Donald Davies and DVB broadcasting
Today's Radio 4 Computing Britain programme (which aired at 13:45, Thursday September the 17th) was entitled "Connected Thinking" and described part of Donald Davies' career, ranging from his early work with Alan Turing through to his invention of packet switching, and its effect on data (and thus multimedia) communications. What the programme did not mention at all was that following his work on packet switching his interests moved into cryptology and cryptography. He worked in this area towards the end of his Civil Service career at the National Physical Laboratory and then carried on as an independent consultant. The security of pay television systems was one of the areas he worked in (another was banking security). One aspect where he made a major contribution to digital television was…