Louis Pouzin

Louis Pouzin (born 1931 in Chantenay-Saint-Imbert, Nièvre, France) invented the datagram and designed an early packet communications network, CYCLADES. He also created the first forms of command-line interface.

His work was broadly used by Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and many others in the development of Internet and TCP/IP under DARPA Director Stephen Lukasik.

Having participated in the design of CTSS, Pouzin wrote a program called RUNCOM around 1963/64. RUNCOM permitted the execution of contained commands within a folder, and can be considered the ancestor of the command-line interface and shell scripts. Pouzin was, in fact, the one who coined the term shell for a command language language in 1964 or '65.. Pouzin's concepts were later implemented in Multics by Glenda Schroeder at MIT.

Louis Pouzin was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government on March 19, 2003.

External links

• Louis Pouzin, The Origin of the Shell
• A small biography of Louis Pouzin and Jon Postel, 1997 SIGCOMM Awards Winners
• A nice photo of Louis Pouzin taken by French photographer Olivier Roller
• The Pouzin Society, named after and devoted to extend the work of Louis Pouzin