Who is the inventor of ATM?

It is believed that the inventors of ATM are Jon Turner, J.P. Coudreuse, and Sandy Fraser. Jon Turner at Washington University is to some the “parent” of ATM as it has become deployed in the enterprise and ISP markets. This is contrast to the “heavy iron” central office switches, which started development first. He was writing papers on ATM way back into the early 80’s. His student team developed an initial chip set, which actively marketed to corporations (e.g. Synoptics) for the development of small ATM switches. The subsequent marketing splash of his and the products of other companies gave inertia to the enterprise and LAN ATM switch market. That then showed up on the radar screens of the weekly trade rags and then the next thing a “parent” is proclaimed. Others focus on the question of who constructed the first practical ATM demonstration. Some suggest that this person is J.P. Coudreuse, one of the technical managers of the CNET “Prelude” project in the early 80’s. “Prelude” was apparently the first project that practically demonstrated the feasibility of service integration with cell switching, encompassing both networking and application aspects. Other focus on the earliest researcher for cell-based ATM like technology. Sandy Fraser has been mentioned to be the earliest. He worked with J.PP. Coudreuse in the early 80’s but began ATM research in the early 70’s. Fraser has presented an excellent summary of the early Bell Labs work on Asynchronous Time Division Multiplexing, easily recognized as cell-based ATM.

It is expected that when ATM becomes available, the capacity of telecommunication networks will increase enormously. It is necessary to have more technique for transporting information. We need switching at high bit rates at a low price. ATM is a new technique, which makes it possible to transmit all kinds of data at a high bit rte in a good way.

I agree that Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is gradually taking its place as the future technology in computer networks. Today’s existing networks cannot handle the high rates needed and cannot supply the demand for voice, video, and data integration. ATM will probably first to be used as a backbone in a large network, covering one or more buildings. The basic idea of ATM is to segment data in small cell and then transfer them by the use of cell switching.

The basic idea of ATM is to segment data in small cells and then transfer then by the use of cell switching. Such cells have a uniform layout and a fixed size of 53 bytes, which greatly simplifies switching. Being more complex, packet switching is not nearly fast enough to be of use for isochronous data. Cell switching gives maximum utilization of the physical resources. If data was segmented in small, fixed size cells, switching could be done with simple specially designed Integrated Circuits. With sufficient intelligence to handle routing information in each cell, such Integrated Circuits could be used to build very fast switch matrixes. By connecting several switch matrixes, highly efficient networks with small and predictable transmission delays can be built. The fact that ATM can be used efficiently in both WANs and LANs shows how powerful ATM is. To be able to transmit a message to a host by ATM, a connection needs first to be made. ATM is thus connection-oriented. Time-Division multiplexing is the sharing of a transmission facility by allotting a common channel to several different information channels, on at a time.