Louis Pouzin

Who is Louis Pouzin?

Louis Pouzin invented the datagram and designed an early packet communications network, CYCLADES.

He studied at the École Polytechnique.

His work influenced Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and others in the development of TCP/IP protocols used by the Internet.

Having participated in the design of the Compatible Time Sharing System, 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 in 1964 or '65. Pouzin's concepts were later implemented in Multics by Glenda Schroeder at MIT.

In 2013, he founded Savoir-Faire, an alternative root company, with Chantal Lebrument and Quentin Perrigueur.