They said success has many fathers but it's a shame that both Vincent Cerf and Bob Kahn did not credited and even mentioned the original idea of TCP/IP was actually derived from Louis Pouzin of France Cyclades Network in their respective interviews.
Louis originally coined the popular keyword "datagram" that described the very nature of the stateless packet switching based network layer packet structure that is known as IP today [1]. The cue of the word "gram" took the name from telegram that embodied the close resemblance of Internet to the messaging architecture of the postal system than the telephone system. The idea is so fundamental and profound that essentially you are creating a reliable networks on top of unreliable networks by clever design.
Louis Cyclades Network based on datagram packet switching, however, was not selected as France national communication networks but they had chosen the inferior circuit switching Minitel. US ARPA had chosen the datagram concept instead for the early Internet and the rest is history.
[1]Internet Hall of Fame: 2012 Inductee Louis Pouzin.
Waldrop's Dream Machines (2001) feels like the definitive book to read about this era & the internet. It personalizes all these people a good bit, weaves the story. Nice to hear it again in short form from Bob Kahn.
While Vincent Cerf and Bob Kahn are often credited as the inventors of TCP/IP, the original idea of packet switching and the concept of internetworking were indeed influenced by the work of Louis Pouzin and the French Cyclades Network. However, in their interviews and public statements, Cerf and Kahn may not have explicitly mentioned or credited Pouzin's contributions to the development of TCP/IP.
Louis originally coined the popular keyword "datagram" that described the very nature of the stateless packet switching based network layer packet structure that is known as IP today [1]. The cue of the word "gram" took the name from telegram that embodied the close resemblance of Internet to the messaging architecture of the postal system than the telephone system. The idea is so fundamental and profound that essentially you are creating a reliable networks on top of unreliable networks by clever design.
Louis Cyclades Network based on datagram packet switching, however, was not selected as France national communication networks but they had chosen the inferior circuit switching Minitel. US ARPA had chosen the datagram concept instead for the early Internet and the rest is history.
[1]Internet Hall of Fame: 2012 Inductee Louis Pouzin.
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/louis-pouzin/