The distinction I will draw is how individual characters navigate thru the network. In most networks that called themselves ‘packet switched’ characters are gathered into groups with a whiff of semantics, such as a line of text, or several lines. Then these characters are gathered into a packet and a destination address appended and the packet launched into the network proper. As packets arrived at intermediate network nodes the destination address from the new packet was consulted and the packet routed intact accordingly. Depending on the network the structure of such an address might make it efficient to route such packets. Internet follows this plan and some think it is easy to take your IP address with you when you move. Such practice is not compatible with efficient routing. Original distribution of 32 bit IP addresses allowed for fairly efficient routing. Some applications needed to avoid the latency of assembling a whole line of text and modes could deal with shorter packets. Packets optimized for lines of text did not handle individual packets efficiently. Packet switching could react to local congestion and failure with purely local solutions.
Circuit switching would choose a path thru the network for a session. A session would typically last from minutes to hours. A path thru the network was chosen by some program with global network knowledge including current network loads. Each network node was notified of its limited role in the new circuit. In Tymnet a circuit passing thru a node would occupy about 64 bits of information in that node, plus occasional space for buffered characters. Characters would move thru the net as node CPU time and outbound links became available. A single character would take about 24 bits in such a block which sufficed to distinguish the character from data of other other circuits on the same link. Single strokes from a keyboard would travel in blocks over internode links intermingled with data from other circuits. Data from hosts would more typically move thru the new in blocks of a few 10s of characters. Upon link or node failure the session was interrupted and had to be rebuilt. The mean time to failure was a few days. In Tymnet a node needed to know only the identity of its immediate neighbors in order to help the centralized routers learn the current network topology. With circuits local back pressure was feasible which meant that links were used efficiently and data was very seldom dropped. When packet networks must drop packets when they arrive at a node with no space to store it. Tymnet back pressure generally blocked a host from sending until there was space to handle the data. The most common bottleneck was the terminal and sustained output would cause back pressure all the way to the host.