[8620] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
RFC1000 - Questions about the origins of ARPANET Protocols 1/2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hauben)
Fri Nov 26 23:41:23 1993
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1993 23:40:47 -0500
From: Michael Hauben <hauben@cs.columbia.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
The history contained in the introduction to RFC 1000 raises some
interesting questions. Please send a copy of any answer to me at
hauben@cs.columbia.edu, as I do not belong to the list.
I'm sure others might be interested in the answers, so
even if answers are not public I will either post a summary
and/or my paper when it is done. I am working on an independent
study looking into the history of TCP/IP.
>THE ORIGINS OF RFCS - by Stephen D. Crocker
> The DDN community now includes hundreds of nodes and thousands of
> users, but once it was all a gleam in Larry Roberts' eye. While much
> of the development proceeded according to a grand plan, the design of
> the protocols and the creation of the RFCs was largely accidental.
Is this accidental nature of the design of protocols and
invention of RFC's instrumental to the network being what
it is today? Does this manner of creation from (perhaps)
bottom-up reflect a fundamental difference from the way OSI has
been designed from top-down?
> The procurement of the ARPANET was initiated in the summer of 1968 --
> Remember Vietnam, flower children, etc? There had been prior
Why is the summer of '68 connected to the procurement of the
ARPANET? Can someone explain the significance of this? This is a
very interesting statement and I would be interested if anyone
has any understanding as to its meaning.
[...Sections deleted....]
> To stimulate
> this process, a meeting was called during the summer with
> representatives from the selected sites, chaired by Elmer Shapiro
> from SRI.... At this point we knew only that the network was
> coming, but the precise details weren't known.
The whole experimental nature of the ARPANET project was very
important and crucial to the work that was being done. As such
the "precise details" being unknown fit. What seemed to be the
challenge and what problems were anticipated? Can anyone
recommend someone to write to in order to find out more details?
> That first meeting was seminal. We had lots of questions -- how IMPs
Could anyone further explain why this meeting was seminal? Was
this a "first" meeting in that it was the first raising of such
questions of the interconnection of computers as such? Was the
Networking Working Group of such an importance in breaking ground?
> and hosts would be connected, what hosts would say to each other, and
> what applications would be supported. No one had any answers, but
> the prospects seemed exciting. We found ourselves imagining all
> kinds of possibilities -- interactive graphics, cooperating
> processes, automatic data base query, electronic mail -- but no one
> knew where to begin.
Is there any kind of notes or information (similar to an RFC)
which might exist about this first meeting? It would be immensely
interesting if more "artifacts" existed about the very beginnings
of this all. What are other people's thoughts about this first
meeting from the details in this RFC?
> We weren't sure whether there was really room
> to think hard about these problems; surely someone from the east
> would be along by and by to bring the word.
So the NWG in the West consisted of graduate students. This line
seems to hit at some untold expectations they had. Is there any
way to recreate the times? In order to fully understand how the
development of the ARPANET, NCP and then TCP/IP, it would be
important to best understand the very beginnings of the
development - which is why I am posting these questions. Does
anyone have any further references that they could suggest? How
available are the early RFCs? Also, why were graduate students
picked to develop the earliest protocols for the ARPANET and not
BBN or other possibilities?
> But we did come to one conclusion: We ought to meet again.
> Over the next several months, we managed to parlay that idea
> into a series of exchange meetings at each of our sites,
> thereby setting the most important precedent in protocol design.
What was the precedent? Was it the idea that protocol design is
best facilitated by meetings between various sites? Could
someone further explain this, as I want to understand the importance.
> The first few meetings were quite tenuous. We had no official
> charter. Most of us were graduate students and we expected that a
> professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems
> we were dealing with. Without clear definition of what the host-IMP
> interface would look like, or even what functions the IMP would
> provide, we focused on exotic ideas. We envisioned the possibility
Ditto on my questioning how and why the Network Working Group was
organized and what their (the members of the NWG) expectations
were, and what ARPA's expectations were for the formation of the
group. Could anyone explain why no professional crew showed up?
[...deletion of DEL:Decode-Encode Lang. and NIL:Network Interchange Lang...]
> In February of 1969 we met for the first time with BBN. I don't
> think any of us were prepared for that meeting. The BBN folks, led
> by Frank Heart, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein and Will Crowther, found
> themselves talking to a crew of graduate students they hadn't
> anticipated. And we found ourselves talking to people whose first
> concern was how to get bits to flow quickly and reliably but hadn't
> -- of course -- spent any time considering the thirty or forty layers
> of protocol above the link level. And while BBN didn't take over the
> protocol design process, we kept expecting that an official protocol
> design team would announce itself.
Again - the question of what each groups (NWG, BBN) goals and
expectations are very fuzzy. Is there any way to stab into this
darkness to get a better understanding of how things were
operated and created to do all this?
> A month later, after a particularly delightful meeting in Utah, it
> became clear to us that we had better start writing down our
> discussions.
Does anyone know which meeting this refers to and why it was
"particularly delightful"? It is important to note that as a
result of this meeting RFCs were developed, but the delight must
have the cause that made the creation of RFCs necessary.
