[8621] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
RFC1000 - Questions about the origins of ARPANET Protocols 2/2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hauben)
Fri Nov 26 23:43:35 1993
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1993 23:42:53 -0500
From: Michael Hauben <hauben@cs.columbia.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: hauben@cs.columbia.edu
[Reminder - Please send responses to hauben@cs.columbia.edu as I
do not subscribe to the list.]
[ Part 2 of 2]
> We had accumulated a few notes on the design of DEL and
> other matters, and we decided to put them together in a set of notes.
> I remember having great fear that we would offend whomever the
> official protocol designers were, and I spent a sleepless night
> composing humble words for our notes. The basic ground rules were
> that anyone could say anything and that nothing was official. And to
> emphasize the point, I labeled the notes "Request for Comments." I
> never dreamed these notes would distributed through the very medium
> we were discussing in these notes. Talk about Sorcerer's Apprentice!
The democratizing trend of the Networks seem to have had an
initiation in the creation of these notes where "anyone could say
anything and that nothing was official." This kind of historical
gem is what makes much of this history extremely fascinating.
But, is there also a technical necessity that initiated such
openness?
[...Material deleted...]
> We also knew that we needed a more fundamental point of
> view for building a larger array of protocols. Unfortunately,
What does this mean?
> operating systems of that era tended to view themselves as the center
> of the universe; symmetric cooperation did not fit into the concepts
> currently available within these operating systems. And time was
This was a trend which those who wanted to combine/network
computers had to battle against - row against.
[...Material deleted...]
> At UCLA we scrambled to build a host-IMP interface. SDS, the builder
> of the Sigma 7, wanted many months and many dollars to do the job.
> Mike Wingfield, another grad student at UCLA, stepped in and offered
> to get interface built in six weeks for a few thousand dollars. He
> had a gorgeous, fully instrumented interface working in five and one
> half weeks. I was in charge of the software, and we were naturally
Interesting that grad student/s were able to offer a better job
than a commercial company.
[...Material deleted...]
> BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived
> on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30. They arrived with the
> IMP, wheeled it into our computer room, plugged it in and the
> software restarted from where it had been when the plug was pulled in
> Cambridge. Still Saturday, August 30. Panic time at UCLA.
> The second IMP was delivered to SRI at the beginning of October, and
> ARPA's interest was intense. Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler came by
> for a visit on November 21, and we actually managed to demonstrate a
> Telnet-like connection to SRI.
> With the pressure to get something working and the general confusion
> as to how to achieve the high generality we all aspired to, we punted
> and defined the first set of protocols to include only Telnet and FTP
> functions. In particular, only asymmetric, user-server relationships
> were supported.
The first set of protocols defined.
> In December 1969, we met with Larry Roberts in Utah,
> and suffered our first direct experience with "redirection". Larry
> made it abundantly clear that our first step was not big enough, and
> we went back to the drawing board. Over the next few months we
> designed a symmetric host-host protocol, and we defined an abstract
> implementation of the protocol known as the Network Control Program.
> ("NCP" later came to be used as the name for the protocol, but it
> originally meant the program within the operating system that managed
> connections. The protocol itself was known blandly only as the
> host-host protocol.) Along with the basic host-host protocol, we
> also envisioned a hierarchy of protocols, with Telnet, FTP and some
> splinter protocols as the first examples. If we had only consulted
> the ancient mystics, we would have seen immediately that seven layers
> were required.
Interesting that Larry Roberts stepped in and made it clearer
what was expected or necessary in the protocols. How did this
compare with previous meetings with various people other than the
immediate members of the NWG?
> The initial experiment had been declared an immediate success and the
> network continued to grow. More and more people started coming to
> meetings, and the Network Working Group began to take shape. Working
> Group meetings started to have 50 and 100 people in attendance
> instead of the half dozen we had had in 1968 and early 1969. We held
> one meeting in conjunction with the Spring Joint Computer Conference
> in Atlantic City in 1971. In October 1971 we all convened at MIT for
> a major protocol "fly-off". Representatives from each site were on
> hand, and everyone tried to log in to everyone else's site. With the
> exception of one site that was completely down, the matrix was almost
> completely filled in, and we had reached a major milestone in
> connectivity.
Was anyone present at this event? It sounded like an exciting
meeting to be a part of!
[...Material deleted...]
> Where will it end? The network has the exceeded all estimates of its
> growth. It has been transformed, extended, cloned, renamed and
> reimplemented. I doubt if there is a single computer still on the
> network that was on it in 1971. But the RFCs march on. Maybe I'll
> write a few words for RFC 10,000.
The growth of the Net starting from the combination of the
ARPANET and eventually other networks around the world into a
Global Computer/Data Communications network is extremely exciting
and important. I intend to try and figure out the role that
TCP/IP has played in making such expansion possible - and if the
development of its predecesors and TCP/IPs (the suite's) itself
has paved a way for what has happened at all.
Thank you for your time,
-Michael Hauben
