[8625] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: RFC1000 (Response to part 2)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen D Crocker)
Sat Nov 27 14:51:39 1993
To: Michael Hauben <hauben@cs.columbia.edu>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 26 Nov 93 23:42:53 EST."
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 93 14:50:32 -0500
From: Stephen D Crocker <crocker@tis.com>
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> From: Michael Hauben <hauben@cs.columbia.edu>
> To: com-priv@psi.com
> cc: hauben@cs.columbia.edu
> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1993 23:42:53 -0500
> Subject: RFC1000 - Questions about the origins of ARPANET Protocols 2/2
>
>
> [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?
Not sure what the question is. The environment we were operating in
was one of open research. The only payoff available was to have good
work recognized and used. Software was generally considered free.
Openness wasn't an option; it just was.
> [...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?
I'm not sure what context you deleted. There were a couple of things
I might have been trying to say.
- - We wanted general mechanisms such as interprocess communication to
form the foundation. We then envisioned building specific services
such as interactive terminal emulation, remote job entry, etc. on
top of the underlying services. Hence we needed to identify the
generally useful services and build them into the underlying
service, while leaving room for whatever applications might be
designed later.
- - The obvious approach toward hooking up a computer to a network would
have been to make the network look like some sort of device the
operating system already knew about. If we could have done that,
the implementation would have been much easier. Unfortunately
operating systems of the day did not usually include anything
similar to networks. They had support for tapes, disks, printers
and terminals. All of these fit into a master-slave model. It was
evident that we needed a symmetric model -- what today is called
peer-to-peer -- so we have to build our own abstractions.
Interprocess communication within some of the more sophisticed
operating systems was the closest analog we could identify.
>
> > 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.
Not really all that interesting. Custom design and implementation is
necessarily expensive. Grad students are relatively cheap.
>
> [...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?
What meetings?
> > 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!
Lots of people attended. It was indeed existing.
> [...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.
Much has been written on this subject already.
Steve
>
> Thank you for your time,
> -Michael Hauben
>
>
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