IP: from cyhst digest via rand Alumni mailing -- SOME ARPANET HISTORY

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date:    Thu, 25 Mar 1999 14:33:36 -0500
>From:    "Willis H. Ware" <willis@RAND.ORG>
>Subject: Arpanet history
>
>______________________________________________________________________
> Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
>______________________________________________________________________
>
>
>I want to comment on ARPANET, MILNET, et al history.  I had direct
>experience with all of those events because of my position at RAND, my
>involvement with DoD advisory committees, and the ongoing personal
>interaction with the individuals in question. The following discussion
>comes from my direct knowledge, plus conversations with the parties
>concerned.
>
>1.  Distributed Communications -- it was the name that Paul Baran coined
>and used before Donald Davies (of the UK) later introduced the term "packet
>switching".  At the time, Paul was in the Computer Science Department of
>RAND; the department contained both a computer-science R&D program and the
>corporate computer-services organization.  He worked directly for Keith
>Uncapher [well known for his founding of the USC/ISI, his long term support
>of (D)ARPA, contributions to the professional societies of our field] and
>in turn, I was the department head.  The genesis of Paul's work was a
>concern expressed by the USAF to RAND's president Frank Collbohm that
>command-control communications would not survive a major nuclear attack.
>Frank's thought was to use the AM radio stations as back-up, largely
>because of their wide spread presence throughout the country.
>
>Frank passed the project to Paul and eventually the Distributed
>Communications concept arose.  The work is documented in a series of 12
>Research Memoranda which are online at:
>
>    http://www.rand.org/publications/classics
>
>They discuss routing strategy (one of which was called the "hot potato
>algorithm" at the time), implementation, network survival under attack,
>survival as a function of network topology and redundancy, costs... in
>short a complete and thorough analysis of the construct.
>
>It is not clear how this work got coupled into DOD/ARPA interests.  The
>reports were widely distributed and briefed; Uncapher was already at that
>time in contact with ARPA.  Paul had many conversations with the industry,
>notably AT&T and Bell Labs, and some interaction with ARPA.  There was
>also networking interests at MIT and Lincoln Labs although the motivation
>there was not driven by military interests but by computer system
>networking.  Roberts, Lickleider, Kleinrock, Kahn and others were
>colleagues; several of them later moved to ARPA.
>
>In any event, eventually Larry Roberts, Lick Lickleider, Bob Kahn and others
>at ARPA set out to build (what by then was called) a packet network to
>inter-connect computer systems.  The clearly expressed belief at the time
>was that such an interconnect would lead to sharing of computer capabilities
>across the network, and in particular, make available specialized resources
>to users nationwide. Some of the motivation was expressed in terms of making
>super-computers available to the scientific R&D community without having to
>own one directly.  The history of the early days of ARPANET is well
>documented; no need to go into it here.
>
>2. DDN.  The shortfalls of the DOD major message-communication network,
>AUTODIN, had become well known and there were various proposals for
>modernizing it.  One was to simply replace the aging computers; another was
>to replace the entire system with modern technology, notably packet
>switching.  The final proposal and project for AUTODIN-2 was (as I recall)
>a mixture of packet-switching and circuit switching; the contractor, I
>believe, was Western Union.  ARPANET was clearly an operational entity by
>that time; and hence, the technical contest was (in essence) a fully
>packetized network vs. a partially packetized one.
>
>In any event, a review of the AUTODIN-2 proposal vs. piggybacking on
>ARPANET technology was organized by Steve Walker (the founder later of
>Trusted Information Systems) who was in OSD at the time.  I was a member of
>his Defense Science Board committee, and one of the issues before us was
>the contest between X.25 and TCP/IP protocols.  The DOD had, via the
>ARPANET, adopted TCP/IP; the commercial world was signaling that it
>intended to adopt X.25.  The National Research Council did a study of the
>matter and recommended that DOD systems support both protocols.
>
>The committee position and report was to cancel the AUTODIN-2 project,
>instead to sequester that part of the ARPANET that even then had military
>sites on it, and eventually to use it as the foundation for the DDN, the
>Defense Data Network.
>
>I recall the name Heidi Heiden (who was, contrary to the name, a male Army
>colonel) as the action officer on the DOD side. I could possibly find a copy
>of the report in my historical holdings.
>
>Steve Walker, now active as a venture capitalist, would know more precisely
>the details of the AUTODIN-2 caper, the politics of its cancellation, etc.
>Perhaps he can be solicited to add his views.
>
>                                        Willis H. Ware
>                                        RAND Santa Monica, CA