IP: Re: Another view on ArpaNet history --

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

>
>Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 20:28:35 -0400
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu, ip-sub-1@admin.listbox.com
>From: Steve Crocker <steve@stevecrocker.com>
>Subject: Re: IP: Another view on ArpaNet history -- 
>Cc: steve@stevecrocker.com
>
>Dave,
>
>Danny presents a crisp view of the three schools of thought about the
>origin of the ARPAnet.  I was a few years younger than the principals and
>wasn't around for the early discussions, but everything I saw supports
>Danny's picture.
>
>Let me add an observation.  The ARPAnet project was driven first by the
>desire to connect computers together, i.e. computer communication.  There
>had been earlier projects along this line.  Three important ones come to
>mind, and there may have been others.  One was the connection between
>Lincoln Lab's TX-2 and ARPA/IPTO, as Danny cited.  Another was a connection
>between SDC's SAGE Q-32 and Lincoln Lab's TX-2.  A third was a substantial
>but ill-fated effort at UCLA to connect three large computer centers.  I
>worked on the UCLA project in 1965-66, and we came close to setting up a
>really interesting network among three politically warring and culturally
>diverse computing communities.  All of the effort was focused on the
>services to be provided to the users.  Essentially none of the effort was
>focused on how to make efficient use of the bandwidth.  For relatively
>small networks, say two to five nodes, packet-switching may be useful as a
>means of allocating bandwidth fairly among competing user streams, but
>there really aren't any interesting routing problems.
>
>These three projects were not the only computer communication experiments.
>I visited all of the early sites on the ARPAnet.  It was not uncommon to
>hear about a project to connect various computers together within the same
>building.  For the most part, those projects did not reach completion
>because the lacunae of connecting computers from different vendors was
>almost insurmountable.  On more than one occasion, the introduction of an
>IMP at a site provided the interconnection the local computers that had
>long been sought.  Thus, a single IMP, without any lines connecting it to
>other IMPs, served as the first local area network.
>
>With this as background, it's easy to see that Bob Taylor's description of
>sitting at ARPA with multiple terminals -- see Katie Hafner and Matthew
>Lyon, "Where Wizards Stay up Late, The Origins of the Internet", pp 12-13
>and much of the rest of the first part of the book -- was a driving force
>in creating the ARPAnet project.  Irrespective of the underlying
>communication architecture, ARPA/IPTO had been poking into computer
>interconnection for several years, and it was obviously going to keep
>pushing on the problem until it got somewhere.
>
>In contrast, ARPA/IPTO had not been pursuing communication technologies,
>per se.  Topics like spread spectrum, phase modulation, etc. were known to
>the senior members of the community, but that wasn't where the money from
>IPTO was going.  Indeed, the political debates inside the IPTO community
>were about the relative importance of research on artificial intelligence
>versus computer graphics versus multiprocessor architectures.  At best,
>interconnection of computers was perceived as a means of serving the needs
>of the research community, not as a means of carrying out research on new
>communications architecture.  Communication was almost completely absent
>from the research agenda, with Abramson and Kuo's seminal work at Hawaii on
>the Aloha system a notable exception.
>
>Thus, I think some sort of "ARPAnet" was inevitable irrespective of the
>underlying communication architecture.  Fortunately, the packet-switching
>ideas Kleinrock and others developed were nicely available at the right
>time and the right place, and the ARPAnet set the direction for
>communication architecture as well as opening the door for broad scale
>computer interactions.
>
>Baran's work on distributed communication was motivated by the need to
>preserve communication in the military command and control system.  As
>Baran found to his frustration, there wasn't any direct way to move his
>work into the mainstream of military systems development.  However, once
>the concept of the ARPAnet was committed to and funded, there was
>investigation into collateral ideas.  Baran's work and the work at the NPL
>became known more broadly.  As the ARPAnet blossomed, communication
>research became important and vied for research funds.  A third budget
>element was added to IPTO to cover funding of post-ARPAnet communication
>research projects like packet-switching in the radio and satellite
>environments.  Local area network projects sprang up everywhere, with
>Metcalfe's Ethernet winning the day.
>
>Steve
>
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