[IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Louis Mamakos <louie@transsys.com>
Date: August 19, 2008 8:40:42 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:         NSF and the Birth of the Internet

In some sense the Internet had been around for some time before the
day the big switch got thrown.  The transition flag day was a forcing
function for those not already on the bandwagon.

Prior January, 1983, there were certainly other operating systems
and hosts doing the IP thing.  At that time, we had a small herd
of Fuzzballs running around via Dave Mills, and "connected" to the
Internet via a 1200bps dial-up link to one of his boxes.  Along
with Mike Petry, we wrote a TCP/IP stack for our UNIVAC 1108 and
1100/40 mainframes, back when those dinosaurs still roamed the
earth.  They were there at the time of the ARPANET transition.

(Even back then, Dave Mills was doing the clock synchronization
thing with a precursor to NTP, using the Fuzzball HELLO routing
protocol.  It was a distance-vector protocol that would use
delay as the metric vs. hop count.  Of course, we taught our
UNIVAC dinosaurs/mainframes to speak it as well.)

In my library, I have a copy of "TCP/IP IMPLEMENTATIONS AND VENDORS
LIST" from the SRI NETWORK INFORMATION CENTER, dated October 1993.
It's an interesting snapshot of the ecosystem, such as it was,
back then.  For those with access to the old SRI-NIC archives, it
was <NETINFO>TCP-IP-IMPLEMENTATIONS.TXT

Louis Mamakos


On Aug 19, 2008, at 6:18 PM, David Farber wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dan Lynch <dan@lynch.com>
> Date: August 19, 2008 5:52:54 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>, Chris Kantarjiev <cak@dimebank.com>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re:        NSF and the Birth of the Internet
>
> It is mighty interesting to see history rewritten by some folks who  
> were not
> there "then".  I was there for most of the ride (from 73 on) and  
> happened to
> be the one at USC-ISI that ran the flag day story for ISI where our
> Tenex/Tops20 systems and our Vaxen did just fine as did the machines  
> at ITS
> from MIT.  It was pretty scary on New Year's Eve to throw that  
> switch (and
> reboot all the machines) and see "who was there" after the magic  
> moment when
> BBN (who was running the code for the Arpanet/Internet IMPs) was  
> programmed
> to no longer run the Arpanet NCP protocols (except for those from a  
> certain
> anonymous 3 letter agency...
>
> It took a few days for it to settle down, but the Internet was born  
> that
> first week of January in 1983 after almost 8 years of coding and  
> debugging.
>
> NSF was no where to be seen in those days.  But after the baby  
> Internet took
> off DARPA quickly looked around for people to take over the O&M part  
> of it
> all and NSF stepped up to the table for sure.
>
> Failure is a bastard -- success has a million fathers and mothers.
>
> Dan
>
>
> On 8/19/08 11:57 AM, "Dave Farber" <dave@farber.net> wrote:
>
> > Begin forwarded message:
> >
> > From: Chris Kantarjiev <cak@dimebank.com>
> > Date: August 19, 2008 2:57:00 PM EDT
> > To: dave@farber.net
> > Cc: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
> > Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet
> >
> > David Farber wrote:
> >
> > > Note that MIT's ITS machines were online under TCP on the flag day,
> > > which was NOT true of berkeley unix, though they got the bugs out of
> > > their implementation pretty quickly.
> >
> > Eh? I'm fairly certain that both of our VAXen at Purdue-CS were  
> > online
> > before and during flag day; one running 4.1c and one running Rob
> > Gurwitz's 4.1 TCP... and both were running my in-host gateway, so our
> > proNET and 10mbps ethernet were connected as well.
> >
> > Maybe the VAXen at Berkeley had problems, but that's a different
> > issue :-)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Tel. 707-967-0203   Cell  650-776-7313
> My assistant is Dori Kirk   Tel. 707-255-7094  dori@lynch.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------





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