History
of the Internet Page 2
By Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba
Internet
History
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The Birth of the ARPANET Continued...
My interest in networking was strongly
influenced by my time at the Network Measurement Center at
UCLA.
Meanwhile, Larry Roberts had gone from
Lincoln Labs to DARPA, where he was in charge of the
Information Processing Techniques Office. He was concerned
that after building the network, we could do something with
it. So out of UCLA came an initiative to design protocols
for hosts, which Steve Crocker led.
In April 1969, Steve issued the very
first Request for Comment. He observed that we were just
graduate students at the time and so had no authority. So we
had to find a way to document what we were doing without
acting like we were imposing anything on anyone. He came up
with the RFC methodology to say, "Please comment on this,
and tell us what you think."
Initially, progress was sluggish in
getting the protocols designed and built and deployed. By
1971 there were about nineteen nodes in the initially
planned ARPANET, with thirty different university sites that
ARPA was funding.
Things went slowly because there was
an incredible array of machines that needed interface
hardware and network software.
We had Tenex systems at BBN running on
DEC-10s, but there were also PDP8s, PDP-11s, IBM 360s,
Multics, Honeywell... you name it. So you had to implement
the protocols on each of these different architectures. In
late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed
serious motivation to get things going. In October 1972
there was to be an International Conference on Computer
Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a
public demonstration of the ARPANET.
It took Bob about a year to get
everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of
applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would
install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor
or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and
actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running
applications all over the U.S.
A set of people who are legendary in
networking history were involved in getting that
demonstration set up. Bot Metcalfe was responsible for the
documentation; Ken Pogran who, with David Clark and Noel
Chiappa, was instrumental in developing an early ring-based
local area network and gateway, which became Proteon
products, narrated the slide show; Crocker and Postel were
there. Jack Haverty, who later became chief network
architect of Oracle and was an MIT undergraduate, was there
with a holster full of tools. Frank Heart who led the BBN
project; David Walden; Alex McKenzie; Severo Ornstein; and
others from BBN who had developed the IMP and TIP.
The demo was a roaring success, much
to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical
about whether it would work. At that conference a collection
of people convened: Donald Davies from the UK, National
Physical Laboratory, who had been doing work on packet
switching concurrent with DARPA; Remi Despres who was
involved with the French Reseau Communication par Paquet
(RCP) and later Transpac, their commercial X.25 network;
Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler, both of whom later joined
and led BBN's Telenet; Gesualdo LeMoli, an Italian network
researcher; Kjell Samuelson from the Swedish Royal
Institute; John Wedlake from British Telecom; Peter Kirstein
from University College London; Louis Pouzin who led the
Cyclades/Cigale packet network research program at the
Institute Recherche d'Informatique et d'Automatique (IRIA,
now INRIA, in France). Roger Scantlebury from NPI, with
Donald Davies may also have been in attendance, Alex
McKenzie from BBN almost certainly was there.
I'm sure I have left out some and
possibly misremembered others. There were a lot of other
people, at least thirty, all of whom had
Continue
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