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Internet History

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Internet History

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The Birth of the ARPANET Continued...

come to this conference because of a serious academic or business interest in networking.

At the conference we formed the International Network Working Group or INWG, Stephen Crocker, who by now was at DARPA after leaving UCLA, didn't think he had time to organize the INWG, so he proposed that I do it.

I organized and chaired INWG for the first four years, at which time it was affiliated with the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). Alex Curran, who was president of BNR, Inc., a research laboratory of Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto, California, was the U.S. representative to IFIP Technical Committee 6.   He shepherded the transformation of the INWG into the first working group of 6, working group 6.1 (IFIP WG 6.1).

In November 1972, I took up an assistant professorship post in computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. I was one of the first Stanford acquisitions who had an interest in computer networking. Shortly after I got to Stanford, Bob Kahn told me about a project he had going with SRI International, BBN, and Collins Radio, a packet radio project. This was to get a mobile networking environment going. There was also work on a packet satellite system, which was a consequence of work that had been done at the University of Hawaii, based on the ALOHA-Net, done by Norman Abramson, Frank Kuo, and Richard Binder. It was one of the first uses of multi-access channels. Bob Metcalfe used that idea in designing Ethernet before founding 3COM to commercialize it.

Bob Kahn described the packet radio and satellite systems, and the internet problem, which was to get host computers to communicate across multiple packet networks without knowing the network technology underneath. As a way of informally exploring this problem, I ran a series of seminars at Stanford attended by students and visitors. The students included Carl Sunshine, who is now at Aerospace Corporation running a laboratory and specializing in the area of protocol proof of correctness; Richard Karp, who wrote the first TCP code and is now president of ISDN technologies in Palo Alto. There was Judy Estrin, a founder of Bridge Communications, which merged with 3COM, and is now an officer at Network Computing Devices (NCD), which makes X display terminals. Yogen Dalal, who edited the December 1974 first TCP specification, did his thesis work with this group, and went on to work at PARC where he was one of the key designers of the Xerox Protocols.

Jim Mathis, who was involved in the software of the small-scale LSI-11 implementations of the Internet protocols, went on to SRI International and then to Apple where he did Mac TCP. Darryl Rubin went on to become one of the vice presidents of Microsoft. Ron Crane handled hardware in my Stanford lab and went on to key positions at Apple. John Shoch went on to become assistant to the president of Xerox and later ran their System Development Division.

Bob Metcalfe attended some of the seminars as well. Gerard Lelann was visiting from IRIA and the Cyclades/Cigale project, and has gone on to do work in distributed computing. We had Dag Belsnes from University of Oslo who did work on the correctness of protocol design; Kuninobu (from Tohoku University); and Jim Warren, who went on to found the West Coast Computer Faire. Thinking about computer networking problems has had a powerful influence on careers; many of these people have gone on to make major contributions.

The very earliest work on the TCP protocols was done at three

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