History
of the Internet Page 5
By Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba
Internet
History
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History
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reliable delivery, from IP. So the
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was created as the
user-accessible way of using IP. And that's how the voice
protocols work today, via UDP.
Late in 1978 or so, the operational
military started to get interested in Internet technology.
In 1979 we deployed packet radio systems at Fort Bragg, and
they were used in field exercises. The satellite systems
were further extended to include ground stations in Italy
and Germany. Internet work continued in building more
implementations of TCP/IP for systems that weren't covered.
While still at DARPA, I formed an
Internet Configuration Control Board chaired by David Clark
from MIT to assist DARPA in the planning and execution of
the evolution of the TCP/IP protocol suite. This group
included many of the leading researchers who contributed to
the TCP/IP development and was later transformed by my
successor at DARPA, Barry Leiner, into the Internet
Activities Board (and is now the Internet Architecture Board
of the Internet Society). In 1980, it was decided that
TCP/IP would be the preferred military protocols.
In 1982 it was decided that all the
systems on the ARPANET would convert over from NCP to
TCP/IP. A clever enforcement mechanism was used to encourage
this. We used a Link Level Protocol on the ARPANET; NCP
packets used one set of one channel numbers and TCP/IP
packets used another set. So it was possible to have the
ARPANET turn off NCP by rejecting packets sent on those
specific channel numbers. This was used to convince the
people that we were serious in moving from NCP to TCP/IP. In
the middle of 1982, we turned off the ability of the network
to transmit NCP for one day.
This caused a lot of hubbub unless you
happened to be running TCP/IP. It wasn't completely
convincing that we were serious, so toward the middle of
fall we turned off NCP for two days; then on January 1,
1983, it was turned off permanently. The guy who handled a
good deal of the logistics for this was Dan Lynch: he was
computer center director of USC ISI at the time. He
undertook the onerous task of scheduling, planning, and
testing to get people up and running on TCP/IP. As many
people know, Lynch went on to found INTEROP, which has
become the premier trade show for presenting Internet
technology.
In the same period there was also an
intense effort to get implementations to work correctly. Jon
Postel engaged in a series of Bake Offs, where implementers
would shoot kamikaze packets at each other. Recently, FTP
Software has reinstituted Bake Offs to ensure
interoperability among modern vendor products.
This takes us up to 1983. 1983 to 1985
was a consolidation period. Internet protocols were being
more widely implemented. In 1981, 3COM had come out with
UNET, which was a UNIX TCP/IP product running on Ethernet.
The significant growth in Internet products didn't come
until 1985 or so, where we started seeing UNIX and local
area networks joining up. DARPA had invested time and energy
to get BBN to build a UNIX implementation of TCP/IP and
wanted that ported into the Berkely UNIX release in v4.2.
Once that happened, vendors such as Sun started using BSD as
the base of commercial products.
The Internet Takes Off
By the mid-1980s there was a
significant market for Internet based products. In the 1990s
we started to see commercial services showing up, a direct
consequence of the NSFNet initiative, which started in 1986
as a 56 Kbps network based on LSI-11s with software
developed by David Mills, who was at the University of
Deleware. Mills called his NSFNet nodes "Fuzzballs."
The NSFNet, which was originally
designed to hook supercomputers together, was quickly
outstripped by demand and was overhauled for T1. IBM, Merit,
and MCI did this, with IBM developing the router
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