[chapter-delegates] How about a World Internet Day?

[Bob Braden]

  *> 
  *> Bob,
  *> 
  *> Actually, to follow the analogy a bit further, the birth may have started 
  *> on 1/1/83, but (depending on your definition of birth) it was a ten year 
  *> gestation period and the birth was not really over until either a few weeks 
  *> or a few months after january 1st. By mid february, 1983 we had about 80% 
  *> of the ARPANET hosts converted from NCP to TCP, and a lot of new LAN based 
  *> "workstation hosts" that used only tcp and not the arpanet host protocol; 
  *> there were also some longer term stragglers on the ARPANET that did not 
  *> take the january date seriously. In reality, I don't think much happened on 
  *> that new years day, and we decided to keep both NCP and TCP protocols 
  *> running in parallel for at least six months to insure continued 
  *> connectivity for everyone.

Bob,

This is all true, of course, but those of us protocol hackers who spent
our New Year's day 1983 hard at work in the office KNEW when the
swithover was, and what a milestone it was.  The event had been
orchestrated by Jon; the evidence is still in the RFC series.
As I recall, Dan Lynch, ops manager at ISI, did not get much sleep on
Jan 1 or a few days afterwards, as production usage exposed flaws in
the TCP/IP code on TOPS20 systems at ISI.

So, even though it did not happen instantly, it was a clearly-defined
event for its participants.  I think there was a T shirt around with "I
survived the ARPAnet/Internet transition -- Jan 1, 1983", or something
like that.

Bob



  *> 
  *> bob
  *> 
  *> At 08:13 PM 5/20/2005, Bob Braden wrote:
  *> 
  *> 
  *> 
  *> >>There are many milestones so I think an attempt to celebrate a birthday 
  *> >>is hard.
  *> >>For Internet one might reasonably pick 1/1/1983 as the date the system 
  *> >>was deployed on all of the networks supported by DARPA.
  *> >>[cut]
  *> >
  *> >For those of us involved with making the Internet happen, I expect that 
  *> >Jan 1, 1983 is the true birth of the Internet as a
  *> >network of networks using TCP/IP, and operational as  opposed to experimental.
  *> >
  *> >Bob Braden
  *>