[ih] Date of RFC 791 for celebration

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Noel et al,

Have the "TCP Meeting Notes" that Jon Postel distributed after each
quarterly meeting survived in electronic form?   These documented in
pretty good detail the gyrations of TCP 2.5, 3, and 4 over the 1977-1978
period.   E.G., there was a "Proposal for TCP 3" by Ray Tomlinson
distributed at the 21 Oct 77 meeting of the TCP Working Group.

My recollection is that there were three implementations over the range
2.5-4 in simultaneous development.   TCP 2.5 (and variants: + epsilon,
+2epsilon, -epsilon, etc. depending on which features were not yet
implemented) was the actual working implementation first tested in
cross-platform connections at the "TCP Bakeoff" on 27 Jan 1979.   The
bakeoff served to nail down some details of the spec -- e.g., I remember
that the exact detail of the checksumming was cast in stone by the first
two dissimilar implementations that managed to agree on checksums (Tenex
and Multics?  I forget...); we all just changed our other
implementations to do what they did.

TCP 3 was a paper specification driven by the experience gained from
running TCP 2.5s.   It was very shortlived (as I remember there was only
one implementation by DTI, which had to implement TCP 3 due to
contractual constraints, and didn't have any other implementation to
play with, since all the rest of us skipped ahead to 4).   TCP 3's
design was debugged by myriad email discussions and supplanted by TCP4
which actually got implemented by the prior 2.5 implementors.  The 18-19
September 1978 meeting notes list the schedule for "TCP 4's ready for
testing":

SRI: 1 Oct (Mathis)
UCLA: now (Braden)                   Bob and his 360! Go Bob!
BBN Unix: 9 Oct (Haverty)
BBN Unix: 1 Nov (Wingfield)
MIT-Multics: 16 Oct (Clark)
BBN-Tenex: ? (Plummer)

Prior to that, the TCP Meeting Notes of the 15-16 June 1978 meeting
include:

"Vint presented his goals for the meeting...
...
The format of the TCP and INTERNET headers is to be firmly decided at
this meeting
...
"

and later in the minutes:

"The format of the headers was decided.  [See "Latest Header Formats"
IEN 44.]"  This almost certainly happened on the second day - 16 June
1978.

Of course, any "decision" in that timeframe has to be viewed in the
context of the philosophy of "rough consensus and running code".

So, depending on whether you're interested in the birthday of the
specification or of the actual working implementation... somewhere in
summer-fall 1978 would make sense to me at least.  I'd vote for 16 June
1978 - the day "the format of the headers was decided".

Of course, we all expected that the next version - after TCP 4 - would
follow shortly, sometime in 1979, to address the long list of unsolved
issues that was always on the blackboard at each meeting.  Boy, got that
wrong....

All of these messages/notes were emailed to
[ISIE]<Postel>TCP-INTERNET.List and made available for FTP as
<INTERNET-NOTEBOOK>TCP-MEETING-NOTES.TXT on ISIE.  Perhaps they live
still on some moldy backup tapes somewhere...

I don't have electronic copies, but I do have some cellulose-based ones,
and the ink hasn't quite bled so far yet as to make them illegible.
Good nostalgia leafing through....

PS - as I remember, for a time there were TWO working groups - the TCP
Working Group, and the Internet Working Group, each focused on the
obvious part of the design.   The joke was that the TCP group kept
concluding at their meetings that changes were needed in the Internet
design, and vice versa.  So Vint declared that they be merged, and
wonder of wonders ... not long thereafter the headers merged as well.

If I remember correctly, in the same timeframe there was work ongoing to
create the ISO equivalents, e.g., TP0, TP4, etc.  in venues such as the
INWG.   They did a lot better job at creating specs and papers than the
TCPIP crowd, who mostly liked to just write code.....

/Jack Haverty
http://3kitty.org


On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 22:55 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> 
>     >> the Internet Working Group (INWG) meeting 
> 
>     > I thought INWG was IFIP WG6.1 The International Network Working Group.
>     > I am thinking of something else?
> 
> Ah, those are two completely different groups (although the acronym is
> confusingly identical).
> 
> The "Internet Working Group" was the name given to the group working on
> TCP/IP in the '78 time frame: see, for example, IEN-60, "Boston Area Meeting
> of the Internet Working Group to Discuss Interactions with Gateways"
> (Davidson, 17-Oct-78).
> 
> I don't know if INWG was the "official" acronym for that group, but I do
> remember seeing it used to refer to the group that met regularly to work
> on TCP/IP.
> 
> 	Noel
>