[ih] Date of RFC 791 for celebration

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>

    > 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.

Would these be the same as these IEN's, I assume?

 64  Sunshine   12-Mar-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 12 March 1977
 65  Postel      5-Aug-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 14 & 15 July 1977
 66  Postel     21-Oct-77   TCP Meeting Notes - 13 & 14 October 1977
 67  Postel      8-Feb-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 30 & 31 January 1978
 68  Postel     27-Jun-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 15 & 16 June 1978
 69  Postel      9-Oct-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 18 & 19 September 1978
 70  Postel     15-Dec-78   TCP Meeting Notes - 4 December 1978

As far as I know, none are available on the web...

    > E.G., there was a "Proposal for TCP 3" by Ray Tomlinson distributed at
    > the 21 Oct 77 meeting of the TCP Working Group.

That doesn't appear in the IEN Index, and a web search doesn't turn it up either.


However, searching for it turned up something valuable this site:

    http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/fool/cs370/

and in particular a link to this site (which I knew of, actually, but had
forgotten about):

    http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/chris/think/digital_archive.html

which contains a number of otherwise-unobtainable IEN's.

So, for instance, it has a copy of IEN-21, "TCP 3 Specification" from January,
'78, which allows us to see that TCP/IP 3 had:

- Separate IP and TCP headers
- Variable length IP addresses

- There are smaller differeces (e.g IP - no checksum, no fragmentation
  support; TCP - 32 bit ports, support for segments), but in general the rest
  of it looks moderately similar to TCP/IP-4

So it looks as if my prior take:

    >> 3 was the first version that had the headers fully split (and included
    >> "protocol numbers" to identify which transport protocol was being used
    >> ..) but my guess is that it included variable-length addresses.  I seem
    >> to recall that 3.1 had the variable-length addresses removed, and 4 was
    >> an editorial cleanup of 3.1

is likely accurate (although I wish we could recover a 3.1 spec to be sure).
(Note: the field called "Format" in the IP3 header is what we now call the
"protocol number".)


    > TCP 3 was a paper specification driven by the experience gained from
    > running TCP 2.5s.

Ah, interesting. Do you concur with the position that TCP 2.5 (which is,
apparently, undocumented - except perhaps in those minutes) was basically the
same *protocol* as TCP 2 (which had fixed-length addresses, BTW), but with the
*implementation* split up into separate IP and TCP layers?

    > It was very shortlived (as I remember there was only one implementation
    > ..  all the rest of us skipped ahead to 4).

Most interesting...

    > 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":

Ah! I don't have those minutes, but it sounds like TCP/IP-4 was done before
then, then...

    > 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 ...  "

Well, not to cast too wary a glance at this (potentially valuable) data, but
no doubt the same thing had been said on other occasions... :-)

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

Also a good point.

    > and later in the minutes:
    > "The format of the headers was decided.  [See "Latest Header Formats"
    > IEN 44.]"

Indeed, IEN-44, Postel, June, 78, "Latest Header Formats"...

    > This almost certainly happened on the second day - 16 June 1978.
    >  ...
    > 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".

That sounds like a good date to me, too - and I think the balance of the
evidence is that that is indeed the day the final TCP/IP-4 headers were
thrashed out.


    > 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...

Hardcopy of all the IEN's was scanned in at some point at ISI, but they
haven't yet made it online (even as scans). Probably easier to go that way,
than try and find old machine-readable copies...

    > as I remember, for a time there were TWO working groups - the TCP
    > Working Group, and the Internet Working Group ..
    > 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.

?? But the headers are separate - are you talking about before TCP-2?


Thanks for the reply - I think we've got it mostly worked out, now...

       Noel