[ih] Date of RFC 791 for celebration

[David P. Reed]

UDP came into being at the same ISI (Marina del Rey) meeting where we 
split IP and TCP.   They were part of the same argument, which was due 
to the demand from several of us to have "connectionless" datagrams for 
non-stream communications.   I remember drawing on the board the IP 
packet and then the two alternative payload formats for TCP/IP and 
UDP/IP underneath them, and the common field layouts.   We even talked 
at that meeting about the "virtual header" that would be included 
logical sharing in the TCP or UDP payload, because one of my personal 
agenda items was preserving the option to implement my officmate Steve 
Kent's proposal to do end-to-end encryption that he had submitted (and 
been shut down on including in TCP because of NSA's fear of crypto 
becoming common [Vint and Bob Kahn tell me that NSA would have killed 
the Internet program had they insisted]).

Note that the virtual header was interesting, because stricter layer 
separation might have led to TCP using globally unique process port 
identifiers (as I argued for and implemented in DSP, the internetworking 
protocol I did at MIT in the summer of 1976), and the transport layer 
using addresses that named one or the other interface of a multi-home 
machine.   Thus the virtual header was a compromise that entangled 
interface IDs with process identity, creating two possible identifiers 
for the same process port - one of many inelegancies that traded off 
efficiency (header size) for architectural simplicity.


Stephen Casner wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Jack Haverty wrote:
>   
>> I wonder when UDP came into being (i.e., implementation, not
>> specification) to define a way of accessing that IP datagram
>> functionality.   I remember it happening at some meeting (was almost a
>> no-brainer), but can't remember when.
>>     
>
> I remember this being a meeting at ISI, but I couldn't name a date.
>
>                                                         -- Steve
>
>
>