[ih] UDP creation (Was: Date of RFC 791 for celebration)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>

    > UDP came into being at the same ISI (Marina del Rey) meeting where we
    > split IP and TCP. ...  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

David, I wonder, are you conflating two different meetings in your memory?

As far as I can tell, TCP and IP were split sometime at the end of '77,
because the TCP-3 spec (in which they were separated) came out in January 1978
(IEN-21, Cerf, Jan-78 "TCP 3 Specification").

However, the UDP spec didn't come out until January 1979 (IEN-71, Reed,
21-Jan-79, "User Datagram Protocol") - over a year later.

Also, I do seem to recall the final format for UDP being hashed out at a
meeting I was at, shortly before you published the spec.

Is it possible that the *basic concept* of UDP was worked out at one meeting
(at the time of the split), and the final *details* of the protocol were
hashed out at a much later meeting (shortly before the spec was published)?

       Noel