[ih] TCP/IP Meeting dates (Was: UDP creation)

[Jack Haverty]

The "Bakeoff" was on Saturday, prior to the official meeting, so that we
could have something to report at the meeting.   It was important to get
everyone in one place so we could talk to each other easily, and the TCP
Meeting was a convenient venue where everyone was going to be at the
same place anyway, so we just came early.

Jon picked Saturday because the ISI offices were mostly deserted, so we
all spread out in various offices along a hallway, using the terminals
to telnet into our home machines across the Arpanet and try the
experiments.  We could shout at each other down the corridor.  Jon had
set up a bunch of goals, like establishing a connection with someone
else, and assigned points for each accomplishment.   You even got points
for doing things like crashing the other guy's system.

I remember at first no one could talk to anyone else, because each
implementation seemed to have its own ideas about what was a correct
checksum and was rejecting all incoming packets.   So we all turned off
checksumming, and proceeded to get the basic interactions (SYN, ACK,
etc.) to work.   Then checksumming was debugged - getting the exact
details of which fields were included in each checksum calculation and
getting the byte-ordering correct.  After that worked, checksumming was
turned back on.

A few hours later, I remember watching Bill Plummer (PDP-10 TCP) with
his hand poised over the carriage-return key.  Bill yelled down the hall
to Dave Clark (Multics TCP) - "Hey Dave, can you turn off your
checksumming again for a minute?"  A bit later, Dave said "OK!", and
Bill hit the carriage return key.   A few seconds later ... Dave yelled
"Hey, Multics just crashed!"  and Bill whooped "Gotcha!"

A discussion of the legality of getting points for crashing a system by
subterfuge ensued, but doesn't appear in the minutes.

Anyway, that was the Saturday meeting...

/Jack



On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 08:33 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > 27&29-30 January 1979 - ISI (includes Saturday TCP Bakeoff)
> 
> I think remember that one! I certainly remember us all being in the
> ISI
> offices on a Saturday doing a bakeoff, with nobody else around.
> (Although I'd
> have to check the list of attendees to make sure that I'm not
> confusing it
> with some other ISI meeting...) And I'll bet that 25-26 January 1979
> Internet
> meeting was at ISI too...
> 
> But I wonder why the dates are 27&29-30, when the IEN title just says
> 29?
> Hmm, "cal 1 1979" says that for January 1979, the 27th was a Saturday,
> and
> the other two Monday-Tuesday. Hmmm...
>