[ih] Step up "What influenced me, and what difference have I thus made to the Internet (or think I did)?"

[Matthias Bärwolff]

Thanks everyone for the host of responses. That was an inspiring thread,
and helped a lot.

May I very briefly repeat two paragraphs from Jack's latest post:

> So, although it's difficult to determine what influenced someone's decisions, 
> it's perhaps more reasonable to ask what influenced your own decisions.  It's 
> not so easy to answer that question, but at least you're asking an "eye 
> witness".  So, since I was involved in various aspects of what many people might 
> call "The Internet" for much of the late 70s and 80s, I've been asking myself 
> that question.  What influenced me?
>   
> [... copious elaboration ...]
> A few years ago, some organization (Smithsonian I believe) ran a project to 
> capture as much as possible of the experiences of World War II veterans, in 
> order to document the "inside" of the war experience while the opportunity still 
> existed.  Perhaps, in its role as organizer of the world's information (which 
> continually amazes me), Google might take on such a project for the 
> Internet...?   Vint, did you make it this far through my rambling......?
>   

It would really be nice to have an archive of such personal views, each
on the narrow question Jack has asked himself: "What influenced me, and
what difference have I thus made to the Internet (or think I did)?" This
would still be subjective, but at the same time apt, for no-one has been
owning, directing, or building the internet by themselves.

It may be a start if everyone of those who have "been there" just wrote
their piece (no more than five pages) and posted it here (or put it up
online wherever they please) so that Google can find it under a common
header.

Matthias


Jack Haverty wrote:
> =======================================================
>
> Greetings everyone.  Good to hear voices from the past, and it's a great 
> discussion -- made me feel guilty enough to sit down and type in my 2 
> cents..maybe making amends just a little bit for all those papers that never got 
> written back in the 70s/80s.  If you're not interested, just hit delete now....
>
> Matthias' original question concerned whether and to what extent prior academic 
> work influenced the Internet.  That got me thinking about the question more 
> generally - namely what *did* influence the zillions of decisions made by people 
> building the Internet.  I've always been accused of being a "big picture" kind 
> of guy...
>
> I agree wholeheartedly with the previous comments about the difficulty of 
> determining whether or not someone's work or publication influenced someone 
> else.   Even if you could somehow prove that someone subscribed to a journal, or 
> actually read a paper, or even understood it, he or she may not have agreed with 
> it - and simply ignored it as noise.  I'm equally suspect of anyone who claims 
> to have invented any particular mechanism or approach.   It's simply too hard, 
> in my experience at least, to be sure that an idea that pops into your head is 
> original, and not a product of your subconscious working on something you saw, 
> or heard, or read, days or months before.
>
> Still, it's interesting to try to deduce where things have come from, especially 
> things as pervasive, influential, and surprising as "The Internet".  So here goes...
>
> I think the first issue to nail down is exactly what you mean by "The 
> Internet".  In my experience, it means different things to different people, 
> depending on facts like how and when you first encountered "it", what you were 
> doing at the time, and how long it took you to recognize it as something new and 
> important to you.  For some people, the Internet is email.  Others equate it 
> with the Web.  To some it began with the Arpanet, which was "Release 1".   Or it 
> may have begin with CSNET and/or NSFNET, which enabled a lot of people to 
> "connect" for the first time.   Did any particular piece of prior work influence 
> those efforts?  I think you'd have to ask the people involved in building them.
>
> So, although it's difficult to determine what influenced someone's decisions, 
> it's perhaps more reasonable to ask what influenced your own decisions.  It's 
> not so easy to answer that question, but at least you're asking an "eye 
> witness".  So, since I was involved in various aspects of what many people might 
> call "The Internet" for much of the late 70s and 80s, I've been asking myself 
> that question.  What influenced me?
>
> First, the definition, or better put, my own definition -- The Internet.   I 
> think I personally focus on the "Inter" part of "Internet".  There have been 
> many networks over the years.   In the 70s/80s, there were a variety of computer 
> networks.  Mujltidrop lines and terminal networks had been around for a while; I 
> remember using one around the late 60s, which connected MIT to Xerox.  IBM had 
> SNA.   ARPA had ARPANet.  Other technologies were being created to form networks 
> of computers, e.g., the "Packet Radio" networks for tactical military use.  
> Commercial X.25 networks were seeking customers for the telephone companies of 
> the world.   Tymnet, Compuserve, and others were connecting users to applications.
>
> All of those networks used a variety of technologies, but had some common 
> characteristics:  each was composed of uniform components (no SNA nodes in the 
> ARPANet, for example); each was owned and operated by a single owner; and except 
> for very special ad-hoc linkages, each was isolated from the others.
>
> Where the ARPANet focused on connecting dissimilar computers, my personal 
> definition of the Internet focuses on "Inter"connection of dissimilar "net"works. 
>
> In particular, ARPA had this problem of building different kinds of networks, 
> with a need for computers on one network to talk to ones on the other.  As far 
> as I remember, at least in the late 70s (when I first encountered "The 
> Internet") there wasn't any project specifically to "build the Internet".  
> Instead, there were a variety of projects to build different kinds of networks, 
> and applications that would run over those networks, and every project had the 
> requirement to interconnect with the others to make those applications 
> possible.  There were a variety of scenarios that had to work.  E.G., someone in 
> a helicopter, obviously on a radio-based network, interacting with someone on 
> another continent at headquarters, obviously not on the same radio network.  The 
> aggregate of those projects' teams were the de facto Internet team - which in 
> fact started as two separate teams: the "TCP" and the "IP" working groups, but 
> was pretty quickly merged.
>
> The obvious determinant of "dissimilar" networks  was that they used different 
> technologies.  ARPANet, SATNET, PRNet, etc. all had their own unique hardware, 
> software, algorithms, and architectures.   I think at first that's how we 
> thought of the problem.  TCP/IP was the "glue" that allowed communication to be 
> accomplished through a series of dissimilar steps.
>
> But there was another, and I believe in retrospect even more important, nature 
> of being "dissimilar", namely organizational.  In the 70s, I think networks were 
> pretty consistently homogeneously managed.  I'm sure someone will correct me if 
> that's wrong...  But as I remember, networks were owned by someone, either a 
> government agency, or a company, or a utility like a PTT.  It was also likely 
> that all of the components were the same, or at least from the same vendor.   
> Even the ARPANet, which interconnected dissimilar computers, was built and 
> operated by one company.  Someone was in charge - not zero, not two or more; 
> some ONE.   That was simply the state of the art at the time.
>
> In retrospect from 2009, the Internet is a bonanza of heterogeneity.  No one 
> owns it, and it's not clear why it works or whose hand is on the wheel.   
> Virtually anyone can buy some hardware and become an ISP, hooking yet more 
> things into "The Internet".
>
> Since that aspect of organizational dissimilarity wasn't prominent in the very 
> early days of interconnecting ARPANet with PRNet, I started wondering how did we 
> get from there to here.  As was pointed out previously, CSNET and NSFNET 
> arguably led the way in making the Internet organizationally heterogeneous.  But 
> what made it possible for CSNET and NSFNET to do that...?
>
> If I remember correctly, at the time the ARPANet had been very successful, and 
> had become more of an operational communications utility than a research 
> project.  Lots of organizations and universities wanted to connect, but couldn't 
> because either it was very expensive (IMPs, IMP ports and circuits cost $$s), or 
> because they weren't ARPA contractors and the ARPANet was restricted to support 
> ARPA business.   There was a pent-up demand to "get on the net".
>
> Going back to my earlier comment above, I've been thinking about what influenced 
> me personally at that time in the work I was doing.  I was at BBN, managing a 
> bunch of projects which were arguably part of "the Internet", for DARPA as well 
> as other government agencies, all involved with either building parts of "the 
> Internet", or deploying clones of it into other organizations (Yes, there are 
> "Internets").  One of the DARPA projects was the building and operating of the 
> "core gateways", which were the ones which interconnected various long-haul 
> networks among others.   So I think it's reasonable to consider whatever was 
> influencing me in working on those projects was influencing "the Internet" too.
>
> At the time, there was a lot of pressure to deploy a functional Internet - one 
> which could support successful demonstrations of the kinds of mostly 
> government-oriented applications that would cause the "operational" government 
> gang to keep the research funding going and the funds going to ARPA (and then to 
> us and others).    That focus, coupled with the fact that BBN was not a 
> university, led to a noticeable bias toward engineering rather than science.  
> Getting it to work, using proven techniques rather than academic ideas, became 
> the primary goal.   Writing papers, presenting at conferences, trying new 
> interesting approaches, and other such science-oriented activities got pushed to 
> the back burner.  As I remember also, all through that period most of the 
> interesting discussion and argument happened on the various mailing lists, or at 
> the quarterly Internet meetings, rather than in the traditional journals -- at 
> least from my personal perspective at the time.  Sadly, I suspect all of that 
> has been lost.
>
> The focus on engineering and using proven techniques to get things to work led 
> naturally to what I think was the primary influence on the Internet -- the 
> ARPANet, which was arguably "working" well, and more specifically the *internal* 
> unpublicized mechanisms of the ARPANet which had evolved over a decade of its 
> operating experience.  Although there was considerable material in publication 
> about the more mathematical aspects of the ARPANet, especially the routing 
> algorithms, there was a rich soup of engineering "best practices" embedded in 
> the IMP code, the NOC tools, policies, and procedures, and the management 
> approaches.  If I remember correctly, there were something like a thousand 
> separate parameters in the code that could be "tweaked" to deal with different 
> situations that had come up over time.  As far as I know, little if any of this 
> was ever documented in any detail in any public way.  It was pretty boring after 
> all.  Some of it was simply to be experienced - standing as a fly on the wall of 
> the NOC during some network crisis was very educational.
>
> The "Internet guys" resided at BBN literally just around the corner from the 
> "ARPANet group".   This was purposeful, and I fought several battles over the 
> years within the BBN management to keep it that way.  As a result, a lot of the 
> internal decisions associated with the "core gateways" were to steal, adapt, and 
> integrate ARPANet mechanisms and philosophies into the nascent Internet.  This 
> wasn't really intentional, it just happened because of the proximity - 
> "technology transfer" at its best.
>
> That ARPANet influence would naturally have evolved the core gateways and "the 
> Internet" into a homogeneous network like the ARPANet.   All gateways would be 
> built by BBN, all software running the same release (and obviously the same 
> algorithms etc.), all operated by the same single centralized entity.
>
> Speaking of "inventing" things, I might feel inclined to claim responsibility, 
> or blame, for causing a mutation of the Internet.  Originally, the idea was that 
> the Internet interconnected networks, and the boxes that accomplished that were 
> called "gateways".   I pushed the notion that a wire, i.e., a leased line or 
> virtual circuit, was simply a very degenerate type of network, which could 
> connect to only two "hosts" -- "this end" and "that end".   So, if you put a 
> wire from a port on one gateway to a port on another, and treated it as just a 
> very simple "network", the overall Internet would still work just fine.  I must 
> have given the slideshow presentation about this concept at least a hundred 
> times.  Of course it meant that you would no longer need those ARPANet IMPs to 
> plug your gateway into.  You could just unplug the long-haul leased line from 
> the IMP port, plug it into the gateway port instead, and the Internet would 
> simply take over the task of routing traffic across that line.  We actually did 
> exactly that, to make sure it worked.   At that point the boxes we called 
> "gateways" became "routers" and took on the role of switching.  I don't think 
> the BBN management ever understood the implications of that concept on future 
> sales of packet switches, despite my slideshow efforts.  Of course, at the time, 
> the "conventional wisdom" was that the Internet was just a research project, and 
> the "real" system was going to come from the PTTs, CCITT, ISO, and other 
> professionals, with X.25 and X.75 playing the lead role to upstage TCP and IP.
>
> Anyway, that environment would have led to an Internet that looked a lot like 
> the ARPANet, probably ending up as a homogeneous network of routers 
> interconnecting mostly Ethernets, thanks to Bob Metcalfe.   There was a lot of 
> momentum along that trajectory.  But Bob Kahn stepped in the way....
>
> This is one case where I remember quite clearly how the Internet was 
> "influenced" to change directions radically.  Again, all of this is from my 
> personal perspective, with my personal definition of "the Internet".   Others 
> undoubtedly had different experiences.
>
> I was at one of innumerable meetings.  Sorry, I can't remember where or when.  
> It was probably in DC, where I spent a lot of time, but my gut feeling tells me 
> it was the European Internet meeting, maybe in Munich.  Anyway,... Bob and I 
> were hanging on the same subway strap, with the usual group of a dozen or two 
> people heading out to find dinner.  Bob wanted to talk about the Internet 
> architecture, and in particular the core gateways.  He managed over the 
> squealing of the car's wheels to overcome my skepticism and make it clear that 
> it would be a good idea to figure out how to make it possible for gateways not 
> built by BBN to be full participants in the system of gateways.  I don't know 
> whether this was motivated by political pressures to enable CSNET/NSFNET, or 
> some technical considerations, or by the ARPA charter to focus on new technology 
> and new ideas, rather than replicating the old ones.  But he convinced me, and I 
> went away with a new direction, and a harder task to make something work using 
> an unproven approach.
>
> Back at BBN, the challenge was not only to figure out how to make a stable 
> heterogeneous Internet, but also how to convince the people on the project that 
> it was a good idea to let other people build gateways and hook them up to "our" 
> system.   Fortunately the meetings of the TCP and IP working groups were great 
> training for this kind of work.   I recruited one of the best thinkers from the 
> ARPANet crowd - Dr. Eric Rosen.  He and I sat down for several multi-hour 
> brainstorming sessions, and came up with the notion of "autonomous systems", 
> which were sets of routers owned/managed by a single organization, and 
> interconnected with other such systems to form the overall Internet.  EGP (which 
> I think evolved into BGP) and the concept of IGP (which basically means whatever 
> mechanisms are used among the routers inside their own closed system)  made it 
> possible to use different approaches within different ASes.   This led to RFC 
> 827 and a bunch of others in the early 80s.
>
> To me, this is what diverted the Internet from homogeneous to heterogeneous in 
> nature and enable the "Inter"connection of different organizations -- even if 
> they used the same network products, they retained control over their own 
> assets.  In retrospect, given the experiences I later had in various commercial 
> "user" situations, this characteristic was crucial to making the Internet 
> reliable and successful.
>
> Of course, this wasn't a new idea.  Mainframes and timesharing were succumbing 
> to the onslaught of PCs - which allowed you to own and control your own 
> computing resources, rather than being at the mercy of the clowns in the "Data 
> Center".   People like to control what's important to them.
>
> Bob Kahn had it just right.  Maybe that subway strap should be bronzed and put 
> in the Smithsonian.  Of course, adding in all of Vint's "subway straps" would 
> require another wing.
>
> These have been just a few examples, of the influences I felt while doing what I 
> was doing to help build what I think of as the Internet.  Whew, that should be 
> enough caveats.
>
> Getting back to Matthias' original question...  I'd have to say that Pouzin's or 
> Baran's ideas and papers, or anyone else's papers for that matter, didn't have 
> much direct influence on the Internet mechanisms that I was associated with.  
> The culture wasn't very scientific/academic oriented; magazines like Data 
> Communications were popular, and maybe some IEEE journals, but they were 
> peripheral.  The science didn't apply very readily to the Internet environment 
> where nice well-understood, easily modelled wires were replaced by a gaggle of 
> networks with unknown, unpredictable, and variable behavior.   So, the design 
> and implementation decisions were made by the practical needs of trying to make 
> something that worked, even if we couldn't explain why.  It was very much an 
> experimental, engineering kind of world - watch what's happening, try something 
> that seems likely to help, repeat until done; this was largely what had been 
> going on in the ARPANet for a while at that point to refine the basic mechanisms 
> of packet switching.   The ARPANet was probably the biggest influence on the 
> Internet at that time (again, from my personal perspective).   To the extent 
> that the ARPANet mechanisms were influenced by earlier academic work, that 
> influence may have flowed forward to the Internet.  You'd have to ask the 
> ARPANet guys.
>
> I think it's also true that a big influence on decisions is simply the personal 
> experience of the people involved.  In my youth I had a model train set, and 
> learned something about how railroads worked.  If you think of the movement of a 
> commodity like coal, or wheat, or logs, there's lots of analogies to "packet 
> switching".  Logs or lumps of coal are like bits, cars ("wagons" in Europe) are 
> like packets, freight yards are like routers.   In the late nineteenth and early 
> twentieth centuries, railroads built by different companies used different sizes 
> of track, so that cargo had to be moved from one car to another at their 
> junctions - not unlike what a "gateway" had to do?  Railroads encountered all 
> sorts of problems, many with blatant relationships to our Internet world 
> (congestion control comes to mind), and they developed elaborate technologies to 
> deal with it, such as a series of signalling systems and "routing protocols" - 
> all well before Eniac (or pick your favorite "first computer").
>
> With personal experiences like that, what you know from those "technology 
> architectures" can easily influence decisions made in a new situation.  In the 
> Internet meetings in the early 80s, concepts like "expressway routing" were 
> discussed at length, and people pretty much knew the issues from their human 
> experiences with the highway systems.  Their experiences must have influenced 
> their Internet work too, probably more than just adopting highway terminology.
>
> So, if the notion of "packet switching" has a long history, how do you tell 
> whether you're influenced by a recent example, or one from centuries ago.  Roman 
> generals used to dispatch several runners with copies of a message to assure 
> that their reports got back to Rome.  They used to split messages up and send 
> pieces by different messengers, over different routes, to avoid interception by 
> the enemy.   I don't think they called it "fragmentation and reassembly" but 
> it's the same idea.  I knew this history from high school -- did it influence me 
> in my later work on the Internet?  Did it influence Pouzin and others?
>
> Enough philosophy, and enough words.  If you've gotten this far, thanks for 
> listening, and I hope I've helped answer the original question at least a little 
> bit.
>
> To me, the history of the Internet is the aggregate of all of these kinds of 
> anecdotes by all the people involved in whatever they individually think of as 
> "the Internet".  Unlike other huge projects, like putting a man on the moon, 
> there was no "Internet project", and no crisp milestones -- like when it 
> started, or when it was completed.  Are we done yet?  There weren't a whole crew 
> of journalists documenting it along the way, since it was supposed to be 
> ephemeral and wasn't considered important enough to warrant the attention.  But 
> it's a fascinating story.
>
> Just for completeness, my personal view of the Internet was driven by my 
> involvement, so here's a brief summary for the record.  In the mid 70s, I was a 
> user of the ARPANet, building various applications that ran over the net - in 
> particular email.  From 1978 through to 1990 I was at BBN, doing a variety of 
> things over time, almost all somehow associated with the Internet.  I started by 
> building TCP for Unix, ended up managing a gaggle of research projects, and 
> later created a "system engineering" organization to help real users (government 
> and early commercial adopters) deploy and use their own Internets.  In 1990 I 
> went west to Oracle as "Internet Architect", which among other things involved 
> getting the corporate internet up and running, getting products to be 
> Internet-capable, and helping Oracle's customers (which is just about everybody) 
> understand the new-fangled Internet stuff and get it to work, since none of the 
> Internet industry's products seemed to come with a "How to Run and Manage an 
> Internet" or a "How to Use Your New Internet for Fun and Especially Profit"  
> pamphlet.  So, my personal perspective on "the Internet" is an amalgam of all 
> those situations.
>
> The Internet is like the elephant in those proverbial stories about the elephant 
> and the blind man.  What you think it is depends on your perspective as you 
> encounter it.
>
> A few years ago, some organization (Smithsonian I believe) ran a project to 
> capture as much as possible of the experiences of World War II veterans, in 
> order to document the "inside" of the war experience while the opportunity still 
> existed.  Perhaps, in its role as organizer of the world's information (which 
> continually amazes me), Google might take on such a project for the 
> Internet...?   Vint, did you make it this far through my rambling......?
>
> /Jack Haverty
> Point Arena, CA
> - where we still don't have cell service, and the phones only do 24kb/sec, but 
> fortunately there are satellites.....and I'm not on the hot seat at the 
> operations center!
>
>
>
>  
>
>
>   

-- 
Matthias Bärwolff
mbaer at csail.mit.edu