[ih] ARPANet anniversary

[Vint Cerf]

there were "fake host" exchanges almost certainly but the host-host  
protocols were some time in coming. I drove traffic into the net  
either to fake hosts or round-trip from the Sigma-7 at UCLA to get  
statistical measurements and to test Bob Kahn's hypotheses about  
lockup. That would be have been end of 1969 or perhaps more likely  
early in 1970. But going end-end through the BBN 1822 host/IMP  
interfaces would be the key to noel's metric (and mine as I agree with  
him).

v

On Nov 2, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

>> From: "Bernie Cosell" <bernie at fantasyfarm.com>
>
>> the first message sent over the net was, of course, nowhere *NEAR*
>> that ... The net, itself, had been up and running for a little  
>> while by
>> that time. ... first saw the light on the imp lights-panel tell him
>> that the SRI IMP had just come up, which to my view would _really_ be
>> when the ARPAnet first came alive.
>
> As a systems person, I have a somewhat different perspective. Yes,  
> the event
> you mention was a very important milestone, but to me, the most  
> significant
> milestone would have been something that exercised the entire  
> system, and did
> _what the system was intended to achieve as an overall goal_: i.e.  
> have a
> packet go from the source host, through the host and IMP host->Imp  
> interface
> pair, across the network, out the Imp->host interface pair on the  
> other side,
> and into the destination host.
>
> Something I'm curious about, though: how much of this stuff was all
> demonstrated internally at BBN, first? E.g. I would have guessed  
> that the
> first frame (for want of a better word to differentiate IMP-IMP  
> datagrams
> from host-host datagrams) sent from one IMP to another happened at  
> BBN? Or
> was there insufficient hardware/testbed stuff to do that, and in  
> fact the
> first IMP-IMP frames sent actually were sent between the SRI and  
> UCLA IMPs?
> Did BBN have any host-IMP host interfaces (and hosts) they could  
> play with,
> or were the host interfaces at the user sites the first ones  
> actually plugged
> in and tried?
>
> 	Noel