[ih] Genesis of User Datagram Protocol (was: internet-history Digest, Vol 37, Issue 6)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com>

    > Danny was working with voice and Dave Reed was working on
    > qcomputer-to-computer stuff for which datagrams made sense

Just so.

    > (perhaps a precursor to RPC, but I really don't know).

I don't recall exactly what Dave Reed was working on, but RPC-like things (as
well as more specialized distributed computation things) were definitely in
the air at the time (Dave had just done, or was doing, two-phase commit, as I
recall).

    > There's also a comment about supporting anticipated infrastructure like
    > DNS queries, though, that seems a bit improbable as DNS didn't exist
    > and wasn't envisioned.

No, but there _was_ at a very early stage a 'hostname resolution' protocol,
which was one of the first applications for UDP. It was for hosts (perhaps
without stable storage) which didn't have (or want to have) a host table, and
just wanted to be able to look up IP addresses. Some stuff at MIT actually
used it; IIRC, the server we used was on MIT-Multics.

The first version (IEN-61) even predated UDP, and ran on top of IP. A later
version (IEN-89) used UDP.

	Noel