From mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de Tue Feb 16 14:31:44 2010 From: mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Matthias_B=E4rwolff?=) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:31:44 +0100 Subject: [ih] [addendum, lost email of Jack Haverty, for the record] Re: Baran and arbitrary reliability from arbitrarily unreliable components Message-ID: <4B7B1CD0.6020902@cs.tu-berlin.de> I have just realized that a previous email from Jack Haverty in a March 2009 thread on this list did not actually make it to the list, but only to me -- god knows why. here it is, for the record: Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:08:26 PM Subject: Re: [ih] Baran and arbitrary reliability from arbitrarily unreliable components Hmmm. I tried to send this yesterday, but since it hasn't come back to me yet it must have been drawn into one of those Internet black holes. Apologies if you get it twice.... /Jack ======================================================= 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 B?rwolff www.b?rwolff.de From brian at platohistory.org Wed Feb 24 16:24:42 2010 From: brian at platohistory.org (Brian Dear) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:24:42 -0800 Subject: [ih] Conference Announcement: PLATO @ 50, Computer History Museum, June 2-3, 2010 Message-ID: [ Conference Announcement ] "PLATO @ 50" A 2-day Conference Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the PLATO Computer System and its Online Community Co-produced by the PLATO History Foundation and the Computer History Museum, with major support from Microsoft Corporation. WHERE AND WHEN: Computer History Museum Mountain View, California June 2-3, 2010 --> This is a FREE conference and is open to the public. <-- HOW TO REGISTER (FREE): http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1260822096 FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://platohistory.org/conference/50th-anniversary ABOUT THIS CONFERENCE: This once-in-a-lifetime conference focuses on the history and significance of the PLATO computer system and online community. PLATO began in 1960 as an experimental computer-based education system running on the ILLIAC-1 computer at the University of Illinois. During the 1960s the system expanded greatly and as early as 1963 PLATO offered college courses for credit. One of the pioneering efforts of the 1960s became a true phenomenon by the 1970s, where the PLATO IV system, funded by NSF and ARPA, supported 1000 simultaneous users connected via gas-plasma flat-panel display terminals with built-in touch screens (the gas-plasma flat-panel display was invented for the PLATO system, decades before it would emerge as a television technology for consumers). For nearly ten years, there were more users connected to the various PLATO systems installed around the world in the 1970s and early 80s than there were on ARPANET, the major precursor to the Internet. This conference is the first opportunity to discover an entire, amazingly rich and vibrant history of computing, social media, and online community that flourished long before many people would have thought it was possible for such things to exist at such a level of sophistication. A HANDS-ON EVENT: A number of fully-restored, functioning PLATO terminals will be available during the conference for actual hands-on interacting with a live PLATO system that includes thousands of courseware lessons on subjects ranging from elementary math and reading to advanced chemistry and calculus; games (Empire, Avatar, Moria, etc.); and social media (TERM-talk, Talkomatic, Notes, Personal Notes, etc.) WHO SHOULD ATTEND: * Anyone interested in Social Media, Social Software, Blogs, Online Newspapers, Digital Journalism, Online Communities: it all emerged on PLATO years before anywhere else. * Anyone interested in Internet Studies (come find out what was happening before the Internet took off) and the History of Technology and Computing * Anyone interested in the history of online games, online virtual goods and economies, multiplayer games, MUDs, sports games, card games, simulations, and how PLATO influenced and continues to influence and inspire game development today * Anyone interested in the impact of computers on society, cyberculture, online relationships, online addiction, privacy issues, censorship, and the controversies of anonymous online postings. * Anyone interested in computer-assisted instruction, e-Learning, CBT, computer-based education, authoring systems, online testing and administration. PLATO was the largest government-funded system in the history of educational computing. * Anyone who loves technology, computers, and the Internet, and wants to learn what the Future looked like decades ago, at a time when Google's founders were still in diapers, and Apple and Microsoft had not yet been founded. PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE: (NOTE: SUBJECT TO REVISION - follow the platohistory.org site for updates) [----------- Wednesday June 2 -----------] 6pm-7pm: Reception 7pm: General Introductions, and an Overview of PLATO History Featuring John Hollar, CEO of Computer History Museum, and Brian Dear, PLATO History Foundation 7:20pm: Panel #1: SEEING THE FUTURE THROUGH THE PAST: A CONVERSATION WITH DONALD BITZER AND RAY OZZIE Featuring Dr. Donald Bitzer, Distinguished Research Professor and creator of PLATO, and Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation. Dr. Bitzer was only 26 when he began work on creating the PLATO system in the summer of 1960. Ray Ozzie got his start as a student programmer on PLATO at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, and the experience has guided and inspired his career (which includes creating Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes) ever since. [----------- Thursday June 3 -----------] 8am: Coffee 8:30am Morning sessions Panel #2: AN EARLY ONLINE COMMUNITY: PEOPLE PLUS COMPUTING GROWS COMMUNITES Featuring Dave Woolley, Doug Brown, Kim Mast, and others. How PLATO's online community emerged in 1972-73, including one of the first conferencing/message-board systems (PLATO Notes), the first multi-user chat room (Talk-o-matic), one of the first instant messaging applications (TERM-talk), sophisticated remote-monitoring functionality, live online consulting and help, PLATO's electronic mail (Personal Notes), and more. Learn how the PLATO system provided its thousands of users with one of the earliest glimpses of what would be coming decades later with the Internet and Web. Panel #3. PLATO GAMES: AN EARLY, ROBUST COMMUNITY OF MULTI-PLAYER, ONLINE GAMES Featuring Brand Fortner, John Daleske, Andrew Shapira, and others. PLATO's games are legendary and some of the earliest examples of sophisticated multi-player games, including Empire (precursor of NetTrek and dozens of others), Airfight (precursor of Microsoft Flight Simulator), Avatar/Moria/Oubliette/DND (precursors of DOOM, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft), and countless other games. 12:00pm LUNCH INCLUDED 1pm: Afternoon sessions PANEL #4: PLATO SOFTWARE: DRIVEN BY A CLEAR, COMPELLING CHALLENGE Featuring Bruce Sherwood, Michael Walker, Bob Rader, others. Learn about how the PLATO system software evolved over the years, including the powerful TUTOR authoring language, the powerful graphics editors, sophisticated answer judging, and other tools and utilities. PANEL #5: EARLY ON-LINE EDUCATION AND COURSEWARE: LESSONS LEARNED, INSIGHTS GLEANED Featuring Dr. Ruth Chabay and others. Find out the lessons learned from one of the earliest and most major courseware development projects across all areas from elementary education to college-level to industry and government. What can we learn from the evolution of courseware from its designers and their subsequent careers? PANEL #6: PLATO HARDWARE: MISSION-BASED DEVELOPMENTS LED OTHER PLACES Featuring Donald Bitzer, Roger Johnson, Larry Weber, others. Learn about the amazing innovations including the history of the gas-plasma flat-panel display (which, in 1968, was a major inspiration for Alan Kay and his "Dynabook" personal laptop computer), PLATO's touch panel, the CYBER mainframes and custom peripheral systems, and other innovations. PANEL #7: A CLOSE LOOK AT A CULTURE OF INNOVATION: WHAT DON BITZER WROUGHT; WHAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM IT Featuring Bob Sutton, CK Gunsalus, Bob Price (former CEO of Control Data Corporation), David Frankel, and others. Learn about the culture of the PLATO laboratory at the University of Illinois that enabled and empowered bright people to excel. Also covered will be lessons learned from Control Data Corporation's marketing and commercialization of PLATO, its many years of interactions and collaboration with the University of Illinois, and CDC's own PLATO innovations in hardware, software, courseware, and addressing society's major unmet needs. 5:30 (approx) Wrap-up and conference closing. (Once again: times, speakers, etc. still subject to some revision and minor changes). This is not your average conference. It is going to be a major historical event and one that offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear and meet many of the original PLATO system creators, users, and researchers. This free event is sure to fill up early, so register early to make sure you can attend. HOW TO REGISTER (FREE): http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1260822096 FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://platohistory.org/conference/50th-anniversary LATEST UPDATES: see the PLATO History Blog at http://platohistory.org See you there! Brian Dear PLATO History Foundation La Jolla, California http://platohistory.org brian at platohistory.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de Thu Feb 25 01:40:30 2010 From: mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Matthias_B=E4rwolff?=) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:40:30 +0100 Subject: [ih] Fate of Alohanet Message-ID: <4B86458E.5020501@cs.tu-berlin.de> Dear all, I gather from the literature (largely Abramson and Kuo) that Alohanet got connected to the Arpanet by means of an IMP at the Hawaii University in late 1972; then, by 1974 they had NCP and Telnet sufficiently up in the Menehune to allow terminal connections to the Arpanet; and, finally, in 1976 the whole project died for lack of further funding. No further information was provided for the latter point. Does anyone know a specific reason why they discontinued Alohanet? Did the landlines get better, and thus the raison d'etre vanished? What happened to the IMP, did it stay connected to the Arpanet? Thanks, Matthias -- Matthias B?rwolff www.b?rwolff.de From vint at google.com Thu Feb 25 05:33:56 2010 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:33:56 -0500 Subject: [ih] Fate of Alohanet In-Reply-To: <4B86458E.5020501@cs.tu-berlin.de> References: <4B86458E.5020501@cs.tu-berlin.de> Message-ID: <64D64BDC-6739-4227-945F-BA4186E2969A@google.com> the alohanet terminals were just that, terminals. Alohanet terminated at the Menehune and the character streams went into the local Univ Hawaii host. Terminals could then run Telnet to get out on the the ARPANET from the host. Best guess is that the PRNET picked up where Alohanet left off in terms of radio-based network research (and of course, also the Atlantic Satellite Network). I joined ARPA that year but didn't have any direct involvement in the Alohanet effort. Norm Abramson or Frank Kuo could likely give more detail or maybe Bob Kahn. v On Feb 25, 2010, at 4:40 AM, Matthias B?rwolff wrote: > Dear all, > > I gather from the literature (largely Abramson and Kuo) that Alohanet > got connected to the Arpanet by means of an IMP at the Hawaii > University > in late 1972; then, by 1974 they had NCP and Telnet sufficiently up in > the Menehune to allow terminal connections to the Arpanet; and, > finally, > in 1976 the whole project died for lack of further funding. No further > information was provided for the latter point. > > Does anyone know a specific reason why they discontinued Alohanet? Did > the landlines get better, and thus the raison d'etre vanished? What > happened to the IMP, did it stay connected to the Arpanet? > > Thanks, > Matthias > > -- > Matthias B?rwolff > www.b?rwolff.de > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Feb 25 20:08:32 2010 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:08:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ih] Fate of Alohanet Message-ID: <20100226040832.6CDE16BE5EE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Matthias_B=E4rwolff?= > What happened to the IMP, did it stay connected to the Arpanet? The Hawaii IMP was still on the ARPANet in 1980, the latest map I could quickly find online. (Too lazy to go dig out my collection of paper maps and see if I have a later one... :-) Noel