[ih] History of Network Virtual Terminal (NVT)

[Craig Partridge]

Just before Bernie's note arrived I did a bit of reading in the RFCs.

RFC 137 and 139 strongly suggest that the initial idea of doing an NVT
was made in April 1971 by the then TELNET committee which included Crowther.
It was a very vague concept at the time.

Craig

> On 22 Jan 2010 at 11:21, John Day wrote:
> 
> > I may be wrong, but I thought the NVT idea first 
> > showed up in the "new" Telnet in mid-72.  I had 
> > always thought it originated with Alex MacKenzie, 
> > but he swears it wasn't him.
> 
> I think that that was the result of the meeting I referred to when I 
> mentioned DDWW in the previous message: Dave W and I were the 
> representatives of BBN's TIP group at that meeting [although at that time 
> I was pretty much "the guy" working on the TIP code and so I was mostly 
> worrying about the telnet considerations from our side of BBN [as opposed 
> to the TENEX side] and I don't remember who, if anyone, was at the 
> meeting from the BBN TENEX group].
> 
> Ralph Alter and Will Crowther had started on support for the 2741 [half 
> duplex line-at-a-time selectric based IBM terminal], although I don't 
> know why [obviously ARPA told us to do it, but I don't know why and I 
> just had the chore of making it all work...:o)] and I guess a general 
> concern arose at that meeting for being able to talk to sites like 
> MULTICS and [I think] some IBM-based sites that weren't so hot with full-
> duplex, straight ASCII terminals.  [I was a cross-point for that because 
> I was trying to get the 2741 to work at least plausibly with TENEX and so 
> I ran into every sort of terminal-compatibility problem you could imagine 
> [e.g., the 2741 locked its keyboard after you hit 'enter' so you couldn't 
> [easily] input two lines at at time].
> 
> The details all fade, but I'd bet it was at that meeting where the idea 
> of the NVT was hammered out.  Same meeting I presented my scheme for 
> doing negotiations [DDWW] and all that got documented in the RFC you 
> mentioned. After that there were several RFCs with new "options" defined 
> [the first I can remember was RCTE: remote-controlled-transmission-and-
> echoing, proposed by the folks in Hawaii, I think]
> 
>   /Bernie\
> 
> -- 
> Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
> mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
>     -->  Too many people, too few sheep  <--       
> 
> 
********************
Craig Partridge
Chief Scientist, BBN Technologies
E-mail: craig at aland.bbn.com or craig at bbn.com
Phone: +1 517 324 3425