[ih] IEN Notes and INWG

[John Day]

Off list.  And in confidence.

The development efforts on individual protocols 
was always local with common discussions at INWG. 
So to characterize TCP development as being just 
at INWG would be incorrect.  There were always 
ARPA sponsored meetings on TCP outside of INWG 
meetings.  Also, INWG was not CCITTT oriented at 
all.  In fact, quite the opposite.  CCITT's 
decision to go with X.25 was made much earlier. 
The first version was 1976 and they were 
committed to it well before that.

The final meeting on the INWG Transport was held 
in London in late 1977 and first published as an 
appendix to a conference held in Leige by Andre 
Danthine in .  The first OSI meeting was in Feb 
1978.  The first OSI meeting was held in 
Washington DC in March 1978.  The second in 
October in Paris.  I don't remember but when the 
first official liaison contribution was made. 
You would have to check the TC97/SC16 document 
list.  But it was probably soon there after.  Tom 
Steel of ATT was the IFIP liaison representative. 
It would have been a contribution to WG3 on Lower 
Layers.

Now for the in confidence part.  INWG was 
originally created to promote TCP in 74.  When 
INWG decided to do some thing different, it is 
pretty clear that Vint "decided to take his ball 
and go home."  There were US meetings in 1978 and 
maybe into 1979 in which ARPA funded 
organizations participated.  By probably 79 and 
definitely by 80,  Vint prevented anyone with a 
DARPA contract from participating in OSI 
meetings.  (I don't believe there were ever any 
ARPA funded researchers at any of the US 
architecture meetings (which I chaired). He tried 
to widen it to all DoD funding, but inter-agency 
rivalry kept that from happening.  My funding and 
Hal Folts' was from DCA (Defense Communication 
Agency) and I remember it happening.

But you are not starting to tread on a touchy 
subject.  This is where the collaboraion of the 
international research community really begins to 
break down.  Before this, ideas were flying back 
and forth and everyone was bouncing off everyone 
else.  After this, it gets personal.  (Notice how 
the Americans make a big deal about packet 
switching being the big breakthrough, not 
datagrams.  And how everyone believes that the 
Internet is based on the ARPANet, when in fact it 
is based on CYCLADES.   They have to keep the 
role of the French out of it.  One can make a 
pretty good case that as happens often, the 
people who adopted someone else's idea didn't 
really understand it.  The Internet didn't really 
understand CYCLADES and got caught flat-footed.) 
If you want to keep your sources contributing.  I 
would be very careful how you approach this.  The 
implications of what they didn't understand are 
only now coming out from under Moore's Law, so 
the subject is not just of historical interest.

This is the start of the separation from the ARPA 
side.  There was a US group that maintained 
participation in both and were the primary movers 
that got CLNP developed in OSI and engineered the 
ROAD process.  However, the damage was done. The 
isolation of the two groups had created the 
suspicion and animosity within the IETF.  So that 
when IPv7 was proposed it was soundly rejected by 
the IETF.  Leading to the current impending 
crisis with IPv6.

This is a lot more complicated.  I have a 
presentation that I characterize as the "Guns, 
Germs, and Steel" of networking.  That makes the 
case that we are where we are because of outside 
forces of economics and politics, not by science 
and technology.  Once you have a picture of where 
we should be, it is pretty easy to see the 
current Internet has been basically stagnate 
since the mid-70s living on band-aids and Moore's 
Law.

You might want to look at the preface and last 
chapter of my book, Patterns in Network 
Architecture.

Take care,
John

At 11:58 +0100 2010/03/22, Matthias Bärwolff wrote:
>Without wanting to go into excessive detail, up until TCP-1 (RFC 675,
>Dec 1974) the work on TCP seems to have been "part" of INWG, and by
>TCP-2 (IEN 5, Mar 1977) the work had been split from INWG (and the whole
>IFIP, CCITT attendant connotation) and moved to ARPA (as Vint has
>indicated), once the final common proposal along the Pouzin TS lines
>(INWG 96, "Proposal for an international end to end protocol", Jul 1975)
>turned out to go nowhere given (1) CCITT's decision to go with X.25
>
>I wonder: when exactly did ARPA make the strategical decision to push
>ahead with TCP? Was there any thought of sticking with INWG and try
>implementing their stuff?
>
>And, what was first, INWG approaching ISO, or ARPA deciding to go with TCP?
>
>(Pardon if I am being lazy, those questions must have been answered a
>thousand times already, I take it. Thanks for the additional clarification.)
>
>Matthias
>
>Vint Cerf wrote:
>>  inwg notes were a distinct series. IENs were produced by the DARPA contracts
>>  while INWG was a volunteer activity that eventually become IFIP 6.1.
>>
>>  vint
>>
>>
>>  On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 7:11 PM, Matthias 
>>Bärwolff <mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de>wrote:
>>
>>>  Just a quick question: Is it fair to say the IEN Notes came out of INWG,
>>>  or were these two different games? (There were INWG Notes, too.) Put
>>>  differently, did the "group" that produced the IENs have a name of its own?
>>>
>>>  Thanks.
>>>
>>>  --
>>>  Matthias Bärwolff
>>>  www.bärwolff.de <http://www.xn--brwolff-5wa.de>
>>>
>>
>
>--
>Matthias Bärwolff