[ih] invention of multicast addressing

[Dave Farber]

A critical part of the Irvine ring was a multiaddress capability. I  
will hunt the paper when I get home. Date about 1972



On May 7, 2010, at 1:54 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> What about Yogen Dalal's PhD thesis?  The first (that I know of)  
> distributed spanning tree algorithms for multicast?  When I get  
> home, I will check to see but I may be able to point to some mid- to  
> late- 70s discussions of it.  Although the title of Yogen's thesis  
> says broadcast, I remember it as multicast, i.e. less than all!
>
> But you may be on to something with the Irvine ring?
>
> At 13:20 -0400 2010/05/07, Craig Partridge wrote:
>> Hi folks:
>>
>> I'm trying to nail down when the concept of a "multicast address"  
>> came about
>> (just a little citation in a larger paper I'm writing).
>>
>> In 1976 in the original Ethernet paper, there was unicast and  
>> broadcast.
>>
>> In 1978, in their survey of local networks, Clark, Pogran and Reed  
>> mention
>> in passing that Mockapetris is playing around with bit wildcarding  
>> that
>> permits multiple addressees using one address.
>>
>> In the 1980 Ethernet specification there are Ethernet multicast  
>> addresses as we
>> know them today.
>>
>> Digging a bit deeper from references in later papers, it appears that
>> Mockapetris, Lyle and Farber may have proposed a form of  
>> multicasting in 1977
>> (IFIP Congress paper of August 1977 that I don't have).
>>
>> That suggests that someone saw the Mockapetris-Lyle-Farber idea,  
>> simplified it
>> and put it into the 1980 Ethernet standard (where it sat unused for  
>> several
>> years...).  But I can find no trail... Anyone got insights?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Craig
>
>