[ih] invention of multicast addressing

[Peter Schow]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 01:54:54PM -0400, John Day 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!

Or the shorter more-accessible Dalal and Metcalfe CACM paper may 
provide some clues:

   Reverse path forwarding of broadcast packets
   Yogen K. Dalal (Xerox) and Robert Metcalfe (Stanford)
   Volume 21, Issue 12 (December 1978)

 "Broadcast multipoint communication is the delivery of messages to 
  all destinations, while multicast, or multidestination delivery, is 
  the delivery of messages to some specified subset of all the
  destinations. Ethernet, the DCS Ring and other broadcast networks are 
  ideally suited for such communication."

Vint Cerf was one of Dalal's Ph.D. supervisors, so I'll sure he'll
chime in soon.