[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Miles Fidelman]

John Day wrote:
> At 17:36 -0500 2011/02/18, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> John Day wrote:
>>> As far as working goes, in 1992 cisco's largest customer by far was 
>>> a deployed CLNP network.
>> Who, if anybody, was using CLNP for anything in 1992? By then the 
>> Internet had gone commercial, with about 20,000 or so nets and about 
>> a million hosts linked by IP.
>
> See Tony's response.

Which one?  This one:

> With all due respect, I beg to differ. It's true that cisco did have 
> one real, deployed, sizable pure CLNP network, but they were not even 
> close to being the largest customer.
or this one:
> There was a large, national government network that was purely CLNP at that time.  This network drove the development of ISO-IGRP and IS-IS within IOS.  I'm sorry I can't name names, but this can be corroborated with Dave Katz.
>
> In addition, there were a number of companies that were actively deploying CLNP in a pilot mode in order to understand it.  Most of this was to comply with governmental directives.  AFAIK, no one else was doing it in a truly mission critical way.
>    

Ok... so there was one large CLNP network.
> This is interesting and I hadn't thought about it until it was pointed 
> out to me.  But it was the case.  BBN was DARPA's biggest contractor 
> for building and operating the net.  How many days a week could BBN 
> take the net to run experiments on say routing or congestion control 
> etc.  Very quickly, the ARPANET was an operational network to support 
> others research.

Actually, no.  By 1992, most of the money was coming through DCA, and 
was going to BBN Communications - the commercial network group.  Huge 
amounts of money continued to (and still do) flow to BBN Labs (now 
Raytheon) for more researchy things.  Most of the time, I was in BBN 
Communications, focusing more on DDN deployment; I expect others could 
comment more on the researchy things that were going on.  (Granted, some 
of those funds went to research in areas outside of networking.)

> I remember people telling me that the CYCLADES on the other hand was 
> constantly being commandeered by the INRIA guys to run experiments and 
> couldn't really be used the way we used the ARPANET.  They were doing 
> a lot of research on networks, we had to catch as catch can other 
> stuff and what BBN could accomplish when they were doing IMPsys loads 
> on Monday nights.  And much of the early work on congestion control 
> and related performance issues did come from those researchers, 
> LeLann, Gelenbe, etc.

Well, there were also the WIDEBAND net and SATNET, work on streaming 
protocols, and a lot of tasks came my way related to network management 
and network security.  I also recall that our network analysis group 
kept loading funny software into the switches to do various kinds of 
performance analysis and tuning.  There was also an awful lot of work 
going on around routing protocols.

And then, outside of BBN, there was an awful lot of network research at 
places like MIT, USC, Berkeley, Xerox PARC - CYCLADES and INRIA were 
certainly not the only ones doing network research in the '80s.

>>>>> Sometimes.  Yes, you are correct.  Although I have no idea why 
>>>>> IEEE bothers.  Ethernet is an ISO standard.  What you describe is 
>>>>> very much the case in IEEE today.  It was less so at the beginning 
>>>>> but even there one had competing products:  Ethernet, token bus, 
>>>>> token ring.  It was what a lot of people wanted but it was the 
>>>>> processs produced.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure why IEEE bothers either, but they seem to be doing 
>>>> something right with the 802 line of standards.
>>>
>>> Over a decade ago, I told them not to bother. IEEE has international 
>>> recognition.  There is no point to it.
>>
>> Huh?  IEEE has been pretty effective as a standards body in a number 
>> of areas - 802, laboratory interconnection, Firewire, POSIX, as well 
>> as some of its more traditional electrical machinery, power, 
>> telegraph, and radio .  As a standards body, its activities date back 
>> to the 1880s (AIEE which later merged with IRE to become IEEE).
>
> I was agreeing with you that there was no point to IEEE sending their 
> stuff to ISO.  I never saw the point in it.

Ahhh....

I think it had more to do with agreements between IEEE, ANSI, et. al., 
regarding who had authority to set national standards. There's some good 
history at
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/History_of_Institute_of_Electrical_and_Electronic_Engineers_(IEEE)_Standards

Interestingly, IEEE standards activities date back to 1885 - which, I 
figured, had to make them the oldest standards body around, at least for 
technical things.  But, a little research yielded the interesting 
factoid that the ITU dates back to 1865 - formed to support 
standardization and interconnection of telegraph networks.


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra