[ih] infrastructure history [was: who invented the Internet]

[Jack Haverty]

Alex, Dave, et al

A little piece of Internet/BBN history from that era -- BBN Report
4825, QTR #23, dated November 1981.  Section 5.1 is titled "Gateway
Development".  It is part of Section 5 which is titled "Internet
Operations and Maintenance"  It says in part:

"During this quarter, responsibility for all gateway maintenance and
development was transferred from the Information Sciences Division to
the Computer Systems Division (now Communications System Division).
The motivation for this transfer was the need to emphasize the
treatment of the gateways as an operational communications system,
rather than a research tool to support the growing user community.  In
this approach, we plan increasingly to treat the gateway system much
as we do the ARPANET and SATNET systems in terms of monitoring and
maintenance."

I was on the receiving end of this transfer, so I then had the
responsibility for effecting that change in direction and managing the
efforts going forward to make the Internet operational.  After the
change, the "Gateway group" was literally down the hall from the
"Arpanet group".   I think this was the point where the "Arpanet DNA"
began to strongly influence the evolution of the gateways which formed
the early Internet, as we began to change the hardware and software to
make it more manageable and reliable and more like the Arpanet, which
had already proven the techniques.  Before long, all of the "core
gateways", as well as the Arpanet IMPs and SATNET SIMPs, were being
operated and managed by the same NOC at BBN.

One might note this as the point in time where the Internet stopped
being a pure research tool and started being a communications utility.
 I'm not sure who invented The Internet, but I think it was "turned
on" sometime in the quarter of August/September/October 1981.

All of this was government funded.  The full report is available
online from DTIC - http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a108783.pdf

/Jack Haverty




On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Alex McKenzie <amckenzie3 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dave,
>
> There were Internet Gateways of that period built by BBN (Ginny Strasizar),
> University College London (Peter Kirstein's group) and Stanford University
> (Vint Cerf's group).  At least the BBN and Stanford gateway projects were
> funded by DARPA.  I do not know which of these gateways were used at the
> non-BBN sites at the time of the picture you cite, and I do not believe the
> BBN Report provides any information.  I do know that _eventually_ all the
> SATNET gateways were provided by BBN.
>
> Regards,
> Alex
>