[ih] Hesitating to disagree with one of the fathers of the Internet…..

[dave.walden.family at gmail.com]

We, BBN, certainly did a lot of design for the IMP system, taking off from the fairly undetailed spec that came in the Request for Quotation.  I would say we contributed to the larger ARPANET design along with the people at ARPA, Network Analysis Corporation, the Host computer sites, the Network Working Group, the UCLA Network Measurement Center, the SRI Network Information Center, etc.

We did do the day-to-day operation of the IMP subnetwork and monitored that as well as some bits of Host status.  In terms of who managed the overall ARPANET in the early days, I'd say that was ARPA.  The NIC also played an operational role.  As for the other groups mentioned above, in some sense they also played operational roles, but I think of the my as playing more developmental roles.

I certainly concur that lots of people were involved in discussions and design of various aspects of the evolving design.

Bob Kahn and I went to UCLA to run the tests that showed the lockup problem with the initial source-IMP to destination-IMP storage allocation algorithm.  Vine and UCLA people were also there.

Dave

Sent from my iPad

On May 10, 2012, at 3:58 PM, David Elliott Bell <bell1945 at offthisweek.com> wrote:

> nevertheless, I would point out that not everyone agreed that 
> 
> "BBN was the designer and operator of the ARPANET from the outset to its termination in 1990."  
> 
> The disagreement would be over the phrase "the designer".  
> 
> Michael Padlipsky clearly did not agree. per his book The Elements of Networking Style (& Other Essays & Animadversions of the Art of Intercomputer Networking. (Peter Salus continues to have a high opinion of this book, which includes the only reference on Wikipedia to the Arpanet Reference Model.)  
> 
> One of the chapters in that book "And They Argued All Night...."  posited that much of what happened in the early days of the Arpanet was the result of group discussion where the participants did not always themselves remember who said what and where ideas came from.
> 
> I recommend his book for some reflection of the life and times of the early days of ARPA's Network Working Group (?  phrasing right?).
> 
> David Bell
> 
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