[ih] Hesitating to disagree with one of the fath ers of the InternetŠ..

[John Day]

A few things:

Bernie is right.  It is amazing how it pretty much just worked. 
There were bugs.  And those cranky Tuesday mornings. (BBN tried out 
new IMPsys' on Monday nights, if they were going to.)  The ARPANET 
was primarily an operational network from the beginning.  It was not 
a network for experimenting about networks, it was a network for 
sharing resources, which we did a lot.  We were the largest user of 
Rutherford in the UK, and were using a lot of other machines around 
the network.

What I find amusing about Sytel's questions is how much he assumes 
that things then were like they are now.  They were very different.

Noel is correct as far as I know.  The design and development of the 
IMP subnet was pretty much a BBN affair.  Also the comments that NMC 
(and BBN) was running most of the tests on the network.  Someone 
should talk to Ari about that.  Most of the testing the hosts did 
were on their own projects.

However the NWG meetings were a different matter.  They were loud, 
boisterous, and cantankerous.  Made of the OS guys from the various 
sites, who were lords in their own kingdoms (some would say prima 
donnas), so sparks were to be expected.  I remember marvelling at how 
often we were arguing about the same design but with different words. 
The same term meaning slightly different things on different systems 
but largely everyone had the same basic sense.  (Although one should 
read Ritual for Catharisis #1).

But what I have found missing here is the excitement of the what was 
going on outside the lab.  Of course BBN being a company was pretty 
much immune to it.  Demonstrations against the Vietnam War.  John 
Melvin's comment about ARPA, that "our money is only bloody on one 
side."  Agitation about the military research on campuses.  We were 
in the thick of it at Illinois more because of Illiac IV than the 
ARPANET  but they were both ARPA projects.  We spent many hours 
dealing with the demonstrators.  Our office was fire bombed (but it 
didn't go off).  The thing was, we agreed with them that classified 
research shouldn't be on campus.  The project was doing anything 
classified, so what was the beef?  The story I tell of 4 of us 
leaving Urbana to go Philadelphia to do some debugging, running into 
the first metal detectors at the gate but as we had arrived in 
Chicago, the flight attendant had said to me, "Are you guys in a 
band?"  ;-)  (That wasn't the last time we were asked that question!) 
All of this happening in the context of Kent State, Watergate, the 
overthrow of Allende, Agnew resigning, etc.  It was a pretty wild and 
wooly time.  I am amazed at all tthe stuff that was done.

And other things I am not sure I should talk about.  ;-)

Take care,
John


At 16:51 -0400 2012/05/10, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: David Elliott Bell <bell1945 at offthisweek.com>
>
>     > The disagreement would be over the phrase "the designer".
>
>It depends; there are lots of different parts to 'the ARPANet'. The Host-Host
>and application protocols were clearly done by a group of people from the
>sites. Then there is the actual network as implemented - and then you get the
>early versions (as documented in Heart et al. 1970 SJCC), the 'middle' version
>(McQuillan et al. 1972 FJCC) and the 'late' version (no quick ref for this,
>but it includes after the 'new' routing algorithm).
>
>As to the actual network, check out the original ARPA RFQ, July 29 1968
>(#DAHC15 69 Q 0002), and then look at the BBN proposal, 6 September 1968 (IMP
>P69-IST-5). Then compare that with the actual network as first implemented.
>(And bear in mind that before the RFQ was written, there was a lot of
>discussion among a fair number of folk, e.g. Wes Clark's suggestion of a
>separate IMP.)
>
>I would say 'designed by BBN' is a reasonable, succint, description for the
>actual network, but of course there were many hands, and many pieces, and
>a full description of all the former, for the latter, is rather lengthy.
>
>	Noel