[ih] Historical fiction

[Alex McKenzie]

Every site connected to the early ARPAnet was the center of something.

IMP 1: UCLA was the place where Kleinrock worked - applying 
queueing theory to data communications.  Because of this he had an ARPA 
contract to operate the Network Measurement Center which used facilities built into the IMPs (packet tracing, periodic measurements of queue 
lengths and waiting times, traffic statistics, traffic generators, etc) to run experiments with the performance/behavior of the "subnetwork".
    UCLA was also home of the Campus Computer Network and its IBM 360/91, funded in large part by ARPA.  This was the largest commercial number-cruncher planned to be connected to the network, and was therefore an important 
number-crunching resource to be shared by the ARPA research community.

IMP 2: Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was home to Doug Englebart and his "[Human] Augmentation Research Center (ARC), largely funded by ARPA.  
The ARC developed the OnLine System (OLS) to facilitate the 
collaborative production of documentation, including authoring, sharing, indexing, storing, etc. Because of this Doug's group had an ARPA 
contract to serve as the Network Information Center.

IMP 3: UCSB had an IBM 360/75 which was used to run a time-sharing system, 
which included special CRT terminals designed for the UCSB system (at 
this time almost every ARPAnet site except UCSB and SRI used hard-copy 
terminals).  The UCSB  360/75 was a major resourch intended to be 
shared.

IMP 4: University of Utah was doing major work in experimental graphics for ARPA.  Its graphic expertise and graphic rendering software was a 
resource to be shared.

IMP 5: BBN was the location of the group (the "IMP Guys") who designed the 
subnetwork and built the hardware and software to implement it.  Once 
IMP 5 was installed in early 1970 BBN ran the Network Operation Center 
(NOC) which managed network operation, maintenance, and improvement. 
[IMP 1 was installed at the beginning of September 1969 and IMP 5 was 
installed in March 1970; during the intervening time (a bit over 6 
months) UCLA was the center of much subnet activity, especially 
measurement and testing.  After March 1970 BBN was the center of operations and the goal was to keep the subnet running all the time.]
     BBN was also the home of the group which built the TENEX hardware and 
operating system and used TENEX as a platform for research in artificial intelligence, speech understanding, and natural language processing.  
This expertise and the TENEX system were resources to be shared.

IMP 6: MIT was the home of a variety of unique computer resources and 
expertise, including (but far from limited to) the CTSS, ITS, and 
Multics computer systems, and major research in AI, symbolic mathematics, and operating system security - all funded in part or entirely by ARPA.  The systems and expertise were resources to be shared.

And so on. [I'm a 1-finger typist and can't keep this up.]  It would be impossible to say that any of the network sites 
were the center of the network, in the sense that "center" implies "most important".  But on the other hand, EVERY site was the center of some 
important and unique activity!  Only when Terminal IMPS (TIPs) were first deployed was it the case that some sites were purely users of other resources rather that the center of some activity.


Hope this helps,
Alex McKenzie
BBN 1967-1996



________________________________
 From: Sytel <sytel at shaw.ca>
To: internet-history at postel.org 
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 7:15 PM
Subject: Re: [ih] Historical fiction
 
I see. This is interesting, and definitely new; from the accounts I'd read (admittedly, mostly from Kleinrock's perspective) I was under the impression that the NMC was the "headquarters" for the early net; indeed, I might have read somewhere that it wasn't even connected to BBN's offices until some time after... I'm aware that most of the original team went their separate ways after the ECCC in 1972, but up until then I'd been sort of picturing Kleinrock's team as "running" the network from UCLA, with a lot of contact with BBN, of course.
I'm sorry if there's some false assumptions in there... as mentioned, this is something that's often hard to find out about in the more widely available histories.
What would have been the main "home bases" in the 1969-1972 period, then, and what would be happening at each one? Were they actually connected to the network, or were they more working on things that would be used at nodes that were connected?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Bernie Cosell" <bernie at fantasyfarm.com>
To: <internet-history at postel.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 3:21 PM
Subject: Re: [ih] Historical fiction


> On 10 May 2012 at 11:43, Sytel wrote:
> 
>> I guess what I'm interested in is "zooming in" a little more, if you
>> will. November, 1969, a typical afternoon in room 3420
>> (http://www.flickr.com/photos/3420boelterhall/5609051340/) -- what might
>> people be working on, reading, doing with the computers? What's a test
>> that might be running on the network, and how is it still not quite
>> working right? If something strange happens, who asks who about it? What
>> exciting plans are in the pipeline, what deadlines are looming?
> 
> I think that given the reality of all of the folk around the country
> working on the ARPAnet, between the actual network development and the
> host system software and the application development, I don't think that
> Boelter Hall was all that central to what was going on either in the
> large or in the small, so your work will be really quite "fictional" if
> you're focusing on UCLA...
> 
>  /Bernie\
> 
> -- Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
> mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
>    -->  Too many people, too few sheep  <--
> 
> 
> 
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