[ih] Historical fiction

[Dave Walden]

I think SDC was on the ARPANET, host number 10??
Ari Shoshonan or something like that is a name that comes to mind.

In response to another question yesterday -- about women in the early 
days of the ARPANET: Peggy Karp was involved very early as was Nancy 
Neigus pretty early, and Jake (Elizabeth) Feinler at SRI had early 
and long involvement.  There are others.


At 12:29 PM 5/11/2012, Craig Milo Rogers wrote:
>On 12.05.10, Alex McKenzie wrote:
> > 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.
>
>         UCLA was also the home of the Center for Computer-based Behavioral
>Studies (CCBS), a research unit of the UCLA Psychology Department that was
>essentially an SDC (Systems Development Corp. in Santa Monica) spinoff (SDC
>was itself a RAND spinoff), funded by ARPA.  Initially located in the basement
>of the Business School building, Bunche Hall, CCBS soon moved to a
>purpose-built area on the third floor of Middle Franz Hall.  CCBS had the
>first PDP-10 (KA10) system assembled with a full complement of 256K 36-bit
>words of core memory.  This was bigger than the CTSS and ITS systems at MIT, a
>bit smaller than the 384K 36-bit words on MULTICS, but only a quarter of the
>main memory capacity of CCN's IBM 360/91.  CCBS was chartered to offer general
>purpose timesharing services, interactive statistical analysis tools, and
>realtime, online studies of collaboration and competition (wargaming, in
>piecemeal), both in-house and to military and academic customers over the
>ARPANET.
>
> > 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.
>
>         CCBS also built special CRT terminals, based on the Tektronix storage
>tube technology, with light pens and other special features intended to
>compete with the PLATO system.  I can't remember if they were fully
>operational in 1970, but I'm pretty sure they were in use by 1971.  In a
>sense, this was a continuation of the group's work at SDC, which had CRT
>terminals (fed by a drum storage unit) (and with light pens for input) on the
>IBM AN/FSQ-32 all-transistorized timesharing system (funded by initially by
>SAC to replace the vacuum-tube AN/FSQ-7 computers, taken over by ARPA to study
>timesharing), which I used in 1968.
>
>         There was a dedicated computer-computer link between SDC and the TX-2
>at MIT.  This was a significant pathfinder effort prior to the ARPAnet.  I saw
>it in 1968, although I didn't get to poke at it.  Underlying this West Coast
>activity was SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a military defense
>program, which was the true pioneer in developing timesharing, computer
>communications, CRT-based interfaces and large-scale computing.
>
>         You might ask, why wasn't SDC put on the ARPANET?  It is my
>understanding that even after the group that became CCBS moved from SDC to
>UCLA, it was intended to tie SDC into the ARPAnet fairly quickly.  However, a
>dispute arose between SDC and the government; I recall being told that SDC
>attempted to retroactively raise its overhead rates on its research contracts,
>leading to a drastic reduction in SDC's ARPA funding and the cancellation of
>SDC's ARPAnet connection.
>
>                                         Craig Milo Rogers


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