[ih] The story of BGP?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Guy Almes <galmes at tamu.edu>

    > we were asked in 1988 to comment on a then-draft spec for a successor
    > to EGP2, viz. EGP3. EGP3 was, in many ways, well done and it was
    > incremental and thus might have scaled well with regard to the rapidly
    > growing number of networks.
    > But EGP3 remained 'flat' in the sense above.

If this is true, it probably explains why EGP3 never got much traction.

I wish I had a later EGP3 draft spec to confirm this - I'm looking through my
pile of paper (and actually organizing and cataloging it!), but so far, no
luck.

I suspect that's why I went off to do FGP - I suspect I could see the need to
support cycles in the topology coming soon. (Proteon was heavily involved in
selling to the regionals, and tried to sell to the NSF backbone, so we knew a
lot about what they were all up to.)


And speaking of FGP, while setting up to file the stuff I was organizing, I
ran across a (thin!) folder labelled "FGP"! I won't bore you all with all the
details, but a few useful tidbits.

It does appear to date from the end of 1986; I see an email from Hans-Werner
Braun from October 1986, and a Proteon memo about a potential contract from
November, 1986. We had apparently discussed it with "Steve" at NSF (Steve
Wolff, I assume), to see if we could get money out of them to support the
effort, and Scott Brim had offered a chunk of money from NYSRENET.

A short (3-page) design note which I wrote indicates that it had the
following goals:

- Ability to handle a larger Internet
- Cycles - no topology restrictions
- Quick adaption to topology changes
- No counting to infinity
- Low overhead - updates not transmitted every N seconds
- Better metric than just hop-count

Actually, I guess the design note is of some interest, as it reveals how
limited my/our understanding of routing was at that date. It's clearly a
whole order of magnitude (or more) less advanced than Nimrod. But I
digress..:-)

Anyway, one other item of interest in the file is a timeline chart for the
proposed contract/effort. It shows things like 'Requirements [definition, I
asssume]', in December, 1986, 'Spec writing' in Feb/March 1987,
implementations in May/June, 'Trials' in June/July, 'Spec update' in August,
and 'Spec relase' in September.

Probably a little optimistic on the schedule... :-)

	Noel