[ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 84, Issue 4

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Bob,

That sounds about right.   IIRC, there were a lot of TCP implementations in
various stages of progress, as well as in various stages of protocol
genealogy - 2.5, 3, 4, and many could communicate with themselves or
selected others prior to January 1979.  Jon's "bakeoff" on the Saturday
preceding the January 1979 TCP Meeting at ISI was the first time a
methodical test was done to evaluate the NxN interoperability of a diverse
collection of implementations.

I remember that you were one of the six implementations in that test
session.   We each had been given an office at ISI for the day and kept at
it until everyone could establish a connection with everyone else and pass
data.

There were a lot of issues resolved that day, mostly having to do with
ambiguities in the then-current spec we had all been coding to meet.   As
we all finally agreed (or our code agreed) on all the details, Jon tweaked
the spec to reflect what the collected software was now doing.   So I've
always thought that those six implementations were the first TCP4
implementations to successfully interoperate.  Yours was one of them.

There was a lot of pressure at the time to get the spec of TCP4 nailed down
and published, and that test session was part of the process.  Subsequently
that TCP4 spec became an RFC, and a DoD Standard, and The Internet started
to grow, and the rest is history....

I wonder if Dave Clark ever forgave Bill Plummer for crashing the Multics
TCP by innocently asking Dave to temporarily disable his checksumming
code....and then sending a kamikaze packet from Tenex.

/Jack



On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Bob Braden <braden at meritmail.isi.edu>wrote:

>
> Jack,
>
> You wrote:
>
>     I wrote a TCP back in the 1979 timeframe - the first one for a Unix
>     system, running on a PDP-11/40.  It first implemented TCP version
>     2.5, and later evolved to version 4.   It was a very basic
>     implementation, no "slow start" or any other such niceties that were
>     created as the Internet grew.
>
> I have been trying to recall where my TCP/IP for UCLA's IBM 360/91 ran in
> this horse race. The best I can tell from IEN 70 and IEN 77 is that  my
> TCP-4 version made it between Dec 1978 and Jan 1979, although I think I had
> an initial TP-2.5 version talkng to itself in mid 1978.
>
> Bob Braden
>
>
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