[ih] notable "bakeoffs" Re: internet-history Digest, Vol 84, Issue 4

[Suzanne Woolf]

Side question:

On May 19, 2014, at 4:45 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> 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….

Was this the first such "bakeoff" for test/debug of interoperability for TCP/IP or its ancestor protocols?

Occasionally I try to explain Internet history and processes to people outside of engineering culture. In that context, what we mean by "interoperability" and its role in usable standards is hard to explain, but keeps turning out to be important….


thanks,
Suzanne