[ih] Significant milestones in the history of TCP/IP

[Craig Partridge]

> 
> The idea would be to have community discussion and agreement about the
> major milestones.  Which milestones were seminal?  When did they occur?
> Is there documentation for it?  Maybe who the actors were.
> 
> I'd originally focused on IPv6, but a facebook thread on this produced a
> suggestion to broaden to all of IP (and I think that requires including
> TCP.)

Hi Dave:

Not sure I have time this busy fall to do more than kibbitz, but in the interests of helping out, here are some dates that may help.

February 1978 - first spec for IP (version 2) in IEN 28.  This was the product of a hallway conversation at an Internet meeting at Marina del Rey (the hallway discussion included Vint, Jon Postel, Danny Cohen, Dave Reed, Steve Crocker and perhaps another person or two).  Dave Reed also credits prior work by John Shoch at PARC and the help of the meeting participants after the hallway meeting — apparently the team sketched the IP header on a white board and worked through which mechanisms should be in IP and how.

April 1989 - Mike St Johns graphs the demand for IPv4 addresses and shows address depletion likely c. 2000.  See his presentation at IETF 13.  My view is this was the first alert we had a problem for IPv4.

July/August 1990 - Frank Solensky redoes St Johns’ analysis by address class (remember Classes A, B, C, D, and E?) and discovers Class B will be exhausted around the start 1994.  See his presentation at IETF 18.  My personal recollection is this was the “oh no” (insert worse words) moment and eventually led to the creation of the ROAD group in November 1991 (see IETF 23 announcement).

I can’t quite date the creation of CIDR and NAT but they were ROAD group products sometime in early 1992.

Craig