From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Thu Sep  1 04:32:02 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 23:32:02 +1200
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <CAJzUrJq=P9z3-AjXbUEMOr8E8RpdS10Bpu3EdpR6Zx3XvrzgSw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20160901020927.13520.qmail@ary.lan>
	<ae1c7f2e-4a4b-f8f6-373d-3b18430aa428@gmail.com>
	<CAJzUrJq=P9z3-AjXbUEMOr8E8RpdS10Bpu3EdpR6Zx3XvrzgSw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <549caadb-cc78-3be1-37cd-bf4702f4ab13@gmail.com>

On 01/09/2016 17:37, Steven Ehrbar wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think Token Ring really failed because the IBM Cabling System was
>> too good, and therefore very expensive. The Ethernet discourse (one
>> simple coax cable goes everywhere) was very persuasive, especially
>> when Cheapernet (thin coax) came along.
>>
> 
> I'll agree with the first sentence, disagree with the second.  The
> battlefields the network wars were finally decided on were in the offices
> of businesses, and bus coax Ethernet was awful there.  

Quite right, and those were the arguments for the IBM Cabling System.
But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

   Brian

> They were far too
> vulnerable to user-induced cabling faults that could take down a network or
> large parts thereof.  What won the war for Ethernet in the office was that
> 10BaseT was native on UTP (and tolerant of bad UTP wiring), while Token
> Ring, while it claimed to work on UTP, really wanted STP to work right.
> Where the office went, volume production followed.
> 


From vint at google.com  Thu Sep  1 05:13:08 2016
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 08:13:08 -0400
Subject: [ih] Packet Radio and Why TCP
In-Reply-To: <b97fc567-cdf8-1670-5e18-360e593ba430@3kitty.org>
References: <mailman.16.1472682950.782.internet-history@postel.org>
	<952689980.3225941.1472696998029@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b97fc567-cdf8-1670-5e18-360e593ba430@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggeY9Yt-pmDLtbhVdyjwL1vFg6R3s8phtNFGKHKxYgkzDg@mail.gmail.com>

a variety of radios were developed, some by DARPA. Adding Preston Marshall,
now at Google, who was DARPA program manager for developing new radios and
testing the use of the delay and disruption tolerant Bundle Protocol
against TCP/IP in tactical environments. He may have additional information
about the path of tactical radio development after the packet radio program
ended in the 1980s.

v


On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 11:23 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> I wasn't directly involved in Packet Radio itself, but heard about it,
> mostly from Jim Mathis and (IIRC) Holly Nelson who were at most of the
> meetings.  Helicopters were definitely in the thought experiments, and
> even faster low-altitude aircraft, as users of communications.  But I
> think you're right that probably only land-mobile and high-altitude
> aircraft was possible to actually demo, at least at first.
>
> There were many problems to be solved (we all had lots of lists of
> "things that need to be worked on"), and packet radio with higher speed
> mobile platforms was probably one of them.  It involved not only
> power/weight/size but also things like routing protocols, which would
> likely have to be much faster to respond to changes.
>
> I never have heard how (or if) that early Packet Radio work evolved into
> "real" use in modern military systems.   E.G., do drones still use TCP,
> do they communicate with Packet Radio protocols, etc.   There's probably
> a good history story there for some future historian to uncover.
>
> /Jack
>
> On 08/31/2016 07:29 PM, Barbara Denny wrote:
> > In case people are interested,  various packet radio efforts did
> > actually have demos for the military that utilized a hummer or an Air
> > Force airplane besides the SRI bread/mobile van which is now sitting
> > outside the Computer History Museum. I am not aware of any packet radio
> > demos with helicopters.  I think power, weight, size issues probably
> > prevented this but feel free to correct if anyone knows otherwise.
> > Helicopters have been used in more recent MANET program demos for DARPA.
> >
> > barbara
> >
> > p.s.
> > Packet radios may have ended up on a boat too before I started working
> > on the project.  I believe SRI had access to a research vessel.
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *From:* "internet-history-request at postel.org"
> > <internet-history-request at postel.org>
> > *To:* internet-history at postel.org
> > *Sent:* Wednesday, August 31, 2016 3:35 PM
> > *Subject:* internet-history Digest, Vol 105, Issue 37
> >
> > Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
> >     internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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> > <mailto:internet-history-request at postel.org>
> >
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> > <mailto:internet-history-owner at postel.org>
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >   1. Why TCP? (Jack Haverty)
> >   2. Re: Why TCP? (Vint Cerf)
> >   3. Re: Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
> >   4. Re: Why TCP? (Vint Cerf)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:43:24 -0700
> > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Subject: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > Message-ID: <87d2d00a-361a-8ec1-b1cd-2e047a40df93 at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:87d2d00a-361a-8ec1-b1cd-2e047a40df93 at 3kitty.org>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> >
> > [I changed the subject because I hate unsearchable subjects like
> > "...internet history digest..."]
> >
> > I think Dave's observation is a really important fact for future
> > historians - the Internet did not evolve in a vacuum.
> >
> > ARPANET was one of the first packet networks (I'll let others argue
> > about which was First...), but it was preceded by networks based on
> > phone lines and modems interconnecting terminals and computers.
> >
> > The ARPA Packet Radio net enabled communications between mobile
> > computers, moving around in jeeps and helicopters, by radio links.  But
> > it was preceded by AlohaNet in Hawaii, which interconnected the various
> > islands by radio.  AlohaNet was also the inspiration for Ethernet.  In
> > the early 1970s, Bob Metcalfe's office at MIT was three doors down the
> > hallway from mine as he wrote his thesis that spawned Ethernet.  I
> > remember hearing about AlohaNet from him.
> >
> > Later, SATNET interconnected sites using satellite links, also obviously
> > using radio for communications.  Unlike the packet radio environment,
> > the path of the satellites was highly predictable, and the massive dish
> > antennas on the ground didn't move at all.
> >
> > SATNET was subsequently adapted to create MATNET, a Navy project, that
> > used satellite dishes on ships for communication.  Ships moved of
> > course, but not as rapidly or spasmodically as jeeps and aircraft.
> >
> > Ethernet was evolved by Xerox PARC into its own "internet", with
> > multiple LANs interconnecting by radio links or telephone lines.
> > During the early 80s, The Internet which we still use today was running
> > in parallel with the PARC internet (I can't recall what they called it),
> > using PUP where we used TCP.
> >
> > As Dave noted, we got used to hearing that the mission of the Internet
> > Project (as driven by the IAB/ICCB under Vint's direction) was to
> > develop the infrastructure technology, i.e., protocols and algorithms
> > and standards, to interconnect these networks, both the existing types
> > and anything else that someone might dream up in the future.
> >
> > If some new type of network could carry packets from point A to point B,
> > it should be possible to incorporate it into the Internet --- without
> > requiring the host computers to change any software (which would be
> > hard), or change all of the routers in the Internet (only the ones that
> > directly interface to the new network need to change to be able to use
> it)
> >
> > We even mused about extreme networking.  For example, TCP/IP should be
> > able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> > transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> > containing one packet of data.
> >
> > As far as I know, no one ever did that....  But it was one of the
> > scenarios that came up in the brainstorming discussions to prevent us
> > from changing the technical mechanisms in a way that precluded
> > PigeonNet's use.
> >
> > On another extreme, we mused about incorporating another Internet into
> > The Internet, i.e., using some existing set of routers and lines
> > (Internet 1), as a means to interconnect routers in an overlaid internet
> > (Internet 2).  After all, a fragment of an internet meets the
> > definition of a network - a communications mechanism that can carry
> packets.
> >
> > As far as I know, such multi-layer Internet-of-Internets *did* happen.
> > It was used in some secure environments and I think also used as a
> > technique to implement the IP4 to IP6 transition (are we there
> > yet...it's been more than 30 years!???)
> >
> > So, as Dave noted, TCP/IP was developed as an overlay that would run
> > over all existing, or future, networks.  That goal often came up during
> > the meetings and discussions as something akin to a Prime Directive.
> >
> > ==============
> >
> > IMHO, future historians might also like to know *why* that was the Prime
> > Directive.  In other words, Why TCP?  The intransigence of people to
> > settle on a single technology and protocol was important as a motivator,
> > but IMHO only part of it.
> >
> > My introduction to TCP was in 1977.  I had been working in the ARPANET
> > environment, doing things like email et al at MIT.  I moved to BBN in
> > 1977 and my first task was to write the first TCP for Unix, which was
> > needed as part of an ARPA project.  At that time, TCP was at the version
> > 2.5 stage.
> >
> > Over the next year or so, we made a lot of changes to create TCP 3 and
> > then TCP 4.
> >
> > Creating a technology that could incorporate any kind of network was a
> > big part of the mission.  But there were others.  For example, it was
> > desirable that the infrastructure support different types of user
> > traffic.  Ideally, the TCP infrastructure would support all types of
> > user traffic in a way similar to its ability to utilize any type of
> > network that might appear.
> >
> > Specifically, voice traffic - realtime human-human speech - was found to
> > not work very well over a TCP connection.  With our traditional uses,
> > e.g., FTP/Telnet/Email, getting all of the data there intact was the
> > overriding goal.  In speech, getting the data there in a timely fashion
> > was most important, and some loss of snippets of speech was acceptable.
> >
> > That, among other things, motivated the split of TCP into TCP/IP,
> > allowing the creation of UDP and "higher" protocols to carry things like
> > speech and video.
> >
> > =======================
> >
> > All of these internet-history discussions tend to revolve around
> > technology - protocols, algorithms, etc., which isn't surprising since a
> > lot of the people on this list were deeply involved in creating that
> > technology.
> >
> > But for the benefit of historians, there's another "layer" of discussion
> > that seems important - Why TCP?  In other words, why was it so important
> > to create a whole new infrastructure with such capabilities.
> >
> > The Departments of Defense (note plural) put quite a lot of money into
> > the efforts to develop the Internet technology.  ARPA, part of the US
> > military, was a large player, acting as a conduit for funds from the
> > various parts of the military - Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.  But other
> > players from other countries were there too - RSRE (UK), NDRE (Norway),
> > DFVLR (Germany), and CNUCE (Italy) are ones I remember.
> >
> > So, .... the interesting question is "Why did they send money, and keep
> > sending it, to create the TCP/IP technology"?  Why did they care about
> > being able to interconnect all sorts of networks?
> >
> > The answer of course is because they needed it to solve their own
> > communications problems.
> >
> > During that TCP2-->4 evolution period, I remember that we were
> > continuously aware of stereotypical military scenarios in which TCP was
> > supposed to operate.  The military folks didn't really care about bits,
> > bytes, packets, etc.  They just knew what they wanted to be able to do
> > with it all.
> >
> > The scenario I remember most was what I heard on joining the fray in
> > 1977 and learning what exactly this "TCP" thing and associated projects
> > were all about.
> >
> > It was a "Command and Control" scenario, which is the bread-and-butter
> > of the military world.  The notion was that someone "out in the field",
> > perhaps a scout in a jeep, would see something interesting, and need to
> > report it up the command chain.  "I see a column of tanks coming along
> > the river valley".
> >
> > The jeep of course couldn't be wired into an IMP port on the ARPANET.
> > But it could have a radio, and that radio should be able to communicate
> > with another jeep, or tank, or whatever else might be around.  And they
> > might be able to communicate with the field headquarters, possibly
> > several miles away.  But everyone had to be able to move, often rapidly
> > and unpredictably.
> >
> > So, .... here's some money....make it work... and Packet Radio networks
> > were born.
> >
> > With lots of jeeps, or helicopters, or whatever, and their eyes and
> > ears, the field headquarters could be connected back to the Pentagon
> > over the ARPANET and all of that information could be used to figure out
> > what to do about it.  But somehow we need to have messages flow from the
> > Packet Radio to the ARPANET...
> >
> > So, .... here's some money....make it work.... and gateways (aka
> > routers) were born.
> >
> > Back at the Pentagon, looking at all the reports, it might become clear
> > that the Army guys in the jeeps needed a little help as waves of tanks
> > approached them.
> >
> > Perhaps there's a ship offshore, with some big guns, and a carrier full
> > of nasty airplanes.  But they're over the horizon, too far away for the
> > Packet Radio to reach, or for wires to an IMP port.  But they do have
> > satellite dishes, and can talk to other dishes halfway around the planet
> > if necessary.  If only their computers could talk with everybody else...
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work.... and SATNET and MATNET were
> > born.  The USS Carl Vinson was on The Internet.
> >
> > When things get frenetic, messages and email just aren't fast enough.
> > Real time voice communication is critical (remember, no cell phones in
> > those days).  But voice over TCP isn't working well.
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work.... and TCP is split into TCP and
> > IP, UDP is defined, and the obstacle to realtime voice is removed.  Hey,
> > it should even work for video someday.
> >
> > We can't do video, but graphics are a big help.  A general might be able
> > to view a map while talking with commanders in the field who see the
> > same map.  Even use a pointer to highlight specific areas of the map as
> > he gives instructions.  "Unit A, you move here (pointing somewhere),
> > and Ship B, you fire at this location (pointing somewhere else)".
> >
> > It's really important that the "pointing" actions in the graphics are
> > well-synchronized with the speech giving the commands......
> >
> > So, the real-time UDP speech needs to be time-synched with the graphics
> > images over TCP.
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work....and .... mechanisms such as NTP
> > (thank you Dave Mills!) are created to provide high-accuracy global
> > time.  But I have no idea if the voice/graphics synching is guaranteed
> > even today.  Sure hope so...
> >
> > There were a number of these scenarios that drove our thinking about the
> > problems.  I was an initial member of Vint's IAB (then called ICCB), and
> > these kinds of scenarios played a significant role in those discussions,
> > which complemented the technical discussions in the larger Internet
> > group meetings.  The IAB in part acted as a conduit to translate the
> > desires of the guys with the money into the technical goals that drove
> > the creation of the TCP/IP protocols and machinery.
> >
> > Someone (I wish I knew who) made the decision to do all of this work,
> > and spend all of that money, in an open environment, and make the
> > technology freely available and standardized for anyone to use.  None of
> > the competing Internet architectures (Xerox, Novell, DEC, IBM, ISO,
> > etc.) did that.  So when the rest of the world discovered that the
> > military TCP/IP technology not only worked but also could solve their
> > problems, the ascension of the Internet was natural.
> >
> > So, that's why we have TCP!
> >
> > As usual, I've written a lot, sorry about that.  It just seems important
> > to get this written down somewhere to capture some of the "why" part of
> > the Internet history.  The existence of concrete scenarios was key in
> > focusing the technical work on actual real-world problems to be solved.
> > That permeated the culture of the Internet developers.  Instead of
> > writing documents, we wrote code...
> >
> > /Jack Haverty
> > August 31, 2016
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 08/31/2016 07:17 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> >> On 8/31/2016 6:50 AM, Craig Partridge wrote:
> >>> As I recall the story (I arrived on the scene later), Bob Kahn was in
> >>> the process of funding Packet Radio Networks and he and Vint needed to
> >>> solve the
> >>> interconnection problem and that motivated the TCP paper.
> >>
> >>
> >> This is a variant of the broader problem statement I was used to
> hearing:
> >>
> >>      Even by 1972 there already were a variety of independent networks
> >> around the world.  How to interconnect them, since it was unlikely that
> >> they would all agree to switch over to someone else's network protocols.
> >>
> >>      TCP was developed as an overlay that would run on all of them,
> >> connecting them.
> >>
> >> d/
> >>
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:29:05 -0400
> > From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com <mailto:vint at google.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet history <internet-history at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>>
> > Message-ID:
> >     <CAHxHggd8=NHr6T-j89ANp+sDOYak8sVtV1YyQs3EDfZYc9rAxA at mail.gmail.com
> > <mailto:sDOYak8sVtV1YyQs3EDfZYc9rAxA at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> We even mused about extreme networking.  For example, TCP/IP should be
> >> able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> >> transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> >> containing one packet of data.
> >>
> >> As far as I know, no one ever did that...
> >
> >
> > yeah, they did - there's even an RFC about it, I think, from UK.
> >
> >
> > see also YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCZH9Lp8uo
> >
> > The audio and auto-caption is hilariously disconnected.
> >
> > https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/08/29/
> 1934251/pigeon-protocol-finds-a-practical-purpose
> >
> > http://www.cnet.com/news/pigeon-powered-internet-takes-flight/
> >
> > v
> > <http://www.cnet.com/news/pigeon-powered-internet-takes-flight/>
> >
> > --
> > New postal address:
> > Google
> > 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> > Reston, VA 20190
> > -------------- next part --------------
> > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> > URL:
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> attachments/20160831/30aad3c0/attachment-0001.html
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 3
> > Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 10:31:16 +1200
> > From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
> > <mailto:brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > Message-ID: <50804405-fff3-c6cb-421a-44d1bf08ab2c at gmail.com
> > <mailto:50804405-fff3-c6cb-421a-44d1bf08ab2c at gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> >
> > On 01/09/2016 09:43, Jack Haverty wrote:
> > ...
> >> For example, TCP/IP should be
> >> able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> >> transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> >> containing one packet of data.
> >>
> >> As far as I know, no one ever did that....
> >
> > Of coure they did:
> > http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/
> >
> >   Brian
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:35:06 -0400
> > From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com <mailto:vint at google.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet history <internet-history at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>>
> > Message-ID:
> >     <CAHxHggfi9-LNbV71bUSX6ozkX=GTtioTLdVTMk2EhBi_Y-Z3wg at mail.gmail.com
> > <mailto:GTtioTLdVTMk2EhBi_Y-Z3wg at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Someone (I wish I knew who) made the decision to do all of this work,
> >> and spend all of that money, in an open environment, and make the
> >> technology freely available and standardized for anyone to use.  None of
> >> the competing Internet architectures (Xerox, Novell, DEC, IBM, ISO,
> >> etc.) did that.  So when the rest of the world discovered that the
> >> military TCP/IP technology not only worked but also could solve their
> >> problems, the ascension of the Internet was natural.
> >
> >
> > Bob Kahn, Larry Roberts and Dave Russell are probably the closest to the
> > deciding parties
> > at the IPTO level but one has to credit George Heilmeier and Steve
> Lukasic
> > as DARPA
> > Directors for their strong support for ARPANET and then Internet.
> >
> > v
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > New postal address:
> > Google
> > 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> > Reston, VA 20190
> > -------------- next part --------------
> > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> > URL:
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> attachments/20160831/86df189e/attachment.html
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > internet-history mailing list
> > internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for
> assistance.
> >
> >
> > End of internet-history Digest, Vol 105, Issue 37
> > *************************************************
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______
> > internet-history mailing list
> > internet-history at postel.org
> > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> >
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
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> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
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>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk  Thu Sep  1 05:19:31 2016
From: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk (George Ross)
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:19:31 +0100
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 01 Sep 2016 23:32:02 +1200."
	<549caadb-cc78-3be1-37cd-bf4702f4ab13@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <201609011219.u81CJVpc009139@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk>

> But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
> even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
> business seriously was when UTP came along.

Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
suitable for serious business roll-out.

Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
installing more was a pain.

Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.

Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.

(We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)

--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk   Voice: 0131 650 5147   Fax: 0131 650 6899
PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.


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From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu  Thu Sep  1 06:08:29 2016
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu,  1 Sep 2016 09:08:29 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [ih] Why TCP?
Message-ID: <20160901130829.72AF918C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: Jack Haverty

    > TCP/IP technology is fine, but there were numerous other ways to define
    > the technical mechanisms that could have evolved into The Internet. The
    > people driving all those technologies had to make a similar decision.
    > They all made the wrong choice, and their technologies have all but
    > disappeared.

My perception is that the single biggest reason that TCP/IP became the
protocols used on 'the Internet' (and I hate that some people don't get why
there's a capital on it - I look forward to the new US President being
installed in the white house) is not so much its internal technical goodness,
or even the openness, but other factors - the biggest of which, I think, was
the size of the inter-connected user base.

The point of a communication network is to communicate with people, and so
naturally people, when deciding which network to hook up to, will tend to
pick the one with the most, since it gives them the most benefit. (I think
Metcalfe has a Law about that?) And that tends to drive the smaller networks
out of existence, and the whole ecosystem toward one single Network To Rule
Them All. (The same force acted on the telephone network back when, I expect.)

The TCP/IP Internet, starting as it did with large chunks of the US academia,
and tech businesses (plus government and military, although they were
secondary), just had a lead nothing else could ever catch. And as time went
on, it got worse (feedback)...

(I expect the X.25 networks probably started with a large user base, but that
may be one place where technical capability _did_ play a role: TCP/IP worked
well over LANs, which were going crazy at that point.)

An ancillary factor was the wide variety of systems for which TCP/IP
implementations were available - and the two fed back between each other.

	Noel


From wfms at ottix.net  Thu Sep  1 06:08:25 2016
From: wfms at ottix.net (William Sotomayor)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 09:08:25 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <CAA=duU1HH8ag_9SMVpetjG12WX65HHL+jRwvxG_vP3j77=jk8w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20160901020927.13520.qmail@ary.lan> <57C7A0A2.70601@redbarn.org>
	<CAA=duU1HH8ag_9SMVpetjG12WX65HHL+jRwvxG_vP3j77=jk8w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1609010907530.12285@iskra.ottix.net>


On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Andrew G. Malis wrote:

> 
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
>       later on, DEC poured billions (that's like millions except with a "b")
>       of dollars into DECnet Phase V, proving after all that they, and not the
>       community, knew what the future of networking was going to look like.
>       (they should have saved the money so that Compaq could have it.)
> 
> 
> DECnet Phase V gave us IS-IS, which was later standardized by ISO and is now in wide use
> throughout the Internet. It?s probably the most popular intra-AS routing protocol in use today
> by Internet backbone providers. So it wasn?t a total waste. :-)

Not at all, in fact it seems to be getting some use in the data centre of 
all places by at least one vendor.

wfms

From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu  Thu Sep  1 06:20:31 2016
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu,  1 Sep 2016 09:20:31 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
Message-ID: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: "John Levine"

    > As we all know, Ethernets worked just fine. A lot of people didn't
    > believe it until they saw it

In defense of the Ethernet sceptics, most Ethernets were operated at traffic
levels where the collisions which theory predicted at high traffic levels
weren't a problem.

Liba Svobodova (at MIT at that point) did a bunch of analyses (this would be
ca. '78 or so) which showed that at low traffic levels, it would be fine, and
that only at high traffic levels would there be issues. Her analyses, AFAIK,
were right on target.


And of course the _real_ advantage of rings was not so much in the
token-passing access method, as in the analog lower level they used - all
simple point-point links. (Great for optical, BTW.)

Which is why today's 'Ethernet' networks are not (when you lift the covers)
really CSMA-CD networks: they actually consist of lots of little packet
switches connected by point-point links. I.e. the current systems use the best
of both approaches (the simple access mechanism of Ethernet, and the simple
point-point links of rings).

The only parts of 'Ethernet' left are the packet format, and the host/network
interface standard. As always, the interface is left when the equipment on
either side has changed out of all recognition - check out the screw base on a
mains AC LED bulb...

	Noel


From vint at google.com  Thu Sep  1 06:38:16 2016
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 09:38:16 -0400
Subject: [ih] Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <20160901130829.72AF918C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20160901130829.72AF918C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggfuKyMCghF-0ztkj6z3QZ1yfrTZaxw_R1WEK5kFzP60+g@mail.gmail.com>

I think Noel is largely correct although it was the NSF decision to use
TCP/IP for both CSNET and then NSFNET that drew significant academic
uptake. The ARPA-sponsored academic sites were mostly CS research into AI
and related areas - numbering around a dozen in the early days, but growing
to about 40-50 as the TCP research continued.

v


On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Jack Haverty
>
>     > TCP/IP technology is fine, but there were numerous other ways to
> define
>     > the technical mechanisms that could have evolved into The Internet.
> The
>     > people driving all those technologies had to make a similar decision.
>     > They all made the wrong choice, and their technologies have all but
>     > disappeared.
>
> My perception is that the single biggest reason that TCP/IP became the
> protocols used on 'the Internet' (and I hate that some people don't get why
> there's a capital on it - I look forward to the new US President being
> installed in the white house) is not so much its internal technical
> goodness,
> or even the openness, but other factors - the biggest of which, I think,
> was
> the size of the inter-connected user base.
>
> The point of a communication network is to communicate with people, and so
> naturally people, when deciding which network to hook up to, will tend to
> pick the one with the most, since it gives them the most benefit. (I think
> Metcalfe has a Law about that?) And that tends to drive the smaller
> networks
> out of existence, and the whole ecosystem toward one single Network To Rule
> Them All. (The same force acted on the telephone network back when, I
> expect.)
>
> The TCP/IP Internet, starting as it did with large chunks of the US
> academia,
> and tech businesses (plus government and military, although they were
> secondary), just had a lead nothing else could ever catch. And as time went
> on, it got worse (feedback)...
>
> (I expect the X.25 networks probably started with a large user base, but
> that
> may be one place where technical capability _did_ play a role: TCP/IP
> worked
> well over LANs, which were going crazy at that point.)
>
> An ancillary factor was the wide variety of systems for which TCP/IP
> implementations were available - and the two fed back between each other.
>
>         Noel
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From paul at redbarn.org  Thu Sep  1 09:02:20 2016
From: paul at redbarn.org (Paul Vixie)
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2016 09:02:20 -0700
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <57C8510C.9060606@redbarn.org>



Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      >  From: "John Levine"
>
>      >  As we all know, Ethernets worked just fine. A lot of people didn't
>      >  believe it until they saw it
>
> In defense of the Ethernet sceptics, most Ethernets were operated at traffic
> levels where the collisions which theory predicted at high traffic levels
> weren't a problem.

the theories that predicted congestion collapse were just wrong. see below.

> Liba Svobodova (at MIT at that point) did a bunch of analyses (this would be
> ca. '78 or so) which showed that at low traffic levels, it would be fine, and
> that only at high traffic levels would there be issues. Her analyses, AFAIK,
> were right on target.

see also:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-88-4.pdf

-- 
P Vixie


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Thu Sep  1 09:27:42 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 09:27:42 -0700
Subject: [ih] Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <CAHxHggfuKyMCghF-0ztkj6z3QZ1yfrTZaxw_R1WEK5kFzP60+g@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20160901130829.72AF918C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
	<CAHxHggfuKyMCghF-0ztkj6z3QZ1yfrTZaxw_R1WEK5kFzP60+g@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e1264107-10cb-47df-9a0d-0fa5552c3269@dcrocker.net>


> I think Noel is largely correct although it was the NSF decision to use
> TCP/IP for both CSNET and then NSFNET that drew significant academic
> uptake. The ARPA-sponsored academic sites were mostly CS research into
> AI and related areas - numbering around a dozen in the early days, but
> growing to about 40-50 as the TCP research continued.


Large-scale adoption of innovation is a sufficiently social process to 
make precise accounting impossible.  Still, it might be worth listing 
the serious of choices and factors people consider as likely 
contributing factors at different levels.

A quick start:

In terms of design, the focus on relative simplicity and consistency 
(one TCP rather than 5 OSI TPs, for example) and the layering, such as 
separating TCP and IP, dramatically reduced technical learning curves. 
(I suspect so did the tendency to use textual encoding rather than binary.)

The very long history of practical field experience, with 10 years of 
production use before it started to hit the larger mass-market.  Besides 
making for well-baked code, it ensured end-to-end operational usability. 
  The DNS was not a small part of this.  The competing OSI effort 
largely failed to ensure complete solutions (or at least failed until it 
was far too late, but I tend to think they never got there or when they 
did, had largely unworkable solutions, such as email addressing.)

Starting in the more constrained environment of R&D might hurt some 
kinds of technical deployment but in this case it allowed an 
infrastructure to grow independent of most national and business 
push-back, until much later in its life.

While the DARPA effort created the core technologies and its initial 
operational use, NSFNet's business and operational model pushed for a 
number of developments that became critical for the large-scale growth. 
An inter-organization routing protocol that did not rely on a single 
backbone.  Regional providers that seeded the commercial market later.

There were other critical decision points, such as the CSNET/NSFNet one 
Vint cites.  Craig Partridge also note the switchover to common use of 
domain naming among the various, independent messaging networks.

Feel free to add/modify...

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From b_a_denny at yahoo.com  Thu Sep  1 09:33:56 2016
From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 16:33:56 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [ih] Packet Radio and Why TCP
In-Reply-To: <mailman.28.1472732014.782.internet-history@postel.org>
References: <mailman.28.1472732014.782.internet-history@postel.org>
Message-ID: <87586194.3785280.1472747636161@mail.yahoo.com>


I should add it would be interesting to know if Rockwell or Hazeltine did anything further with packet radio.? They produced the packet radios. I never heard anything about this though. I believe Hazeltine is now part of BAE.

I hope I didn't confuse people.? There have been many other programs in this area, including ones supported by DARPA, that created new radios and protocols.? For example, I did work briefly on another one in 2002-2003 that was a MANET with multiple transmission media using directional antennas as part of Future Combat Systems. (As far as I know, MANET is a term that was created after packet radio.) I don't know which results from those efforts have been transferred to the field. Overall, I think many of the actual packet radio protocols have been swapped out by other things. I? will admit I am not familiar with the link level things, like encoding, error detection and correction, interleaving, etc.? The problems are challenging.

barbara

      From: "internet-history-request at postel.org" <internet-history-request at postel.org>
 To: internet-history at postel.org 
 Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2016 5:13 AM
 Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 1
   
Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
??? internet-history at postel.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
??? http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
??? internet-history-request at postel.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
??? internet-history-owner at postel.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."


Today's Topics:

? 1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
? 2. Re: Packet Radio and Why TCP (Vint Cerf)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 23:32:02 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
To: Steven Ehrbar <ehrbar at gmail.com>
Cc: "internet-history at postel.org" <internet-history at postel.org>,
??? dcrocker at bbiw.net
Message-ID: <549caadb-cc78-3be1-37cd-bf4702f4ab13 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

On 01/09/2016 17:37, Steven Ehrbar wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think Token Ring really failed because the IBM Cabling System was
>> too good, and therefore very expensive. The Ethernet discourse (one
>> simple coax cable goes everywhere) was very persuasive, especially
>> when Cheapernet (thin coax) came along.
>>
> 
> I'll agree with the first sentence, disagree with the second.? The
> battlefields the network wars were finally decided on were in the offices
> of businesses, and bus coax Ethernet was awful there.? 

Quite right, and those were the arguments for the IBM Cabling System.
But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

? Brian

> They were far too
> vulnerable to user-induced cabling faults that could take down a network or
> large parts thereof.? What won the war for Ethernet in the office was that
> 10BaseT was native on UTP (and tolerant of bad UTP wiring), while Token
> Ring, while it claimed to work on UTP, really wanted STP to work right.
> Where the office went, volume production followed.
> 


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 08:13:08 -0400
From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Packet Radio and Why TCP
To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>, Preston Marshall <pres at google.com>
Cc: internet history <internet-history at postel.org>
Message-ID:
??? <CAHxHggeY9Yt-pmDLtbhVdyjwL1vFg6R3s8phtNFGKHKxYgkzDg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

a variety of radios were developed, some by DARPA. Adding Preston Marshall,
now at Google, who was DARPA program manager for developing new radios and
testing the use of the delay and disruption tolerant Bundle Protocol
against TCP/IP in tactical environments. He may have additional information
about the path of tactical radio development after the packet radio program
ended in the 1980s.

v


On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 11:23 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> I wasn't directly involved in Packet Radio itself, but heard about it,
> mostly from Jim Mathis and (IIRC) Holly Nelson who were at most of the
> meetings.? Helicopters were definitely in the thought experiments, and
> even faster low-altitude aircraft, as users of communications.? But I
> think you're right that probably only land-mobile and high-altitude
> aircraft was possible to actually demo, at least at first.
>
> There were many problems to be solved (we all had lots of lists of
> "things that need to be worked on"), and packet radio with higher speed
> mobile platforms was probably one of them.? It involved not only
> power/weight/size but also things like routing protocols, which would
> likely have to be much faster to respond to changes.
>
> I never have heard how (or if) that early Packet Radio work evolved into
> "real" use in modern military systems.? E.G., do drones still use TCP,
> do they communicate with Packet Radio protocols, etc.? There's probably
> a good history story there for some future historian to uncover.
>
> /Jack
>
> On 08/31/2016 07:29 PM, Barbara Denny wrote:
> > In case people are interested,? various packet radio efforts did
> > actually have demos for the military that utilized a hummer or an Air
> > Force airplane besides the SRI bread/mobile van which is now sitting
> > outside the Computer History Museum. I am not aware of any packet radio
> > demos with helicopters.? I think power, weight, size issues probably
> > prevented this but feel free to correct if anyone knows otherwise.
> > Helicopters have been used in more recent MANET program demos for DARPA.
> >
> > barbara
> >
> > p.s.
> > Packet radios may have ended up on a boat too before I started working
> > on the project.? I believe SRI had access to a research vessel.
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *From:* "internet-history-request at postel.org"
> > <internet-history-request at postel.org>
> > *To:* internet-history at postel.org
> > *Sent:* Wednesday, August 31, 2016 3:35 PM
> > *Subject:* internet-history Digest, Vol 105, Issue 37
> >
> > Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
> >? ? internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> >? ? http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> >? ? internet-history-request at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history-request at postel.org>
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
> >? ? internet-history-owner at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history-owner at postel.org>
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >? 1. Why TCP? (Jack Haverty)
> >? 2. Re: Why TCP? (Vint Cerf)
> >? 3. Re: Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
> >? 4. Re: Why TCP? (Vint Cerf)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:43:24 -0700
> > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Subject: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > Message-ID: <87d2d00a-361a-8ec1-b1cd-2e047a40df93 at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:87d2d00a-361a-8ec1-b1cd-2e047a40df93 at 3kitty.org>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> >
> > [I changed the subject because I hate unsearchable subjects like
> > "...internet history digest..."]
> >
> > I think Dave's observation is a really important fact for future
> > historians - the Internet did not evolve in a vacuum.
> >
> > ARPANET was one of the first packet networks (I'll let others argue
> > about which was First...), but it was preceded by networks based on
> > phone lines and modems interconnecting terminals and computers.
> >
> > The ARPA Packet Radio net enabled communications between mobile
> > computers, moving around in jeeps and helicopters, by radio links.? But
> > it was preceded by AlohaNet in Hawaii, which interconnected the various
> > islands by radio.? AlohaNet was also the inspiration for Ethernet.? In
> > the early 1970s, Bob Metcalfe's office at MIT was three doors down the
> > hallway from mine as he wrote his thesis that spawned Ethernet.? I
> > remember hearing about AlohaNet from him.
> >
> > Later, SATNET interconnected sites using satellite links, also obviously
> > using radio for communications.? Unlike the packet radio environment,
> > the path of the satellites was highly predictable, and the massive dish
> > antennas on the ground didn't move at all.
> >
> > SATNET was subsequently adapted to create MATNET, a Navy project, that
> > used satellite dishes on ships for communication.? Ships moved of
> > course, but not as rapidly or spasmodically as jeeps and aircraft.
> >
> > Ethernet was evolved by Xerox PARC into its own "internet", with
> > multiple LANs interconnecting by radio links or telephone lines.
> > During the early 80s, The Internet which we still use today was running
> > in parallel with the PARC internet (I can't recall what they called it),
> > using PUP where we used TCP.
> >
> > As Dave noted, we got used to hearing that the mission of the Internet
> > Project (as driven by the IAB/ICCB under Vint's direction) was to
> > develop the infrastructure technology, i.e., protocols and algorithms
> > and standards, to interconnect these networks, both the existing types
> > and anything else that someone might dream up in the future.
> >
> > If some new type of network could carry packets from point A to point B,
> > it should be possible to incorporate it into the Internet --- without
> > requiring the host computers to change any software (which would be
> > hard), or change all of the routers in the Internet (only the ones that
> > directly interface to the new network need to change to be able to use
> it)
> >
> > We even mused about extreme networking.? For example, TCP/IP should be
> > able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> > transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> > containing one packet of data.
> >
> > As far as I know, no one ever did that....? But it was one of the
> > scenarios that came up in the brainstorming discussions to prevent us
> > from changing the technical mechanisms in a way that precluded
> > PigeonNet's use.
> >
> > On another extreme, we mused about incorporating another Internet into
> > The Internet, i.e., using some existing set of routers and lines
> > (Internet 1), as a means to interconnect routers in an overlaid internet
> > (Internet 2).? After all, a fragment of an internet meets the
> > definition of a network - a communications mechanism that can carry
> packets.
> >
> > As far as I know, such multi-layer Internet-of-Internets *did* happen.
> > It was used in some secure environments and I think also used as a
> > technique to implement the IP4 to IP6 transition (are we there
> > yet...it's been more than 30 years!???)
> >
> > So, as Dave noted, TCP/IP was developed as an overlay that would run
> > over all existing, or future, networks.? That goal often came up during
> > the meetings and discussions as something akin to a Prime Directive.
> >
> > ==============
> >
> > IMHO, future historians might also like to know *why* that was the Prime
> > Directive.? In other words, Why TCP?? The intransigence of people to
> > settle on a single technology and protocol was important as a motivator,
> > but IMHO only part of it.
> >
> > My introduction to TCP was in 1977.? I had been working in the ARPANET
> > environment, doing things like email et al at MIT.? I moved to BBN in
> > 1977 and my first task was to write the first TCP for Unix, which was
> > needed as part of an ARPA project.? At that time, TCP was at the version
> > 2.5 stage.
> >
> > Over the next year or so, we made a lot of changes to create TCP 3 and
> > then TCP 4.
> >
> > Creating a technology that could incorporate any kind of network was a
> > big part of the mission.? But there were others.? For example, it was
> > desirable that the infrastructure support different types of user
> > traffic.? Ideally, the TCP infrastructure would support all types of
> > user traffic in a way similar to its ability to utilize any type of
> > network that might appear.
> >
> > Specifically, voice traffic - realtime human-human speech - was found to
> > not work very well over a TCP connection.? With our traditional uses,
> > e.g., FTP/Telnet/Email, getting all of the data there intact was the
> > overriding goal.? In speech, getting the data there in a timely fashion
> > was most important, and some loss of snippets of speech was acceptable.
> >
> > That, among other things, motivated the split of TCP into TCP/IP,
> > allowing the creation of UDP and "higher" protocols to carry things like
> > speech and video.
> >
> > =======================
> >
> > All of these internet-history discussions tend to revolve around
> > technology - protocols, algorithms, etc., which isn't surprising since a
> > lot of the people on this list were deeply involved in creating that
> > technology.
> >
> > But for the benefit of historians, there's another "layer" of discussion
> > that seems important - Why TCP?? In other words, why was it so important
> > to create a whole new infrastructure with such capabilities.
> >
> > The Departments of Defense (note plural) put quite a lot of money into
> > the efforts to develop the Internet technology.? ARPA, part of the US
> > military, was a large player, acting as a conduit for funds from the
> > various parts of the military - Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.? But other
> > players from other countries were there too - RSRE (UK), NDRE (Norway),
> > DFVLR (Germany), and CNUCE (Italy) are ones I remember.
> >
> > So, .... the interesting question is "Why did they send money, and keep
> > sending it, to create the TCP/IP technology"?? Why did they care about
> > being able to interconnect all sorts of networks?
> >
> > The answer of course is because they needed it to solve their own
> > communications problems.
> >
> > During that TCP2-->4 evolution period, I remember that we were
> > continuously aware of stereotypical military scenarios in which TCP was
> > supposed to operate.? The military folks didn't really care about bits,
> > bytes, packets, etc.? They just knew what they wanted to be able to do
> > with it all.
> >
> > The scenario I remember most was what I heard on joining the fray in
> > 1977 and learning what exactly this "TCP" thing and associated projects
> > were all about.
> >
> > It was a "Command and Control" scenario, which is the bread-and-butter
> > of the military world.? The notion was that someone "out in the field",
> > perhaps a scout in a jeep, would see something interesting, and need to
> > report it up the command chain.? "I see a column of tanks coming along
> > the river valley".
> >
> > The jeep of course couldn't be wired into an IMP port on the ARPANET.
> > But it could have a radio, and that radio should be able to communicate
> > with another jeep, or tank, or whatever else might be around.? And they
> > might be able to communicate with the field headquarters, possibly
> > several miles away.? But everyone had to be able to move, often rapidly
> > and unpredictably.
> >
> > So, .... here's some money....make it work... and Packet Radio networks
> > were born.
> >
> > With lots of jeeps, or helicopters, or whatever, and their eyes and
> > ears, the field headquarters could be connected back to the Pentagon
> > over the ARPANET and all of that information could be used to figure out
> > what to do about it.? But somehow we need to have messages flow from the
> > Packet Radio to the ARPANET...
> >
> > So, .... here's some money....make it work.... and gateways (aka
> > routers) were born.
> >
> > Back at the Pentagon, looking at all the reports, it might become clear
> > that the Army guys in the jeeps needed a little help as waves of tanks
> > approached them.
> >
> > Perhaps there's a ship offshore, with some big guns, and a carrier full
> > of nasty airplanes.? But they're over the horizon, too far away for the
> > Packet Radio to reach, or for wires to an IMP port.? But they do have
> > satellite dishes, and can talk to other dishes halfway around the planet
> > if necessary.? If only their computers could talk with everybody else...
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work.... and SATNET and MATNET were
> > born.? The USS Carl Vinson was on The Internet.
> >
> > When things get frenetic, messages and email just aren't fast enough.
> > Real time voice communication is critical (remember, no cell phones in
> > those days).? But voice over TCP isn't working well.
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work.... and TCP is split into TCP and
> > IP, UDP is defined, and the obstacle to realtime voice is removed.? Hey,
> > it should even work for video someday.
> >
> > We can't do video, but graphics are a big help.? A general might be able
> > to view a map while talking with commanders in the field who see the
> > same map.? Even use a pointer to highlight specific areas of the map as
> > he gives instructions.? "Unit A, you move here (pointing somewhere),
> > and Ship B, you fire at this location (pointing somewhere else)".
> >
> > It's really important that the "pointing" actions in the graphics are
> > well-synchronized with the speech giving the commands......
> >
> > So, the real-time UDP speech needs to be time-synched with the graphics
> > images over TCP.
> >
> > So, here's some money....make it work....and .... mechanisms such as NTP
> > (thank you Dave Mills!) are created to provide high-accuracy global
> > time.? But I have no idea if the voice/graphics synching is guaranteed
> > even today.? Sure hope so...
> >
> > There were a number of these scenarios that drove our thinking about the
> > problems.? I was an initial member of Vint's IAB (then called ICCB), and
> > these kinds of scenarios played a significant role in those discussions,
> > which complemented the technical discussions in the larger Internet
> > group meetings.? The IAB in part acted as a conduit to translate the
> > desires of the guys with the money into the technical goals that drove
> > the creation of the TCP/IP protocols and machinery.
> >
> > Someone (I wish I knew who) made the decision to do all of this work,
> > and spend all of that money, in an open environment, and make the
> > technology freely available and standardized for anyone to use.? None of
> > the competing Internet architectures (Xerox, Novell, DEC, IBM, ISO,
> > etc.) did that.? So when the rest of the world discovered that the
> > military TCP/IP technology not only worked but also could solve their
> > problems, the ascension of the Internet was natural.
> >
> > So, that's why we have TCP!
> >
> > As usual, I've written a lot, sorry about that.? It just seems important
> > to get this written down somewhere to capture some of the "why" part of
> > the Internet history.? The existence of concrete scenarios was key in
> > focusing the technical work on actual real-world problems to be solved.
> > That permeated the culture of the Internet developers.? Instead of
> > writing documents, we wrote code...
> >
> > /Jack Haverty
> > August 31, 2016
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 08/31/2016 07:17 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> >> On 8/31/2016 6:50 AM, Craig Partridge wrote:
> >>> As I recall the story (I arrived on the scene later), Bob Kahn was in
> >>> the process of funding Packet Radio Networks and he and Vint needed to
> >>> solve the
> >>> interconnection problem and that motivated the TCP paper.
> >>
> >>
> >> This is a variant of the broader problem statement I was used to
> hearing:
> >>
> >>? ? ? Even by 1972 there already were a variety of independent networks
> >> around the world.? How to interconnect them, since it was unlikely that
> >> they would all agree to switch over to someone else's network protocols.
> >>
> >>? ? ? TCP was developed as an overlay that would run on all of them,
> >> connecting them.
> >>
> >> d/
> >>
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:29:05 -0400
> > From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com <mailto:vint at google.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet history <internet-history at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>>
> > Message-ID:
> >? ? <CAHxHggd8=NHr6T-j89ANp+sDOYak8sVtV1YyQs3EDfZYc9rAxA at mail.gmail.com
> > <mailto:sDOYak8sVtV1YyQs3EDfZYc9rAxA at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> We even mused about extreme networking.? For example, TCP/IP should be
> >> able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> >> transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> >> containing one packet of data.
> >>
> >> As far as I know, no one ever did that...
> >
> >
> > yeah, they did - there's even an RFC about it, I think, from UK.
> >
> >
> > see also YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCZH9Lp8uo
> >
> > The audio and auto-caption is hilariously disconnected.
> >
> > https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/08/29/
> 1934251/pigeon-protocol-finds-a-practical-purpose
> >
> > http://www.cnet.com/news/pigeon-powered-internet-takes-flight/
> >
> > v
> > <http://www.cnet.com/news/pigeon-powered-internet-takes-flight/>
> >
> > --
> > New postal address:
> > Google
> > 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> > Reston, VA 20190
> > -------------- next part --------------
> > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> > URL:
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> attachments/20160831/30aad3c0/attachment-0001.html
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 3
> > Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 10:31:16 +1200
> > From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
> > <mailto:brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > Message-ID: <50804405-fff3-c6cb-421a-44d1bf08ab2c at gmail.com
> > <mailto:50804405-fff3-c6cb-421a-44d1bf08ab2c at gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> >
> > On 01/09/2016 09:43, Jack Haverty wrote:
> > ...
> >> For example, TCP/IP should be
> >> able to utilize a "network" implemented using carrier pigeons for
> >> transport, with each pigeon carrying a small tube with a strip of paper
> >> containing one packet of data.
> >>
> >> As far as I know, no one ever did that....
> >
> > Of coure they did:
> > http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/
> >
> >? Brian
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:35:06 -0400
> > From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com <mailto:vint at google.com>>
> > Subject: Re: [ih] Why TCP?
> > To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
> > Cc: internet history <internet-history at postel.org
> > <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>>
> > Message-ID:
> >? ? <CAHxHggfi9-LNbV71bUSX6ozkX=GTtioTLdVTMk2EhBi_Y-Z3wg at mail.gmail.com
> > <mailto:GTtioTLdVTMk2EhBi_Y-Z3wg at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> > <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Someone (I wish I knew who) made the decision to do all of this work,
> >> and spend all of that money, in an open environment, and make the
> >> technology freely available and standardized for anyone to use.? None of
> >> the competing Internet architectures (Xerox, Novell, DEC, IBM, ISO,
> >> etc.) did that.? So when the rest of the world discovered that the
> >> military TCP/IP technology not only worked but also could solve their
> >> problems, the ascension of the Internet was natural.
> >
> >
> > Bob Kahn, Larry Roberts and Dave Russell are probably the closest to the
> > deciding parties
> > at the IPTO level but one has to credit George Heilmeier and Steve
> Lukasic
> > as DARPA
> > Directors for their strong support for ARPANET and then Internet.
> >
> > v
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > New postal address:
> > Google
> > 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> > Reston, VA 20190
> > -------------- next part --------------
> > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> > URL:
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/
> attachments/20160831/86df189e/attachment.html
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > internet-history mailing list
> > internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
> > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for
> assistance.
> >
> >
> > End of internet-history Digest, Vol 105, Issue 37
> > *************************************************
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______
> > internet-history mailing list
> > internet-history at postel.org
> > http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> >
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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------------------------------

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http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.


End of internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 1
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From agmalis at gmail.com  Thu Sep  1 14:22:40 2016
From: agmalis at gmail.com (Andrew G. Malis)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 05:22:40 +0800
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1609010907530.12285@iskra.ottix.net>
References: <20160901020927.13520.qmail@ary.lan> <57C7A0A2.70601@redbarn.org>
	<CAA=duU1HH8ag_9SMVpetjG12WX65HHL+jRwvxG_vP3j77=jk8w@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.20.1609010907530.12285@iskra.ottix.net>
Message-ID: <CAA=duU3OAw3-Xi43LMDnhiX12tYSJBdxTK7jVFwYwNbrnxij7Q@mail.gmail.com>

Yes, it?s been incorporated by TRILL as well, I should have mentioned that.

Cheers,
Andy


On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:08 PM, William Sotomayor <wfms at ottix.net> wrote:

>
> On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
>
>
>> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
>>       later on, DEC poured billions (that's like millions except with a
>> "b")
>>       of dollars into DECnet Phase V, proving after all that they, and
>> not the
>>       community, knew what the future of networking was going to look
>> like.
>>       (they should have saved the money so that Compaq could have it.)
>>
>>
>> DECnet Phase V gave us IS-IS, which was later standardized by ISO and is
>> now in wide use
>> throughout the Internet. It?s probably the most popular intra-AS routing
>> protocol in use today
>> by Internet backbone providers. So it wasn?t a total waste. :-)
>>
>
> Not at all, in fact it seems to be getting some use in the data centre of
> all places by at least one vendor.
>
> wfms
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From jeanjour at comcast.net  Thu Sep  1 15:30:54 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 18:30:54 -0400
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <CAA=duU3OAw3-Xi43LMDnhiX12tYSJBdxTK7jVFwYwNbrnxij7Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20160901020927.13520.qmail@ary.lan> <57C7A0A2.70601@redbarn.org>
	<CAA=duU1HH8ag_9SMVpetjG12WX65HHL+jRwvxG_vP3j77=jk8w@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.20.1609010907530.12285@iskra.ottix.net>
	<CAA=duU3OAw3-Xi43LMDnhiX12tYSJBdxTK7jVFwYwNbrnxij7Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ADD1948C-C416-4321-B519-4841AB74800F@comcast.net>

More importantly, 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging uses IS-IS.  


> On Sep 1, 2016, at 17:22, Andrew G. Malis <agmalis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, it?s been incorporated by TRILL as well, I should have mentioned that.
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:08 PM, William Sotomayor <wfms at ottix.net <mailto:wfms at ottix.net>> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org <mailto:paul at redbarn.org>> wrote:
>       later on, DEC poured billions (that's like millions except with a "b")
>       of dollars into DECnet Phase V, proving after all that they, and not the
>       community, knew what the future of networking was going to look like.
>       (they should have saved the money so that Compaq could have it.)
> 
> 
> DECnet Phase V gave us IS-IS, which was later standardized by ISO and is now in wide use
> throughout the Internet. It?s probably the most popular intra-AS routing protocol in use today
> by Internet backbone providers. So it wasn?t a total waste. :-)
> 
> Not at all, in fact it seems to be getting some use in the data centre of all places by at least one vendor.
> 
> wfms
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.

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From larrysheldon at cox.net  Thu Sep  1 18:22:27 2016
From: larrysheldon at cox.net (Larry Sheldon)
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 20:22:27 -0500
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <6c015959-9bbf-954e-8e7d-1bdbdcf42161@cox.net>



On 9/1/2016 08:20, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: "John Levine"
>
>     > As we all know, Ethernets worked just fine. A lot of people didn't
>     > believe it until they saw it
>
> In defense of the Ethernet sceptics, most Ethernets were operated at traffic
> levels where the collisions which theory predicted at high traffic levels
> weren't a problem.

Which speaks directly to the relative costs issue--low traffic levels is 
almost always (he says unscientifically) what is present at turn-up. 
(and I suspect for all of eternity.)
>
> Liba Svobodova (at MIT at that point) did a bunch of analyses (this would be
> ca. '78 or so) which showed that at low traffic levels, it would be fine, and
> that only at high traffic levels would there be issues. Her analyses, AFAIK,
> were right on target.
>
>
> And of course the _real_ advantage of rings was not so much in the
> token-passing access method, as in the analog lower level they used - all
> simple point-point links. (Great for optical, BTW.)

There was a time when I thought I was going to have to implement token 
ring on a network that consisted largely of 56-kb frame-relay lings in a 
star, with most of the many legs hundreds of miles long.  I wondered 
(but never learned) how long it would take for the token to complete a 
lap in such an arrangement.  (I did think about an earlier life working 
with Teletype? systems where, when a line was idle, the control station 
would "poll" the network by sending out two-letter address groups.  If 
the addressed station had outbound traffic, it would commence sending 
it. If it did not, it sent the letter "V".  The system could gridlock 
for a number of reasons but the usual one was a station that had traffic 
arriving (on other circuits) faster than it could get rid of 
it--exacerbated by several busy stations on the circuit.  One attack on 
the problem was to poll the busy stations several times in each trip 
around the loop.  I had (have) no idea how to do that with Token Ring?.


>
> Which is why today's 'Ethernet' networks are not (when you lift the covers)
> really CSMA-CD networks: they actually consist of lots of little packet
> switches connected by point-point links. I.e. the current systems use the best
> of both approaches (the simple access mechanism of Ethernet, and the simple
> point-point links of rings).
>
> The only parts of 'Ethernet' left are the packet format, and the host/network
> interface standard. As always, the interface is left when the equipment on
> either side has changed out of all recognition - check out the screw base on a
> mains AC LED bulb...

Reminds me of a question I don't see discussed anywhere--do the 
"Ethernet switches" (that replaced the "hubs" from my day in the sun) in 
fact operate as "multi-port bridges" complete with Spanning Tree, BDUs, 
and the other neat Radia Perlman* stuff?

*Interesting to note (ref. earlier mention of DECnet) she worked for DEC 
when she did that stuff.

-- 
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by
its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

 From Larry's Cox account.


From agmalis at gmail.com  Thu Sep  1 19:56:42 2016
From: agmalis at gmail.com (Andrew G. Malis)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 10:56:42 +0800
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <ADD1948C-C416-4321-B519-4841AB74800F@comcast.net>
References: <20160901020927.13520.qmail@ary.lan> <57C7A0A2.70601@redbarn.org>
	<CAA=duU1HH8ag_9SMVpetjG12WX65HHL+jRwvxG_vP3j77=jk8w@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.20.1609010907530.12285@iskra.ottix.net>
	<CAA=duU3OAw3-Xi43LMDnhiX12tYSJBdxTK7jVFwYwNbrnxij7Q@mail.gmail.com>
	<ADD1948C-C416-4321-B519-4841AB74800F@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <CAA=duU1OwHWQR4OHoL4n0D0oG41nqLqrG=+s2tKzsp9cqj8-DA@mail.gmail.com>

John,

Thanks for that reminder!

Cheers,
Andy


On Fri, Sep 2, 2016 at 6:30 AM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> More importantly, 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging uses IS-IS.
>
>
> On Sep 1, 2016, at 17:22, Andrew G. Malis <agmalis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, it?s been incorporated by TRILL as well, I should have mentioned that.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:08 PM, William Sotomayor <wfms at ottix.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
>>>       later on, DEC poured billions (that's like millions except with a
>>> "b")
>>>       of dollars into DECnet Phase V, proving after all that they, and
>>> not the
>>>       community, knew what the future of networking was going to look
>>> like.
>>>       (they should have saved the money so that Compaq could have it.)
>>>
>>>
>>> DECnet Phase V gave us IS-IS, which was later standardized by ISO and is
>>> now in wide use
>>> throughout the Internet. It?s probably the most popular intra-AS routing
>>> protocol in use today
>>> by Internet backbone providers. So it wasn?t a total waste. :-)
>>>
>>
>> Not at all, in fact it seems to be getting some use in the data centre of
>> all places by at least one vendor.
>>
>> wfms
>
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>
>
>
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From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Thu Sep  1 22:43:22 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 17:43:22 +1200
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <6c015959-9bbf-954e-8e7d-1bdbdcf42161@cox.net>
References: <20160901132031.75D1118C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
	<6c015959-9bbf-954e-8e7d-1bdbdcf42161@cox.net>
Message-ID: <14089899-561f-e9e0-a982-0c4d95e7e09f@gmail.com>

On 02/09/2016 13:22, Larry Sheldon wrote:

...
>> The only parts of 'Ethernet' left are the packet format, and the host/network
>> interface standard. As always, the interface is left when the equipment on
>> either side has changed out of all recognition - check out the screw base on a
>> mains AC LED bulb...
> 
> Reminds me of a question I don't see discussed anywhere--do the 
> "Ethernet switches" (that replaced the "hubs" from my day in the sun) in 
> fact operate as "multi-port bridges" complete with Spanning Tree, BDUs, 
> and the other neat Radia Perlman* stuff?

Yes. But there are issues. For example, most of them are reluctant to relay
multicast packets (many people, including me, having horrible memories of
multicast or broadcast storms on early bridged networks). So they perform layer
violations - for example MLD snooping, where an L2 bridge listens to L3 Multicast
Listener Discovery packets (a form of ICMPv6 packet). I was bitten just a
couple of months ago by a "switch" with defective MLD snooping, such that it
dropped most link-local multicasts instead of relaying them to all ports.
I had to borrow a cheap old fashioned "switch" that actually behaved as a
Radia-style L2 bridge.

As I understand it, this sort of problem is the main reason Radia invented
TRILL.

    Brian


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Thu Sep  1 23:07:27 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
In-Reply-To: <201609011219.u81CJVpc009139@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk>
References: <201609011219.u81CJVpc009139@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-b5b16dc5895d@gmail.com>

On 02/09/2016 00:19, George Ross wrote:
>> But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
>> even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
>> business seriously was when UTP came along.
> 
> Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
> suitable for serious business roll-out.
> 
> Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
> taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
> load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
> installing more was a pain.
> 
> Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
> crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
> caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
> plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
> where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
> offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.

So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
think this is very interesting nevertheless (written in 1995):
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html

   Brian

> UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
> more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
> rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
> had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
> 
> Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
> and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
> 
> (We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
> a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
> doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)
> 
> --
> George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
> School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
> Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk   Voice: 0131 650 5147   Fax: 0131 650 6899
> PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 


From b_a_denny at yahoo.com  Fri Sep  2 13:37:29 2016
From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 20:37:29 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
Message-ID: <1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>

Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe.? I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be).? I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time).? I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box? (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.

barbara 



      From: "internet-history-request at postel.org" <internet-history-request at postel.org>
 To: internet-history at postel.org 
 Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 12:00 PM
 Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
   
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To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
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Today's Topics:

? 1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
To: internet-history at postel.org
Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-b5b16dc5895d at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

On 02/09/2016 00:19, George Ross wrote:
>> But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
>> even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
>> business seriously was when UTP came along.
> 
> Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
> suitable for serious business roll-out.
> 
> Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
> taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
> load of other stuff round about.? And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
> installing more was a pain.
> 
> Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.? We had our techs
> crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
> caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
> plumbing, and so on.? It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
> where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
> offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.

So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
think this is very interesting nevertheless (written in 1995):
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html

? Brian

> UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.? It was easy to install, much
> more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.? Our hub site
> rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
> had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
> 
> Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.? Install
> and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
> 
> (We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
> a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
> doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.? But that's another story...)
> 
> --
> George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
> School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
> Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk? Voice: 0131 650 5147? Fax: 0131 650 6899
> PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5? B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A? 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 


------------------------------

_______________________________________________
internet-history mailing list
internet-history at postel.org
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.


End of internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
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From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Fri Sep  2 16:24:51 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 11:24:51 +1200
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>

Barbara,

1. Your messages to the list are consistently filed to 'junk' by Gmail, since Yahoo
persists in using the DMARC heresy.

2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
CERN was often an early adopter.

   Brian

On 03/09/2016 08:37, Barbara Denny wrote:
> Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe.  I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be).  I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time).  I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box  (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.
> 
> barbara 
> 
> 
> 
>       From: "internet-history-request at postel.org" <internet-history-request at postel.org>
>  To: internet-history at postel.org 
>  Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 12:00 PM
>  Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
>    
> Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
>     internet-history at postel.org
> 
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>     http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>     internet-history-request at postel.org
> 
> You can reach the person managing the list at
>     internet-history-owner at postel.org
> 
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."
> 
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
> From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
> To: internet-history at postel.org
> Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-b5b16dc5895d at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> On 02/09/2016 00:19, George Ross wrote:
>>> But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
>>> even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
>>> business seriously was when UTP came along.
>>
>> Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
>> suitable for serious business roll-out.
>>
>> Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
>> taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
>> load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
>> installing more was a pain.
>>
>> Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
>> crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
>> caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
>> plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
>> where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
>> offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.
> 
> That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
> kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
> to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
> (i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
> to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
> dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
> funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.
> 
> So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
> was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
> to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
> from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
> advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
> and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
> workstations were invading our world.
> 
> I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
> think this is very interesting nevertheless (written in 1995):
> http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html
> 
>   Brian
> 
>> UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
>> more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
>> rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
>> had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
>>
>> Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
>> and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
>>
>> (We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
>> a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
>> doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)
>>
>> --
>> George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
>> School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
>> Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk  Voice: 0131 650 5147  Fax: 0131 650 6899
>> PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
>>
>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
>> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 
> 
> End of internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
> ************************************************
> 
> 
>    
> 
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Fri Sep  2 17:08:08 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 17:08:08 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>

On 9/2/2016 4:24 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
> why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
> Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
> CERN was often an early adopter.


I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?

They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I 
assume they had a router product (but not from me).

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From julf at julf.com  Sat Sep  3 00:27:00 2016
From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 09:27:00 +0200
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP
In-Reply-To: <1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <340ee4e8-a896-2729-4e3e-c9bc5f6053e2@julf.com>

On 02-09-16 22:37, Barbara Denny wrote:
> Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up
> also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in
> Europe.  I am glad it has a question mark after it.

Right. I think the DataNet service (developed by by Juha Hein?nen) in
Finland went into pilot slightly later, but was, from what I heard,
"the deal that saved Cisco in the early days").

	Julf




From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sat Sep  3 00:56:20 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 19:56:20 +1200
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>

On 03/09/2016 12:08, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 9/2/2016 4:24 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> 2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
>> why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
>> Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
>> CERN was often an early adopter.
> 
> 
> I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
> 
> They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I 
> assume they had a router product (but not from me).

There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

Rgds
   Brian


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Sat Sep  3 07:10:34 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 07:10:34 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>

On 9/3/2016 12:56 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
> at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
> CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
> 1980's.)

ITU was/is quite a different animal from ISO, of course.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From jeanjour at comcast.net  Sat Sep  3 12:13:48 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 15:13:48 -0400
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>

No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.


> On Sep 3, 2016, at 10:10, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> 
> On 9/3/2016 12:56 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
>> at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
>> CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
>> 1980's.)
> 
> ITU was/is quite a different animal from ISO, of course.
> 
> d/
> 
> -- 
> 
>   Dave Crocker
>   Brandenburg InternetWorking
>   bbiw.net
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From jack at 3kitty.org  Sat Sep  3 13:16:09 2016
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 13:16:09 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>

On 09/03/2016 12:13 PM, John Day wrote:
> No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.

In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet 
who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international 
projects.  E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK 
Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted 
Internet meetings during that era.

IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related 
governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint 
research.   I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what 
the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was 
funding what.  Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European 
organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European 
government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have 
authority to be on the Internet.

Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to 
work.  It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those 
organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet 
research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.

At least some of the work was US DoD funded, e.g., in Norway:

www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010

It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing 
what back then on the early Internet.

I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s, 
when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also 
the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative), 
and a plethora of related projects.  IMHO, most of the funding for The 
Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and 
had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for 
the entire population.

The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we 
know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made 
to make the technology open.  Otherwise we might still be struggling 
with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....

/Jack


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Sat Sep  3 13:33:42 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 13:33:42 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <d46ebd00-44fc-8456-73ad-09d4942b15d8@dcrocker.net>

On 9/3/2016 12:13 PM, John Day wrote:
> No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.


Adding to Jack's posting:


There are some factual problems with the above view.

First, the DoD requirement was removed, at least by the /early/ 1980s, 
such as with NSF's CSnet effort starting in 1981.  (I don't know the 
start dates for The Little Garden, but The World is listed as 1989 in 
Wikipedia.)

While I was at DEC in the late 80s (doing tech transfer, because DEC 
finally realized they needed to support TCP/IP across the company's 
product efforts) my support was from the Field Engineering folks and 
there was a critical moment when they decided it was a competitive 
requirement to be able to support regular customers across the Internet; 
one of their arguments was that their competitors were already doing it. 
  Getting around the AUP was a task, not a showstopper.  Again, this was 
pre-1990.

Then there's the difference between 'the Internet' and "TCP/IP 
products", where enterprises had gotten the interoperability bug -- 
mostly thanks to OSI marketing efforts -- and found that only TCP/IP 
could solve it...

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From vint at google.com  Sat Sep  3 13:43:06 2016
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 16:43:06 -0400
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
	<b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggfNkdjp=LUyCQSj67aJerBMtAWpAS2mKd9X2WkDn4Q-gQ@mail.gmail.com>

while we had agreements and the Norwegians, Italians and Germans were part
of the International Connection board, I am not sure how much equipment was
online there. NDRE had a host and Paal Spilling worked on getting it hooked
up. Peter Kirstein at UCL had an elaborate set up with many systems on the
UK side going through the SATNET. Bob Kahn and I tried to figure out if
anything was on the SATNET other than UCL and NDRE - sketchy information.

v


On Sat, Sep 3, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> On 09/03/2016 12:13 PM, John Day wrote:
> > No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s.
> Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.
>
> In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet
> who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international
> projects.  E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK
> Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted
> Internet meetings during that era.
>
> IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related
> governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint
> research.   I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what
> the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was
> funding what.  Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European
> organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European
> government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have
> authority to be on the Internet.
>
> Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
> work.  It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
> organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
> research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.
>
> At least some of the work was US DoD funded, e.g., in Norway:
>
> www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010
>
> It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing
> what back then on the early Internet.
>
> I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s,
> when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also
> the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative),
> and a plethora of related projects.  IMHO, most of the funding for The
> Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and
> had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for
> the entire population.
>
> The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we
> know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made
> to make the technology open.  Otherwise we might still be struggling
> with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....
>
> /Jack
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From jack at 3kitty.org  Sat Sep  3 15:07:09 2016
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 15:07:09 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <CAHxHggfNkdjp=LUyCQSj67aJerBMtAWpAS2mKd9X2WkDn4Q-gQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
	<b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
	<CAHxHggfNkdjp=LUyCQSj67aJerBMtAWpAS2mKd9X2WkDn4Q-gQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3ad48342-fdb7-d8a3-0b60-ed2ccdbce19e@3kitty.org>

My recollection also is that there wasn't much equipment online in 
Europe in the early 1980s.  At BBN we were responsible for operating the 
SATNET gateways, and likely would have noticed traffic from additional 
IP addresses.

I was interpreting the term "on the Internet" more broadly than physical 
connection of machines sending IP packets.   If you look it as as 
meaning "using the Internet", it's a situation analogous to the 70s with 
the ARPANET.

Being "on the ARPANET" meant you were authorized to use the net, e.g., 
by dialing in or somehow connecting to a machine which had an IMP port 
from which you could utilize the net.  OTOH, if your machine had an IMP 
port, but you were not working on an approved project, you were not 
supposed to be "on the ARPANET", and your machine administrators were 
supposed to somehow enforce such restrictions.

So, in that broad interpretation of "being on the Internet", I can 
imagine that there might have been similar "backdoor" connections from 
one of those few TCP-capable machines to other groups at other 
organizations working on joint projects.  I have no reason to believe 
there were any, but no reason to believe there weren't either...

It would be historically interesting to hear what happened back then, 
and how the technology spread, if at all, from the research environment 
to operational systems.  We know at least parts of the US story, with 
Internet, DDN, etc., but I've never heard much about other countries.

/Jack

On 09/03/2016 01:43 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> while we had agreements and the Norwegians, Italians and Germans were
> part of the International Connection board, I am not sure how much
> equipment was online there. NDRE had a host and Paal Spilling worked on
> getting it hooked up. Peter Kirstein at UCL had an elaborate set up with
> many systems on the UK side going through the SATNET. Bob Kahn and I
> tried to figure out if anything was on the SATNET other than UCL and
> NDRE - sketchy information.
>
> v
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 3, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 09/03/2016 12:13 PM, John Day wrote:
>     > No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.
>
>     In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet
>     who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international
>     projects.  E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK
>     Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted
>     Internet meetings during that era.
>
>     IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related
>     governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint
>     research.   I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what
>     the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was
>     funding what.  Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European
>     organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European
>     government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have
>     authority to be on the Internet.
>
>     Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
>     work.  It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
>     organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
>     research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.
>
>     At least some of the work was US DoD funded, e.g., in Norway:
>
>     www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010
>     <http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010>
>
>     It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing
>     what back then on the early Internet.
>
>     I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s,
>     when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also
>     the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative),
>     and a plethora of related projects.  IMHO, most of the funding for The
>     Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and
>     had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for
>     the entire population.
>
>     The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we
>     know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made
>     to make the technology open.  Otherwise we might still be struggling
>     with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....
>
>     /Jack
>     _______
>     internet-history mailing list
>     internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>     http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for
>     assistance.
>
>
>
>
> --
> New postal address:
> Google
> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> Reston, VA 20190


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Sat Sep  3 16:11:06 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 16:11:06 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <3ad48342-fdb7-d8a3-0b60-ed2ccdbce19e@3kitty.org>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
	<b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
	<CAHxHggfNkdjp=LUyCQSj67aJerBMtAWpAS2mKd9X2WkDn4Q-gQ@mail.gmail.com>
	<3ad48342-fdb7-d8a3-0b60-ed2ccdbce19e@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <cbb914b4-bd12-c284-0036-0d83990d97a7@dcrocker.net>

On 9/3/2016 3:07 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> I was interpreting the term "on the Internet" more broadly than physical
> connection of machines sending IP packets.


I can't resist:

    To Be "On" the Internet

    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1775
    March, 1995

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From julf at julf.com  Sun Sep  4 02:31:06 2016
From: julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius)
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2016 11:31:06 +0200
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<937328d7-b20b-b429-a69c-488f4a41925c@dcrocker.net>
	<373DA139-DC60-4F0C-9436-DE6B712ED5AA@comcast.net>
	<b09f9541-f085-c79b-073f-8c1b380f750e@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <f4747ff4-092b-1fe2-9426-8b969413ae4e@julf.com>

On 03-09-16 22:16, Jack Haverty wrote:

> Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to 
> work.  It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those 
> organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet 
> research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.

I guess the first, fully open-to-everybody transatlantic link
was in 1988 - between CWI (EUnet) and seismo. The NORDUnet US
connection came only a few days later.

http://godfatherof.nl/media/inetaccess.jpg

RIPE was formed in May 1989 to coordinate the European IP activities.

	Julf




From jaap at NLnetLabs.nl  Mon Sep  5 01:28:32 2016
From: jaap at NLnetLabs.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis)
Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2016 10:28:32 +0200
Subject: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP
In-Reply-To: <340ee4e8-a896-2729-4e3e-c9bc5f6053e2@julf.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<340ee4e8-a896-2729-4e3e-c9bc5f6053e2@julf.com>
Message-ID: <201609050828.u858SW30030757@bela.nlnetlabs.nl>

 Johan Helsingius writes:

 > 
 > Right. I think the DataNet service (developed by by Juha Hein?nen) in
 > Finland went into pilot slightly later, but was, from what I heard,
 > "the deal that saved Cisco in the early days").

I do think that we had one or two of the first models at the CWI
(better known as mcvax) at the time. Daniel Karrenberg should know
this for sure.

	jaap


From dot at dotat.at  Mon Sep  5 04:09:44 2016
From: dot at dotat.at (Tony Finch)
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2016 12:09:44 +0100
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>

Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/09/2016 12:08, Dave Crocker wrote:
> >
> > I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
> >
> > They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
> > assume they had a router product (but not from me).
>
> There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
> the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
> at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
> CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
> 1980's.)

I seem to remember one of the criticisms of OSI around that time was that
it was so unready for production that even ISO used TCP/IP.

e.g. this account of Carl Malamud's visit in 1991 mentions this fact
towards the end - http://museum.media.org/eti/Prologue01.html

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Viking, North Utsire: Southerly 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7. Slight or moderate,
becoming moderate or rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor later.


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Mon Sep  5 14:26:14 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 09:26:14 +1200
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <19c5f1d0-e01e-9fb9-efaf-81b72da5975c@gmail.com>

On 05/09/2016 23:09, Tony Finch wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 03/09/2016 12:08, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>>
>>> I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
>>>
>>> They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
>>> assume they had a router product (but not from me).
>>
>> There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
>> the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
>> at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
>> CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
>> 1980's.)
> 
> I seem to remember one of the criticisms of OSI around that time was that
> it was so unready for production that even ISO used TCP/IP.
> 
> e.g. this account of Carl Malamud's visit in 1991 mentions this fact
> towards the end - http://museum.media.org/eti/Prologue01.html

The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.

    Brian


> 
> Tony.
> 


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Mon Sep  5 15:28:02 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2016 15:28:02 -0700
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <19c5f1d0-e01e-9fb9-efaf-81b72da5975c@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>
	<19c5f1d0-e01e-9fb9-efaf-81b72da5975c@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <90fd025d-c736-7812-c8d5-e41ffac79eed@dcrocker.net>

On 9/5/2016 2:26 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
> really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.


That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as 
being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over 
some years before that.

I think I've noted this already, but around 1987 my department was 
developing both various TCP/IP stacks as well as an OSI stack.  As work 
progressed, we started asking our customer base about the kind of 
products they might need to assist in the transition from using Internet 
technologies to using OSI.

We were unprepared for how consistent the response was.  They had 
serious interest only in going from OSI to TCP.  There was zero interest 
in the other direction.

In my view, that was a game-over moment.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Mon Sep  5 17:20:57 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 12:20:57 +1200
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <90fd025d-c736-7812-c8d5-e41ffac79eed@dcrocker.net>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>
	<19c5f1d0-e01e-9fb9-efaf-81b72da5975c@gmail.com>
	<90fd025d-c736-7812-c8d5-e41ffac79eed@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <03b1bd6b-07e7-1976-6b5e-c081cf737b56@gmail.com>

On 06/09/2016 10:28, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 9/5/2016 2:26 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
>> really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.
> 
> 
> That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as 
> being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over 
> some years before that.

It depended who you were and where you sat. For me the moment was when I
presented a talk called "Is OSI too late?" at the RARE* conference in May
1989 - although the talk gave a mixed answer to that qustion, the audience
reaction was conclusively "Yes". In January 1990, a committee of three and
a half (B.Carpenter, L.Backstrom, G.Pujolle, assisted by P.Kirstein)
reported to the RARE Council of Administration recommending that
"RARE recognises TCP/IP as complementary to OSI and preferable to
proprietary protocols for immediate use ... RARE recognises RIPE as an
appropriate body for current TCP/IP  coordination activities..."
and basically that's what happened. OSI efforts dragged on for a while,
however.

*The Europe-wide association of research networks at that time.

   Brian

> 
> I think I've noted this already, but around 1987 my department was 
> developing both various TCP/IP stacks as well as an OSI stack.  As work 
> progressed, we started asking our customer base about the kind of 
> products they might need to assist in the transition from using Internet 
> technologies to using OSI.
> 
> We were unprepared for how consistent the response was.  They had 
> serious interest only in going from OSI to TCP.  There was zero interest 
> in the other direction.
> 
> In my view, that was a game-over moment.
> 
> d/
> 


From craig at tereschau.net  Tue Sep  6 03:21:49 2016
From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge)
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 06:21:49 -0400
Subject: [ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]
In-Reply-To: <03b1bd6b-07e7-1976-6b5e-c081cf737b56@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.1.1472842801.21056.internet-history@postel.org>
	<1734632531.659687.1472848649201@mail.yahoo.com>
	<b27a154a-266d-9fb4-7cb7-85f7e964919c@gmail.com>
	<5b87cf48-716e-de65-79d7-2e1037ced18f@dcrocker.net>
	<5e64323f-ae8f-354d-9ea2-2a5bfce654f4@gmail.com>
	<alpine.DEB.2.11.1609051202510.28546@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>
	<19c5f1d0-e01e-9fb9-efaf-81b72da5975c@gmail.com>
	<90fd025d-c736-7812-c8d5-e41ffac79eed@dcrocker.net>
	<03b1bd6b-07e7-1976-6b5e-c081cf737b56@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAHQj4CcQ43D+Z56T0-1B5gg7nkuUTrdquYNWUx20-tnVEVsiWw@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 8:20 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 06/09/2016 10:28, Dave Crocker wrote:
> > On 9/5/2016 2:26 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> >> The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The
> ITU didn't
> >> really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.
> >
> >
> > That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as
> > being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over
> > some years before that.
>
> It depended who you were and where you sat. For me the moment was when I
> presented a talk called "Is OSI too late?" at the RARE* conference in May
> 1989 - although the talk gave a mixed answer to that qustion, the audience
> reaction was conclusively "Yes". In January 1990, a committee of three and
> a half (B.Carpenter, L.Backstrom, G.Pujolle, assisted by P.Kirstein)
> reported to the RARE Council of Administration recommending that
> "RARE recognises TCP/IP as complementary to OSI and preferable to
> proprietary protocols for immediate use ... RARE recognises RIPE as an
> appropriate body for current TCP/IP  coordination activities..."
> and basically that's what happened. OSI efforts dragged on for a while,
> however.
>
> *The Europe-wide association of research networks at that time.


Brian's experience matches my recollection and what I found in sources when
I
went back and looked at this for the paper just published in Internet
Annals.
Different people date their realization that OSI was dead to different
dates,
generally between 1988 and 1992.  My sense is the closer you were to
operating
a network, the earlier the realization came.

Thanks!

Craig

-- 
*****
Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
mailing lists.
For Raytheon business, please email: craig at bbn.com
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From bill.n1vux at gmail.com  Wed Sep  7 15:01:10 2016
From: bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker)
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2016 18:01:10 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall of
 the Gopher Protocol
Message-ID: <CAAbKA3UJrzbRg9xgPsi1O6+FzDykFLHU2_-oxpz0oPUt_8_PhA@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 2:21 PM, Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com> wrote:

> The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
> By Tim Gihring
> Aug 11 2016
> <https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol>
>

?I was alerted to another article on same topic, in Chronicle of Higher
Ed(ucation)? -


How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet
By Scott Carlson  / September 05, 2016
Premium content for subscribers. Subscribe Today
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Gopher-Nearly-Won-the/237682

?paywall evasion via DuckDuckGo
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Gopher-Nearly-Won-the/237682/?key=QlhJoKFWcO5rwD0jbeGuGHG0quJwz0-qB-sKn4sAIVw5FxVZ4xiftQodV_XioTqbS1oteTk0dk85RFZCYUtOOGsxSTZMaXZVdHo2Z3RRZkVUTGZqZkdUNGc4bw
?

?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
probably would have died.? ?

?Interesting Photo captions:
"'We were a skunk-works project.' says Mark McCahill, who helped develop
Gopher at the U. of Minnesota."
"?The Gopher team posed for an alumni-magazine spread in 1994. By the end
of that year, Gopher's internet dominance was over. Clockwise from left:
Farad Anklesaria, David Johnson, Paul Lindner, Mark McCahill, and Bob
Alberti."
?"Mark McCahill, now at Duke U., [...] Looking at Gopher recently reminded
him of what the internet used to be like, he said, 'when there wasn't an ad
on everything you went to.'" ?

[ ?I see the Chronicle has uncritically accepted AP's dictum of lowercase
Internet. Humbug. ]?

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
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From johnl at iecc.com  Wed Sep  7 18:49:15 2016
From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)
Date: 8 Sep 2016 01:49:15 -0000
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <CAAbKA3UJrzbRg9xgPsi1O6+FzDykFLHU2_-oxpz0oPUt_8_PhA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>

>?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>probably would have died.? ?

Nice try.

Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
web would have won anyway.

When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
future, because full text search was so powerful.

I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
FTP, and everything else.

R's,
John


From jack at 3kitty.org  Wed Sep  7 21:38:16 2016
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2016 21:38:16 -0700
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
Message-ID: <d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>

Well, I guess I have a view of that era of history from a different 
direction.  So, as another input for the historians, here's what it 
looked like to me back then.

In the 90s, I was "Internet Architect" at Oracle, and wasn't paying much 
attention to the "lower layers" anymore, except as it applied to 
building and operating our own internal corporate intranet.  Our 
customers were database users, with a focus on business processes and 
not much awareness of the communications layers.

I knew about Gopher, WAIS, et al, but they didn't seem particularly 
useful to our customers.  As you might expect, the focus was on data, 
and all of the data was in an Oracle database.   There wasn't any 
obvious way to use Gopher or WAIS.  They were designed to help someone 
find existing documents.  Databases typically create documents on the 
fly - you specify in SQL how you want to look at your data and the 
results are formatted and displayed on the screen or printer.   Apps on 
your workstation/desktop/etc might connect to a database over a wire, or 
a TCP connection, or a Novell SPX, etc., but that detail was mostly 
hidden from the business users.

When I first encountered the Web, somewhere around 1992, it immediately 
struck me as a new idea with lots of promise.  We had all been waiting 
for a long time - 20+ years - for the next "killer app" to complement 
the Telnet/FTP/Email workhorses.  The Web looked like maybe, finally, 
possibly, "it".

I showed the web to everyone from the Chairman of the Board to the 
receptionist in the lobby.  The ease of downloading the software made 
this easy.   If we had to negotiate a license agreement, it never would 
have happened.

The Web had two key features from a database perspective.  One was the 
ability to have documents that "linked" to other documents in a very 
unconstrained way.  So a report could have links to more detailed 
information, related reports, etc.

But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was 
called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved 
by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying 
arguments to the call.   This meant that a "document" could also be 
created on-the-fly by a clever program -- a perfect match to how 
databases worked.

Of course the "forms" interface also meant that the user could become an 
active participant in a session, with the ability not only to read data 
presented from a server as documents, but also the ability to input data 
and control the servers' actions.

As far as I remember, there was no such capability with Gopher or WAIS, 
or maybe I just hadn't found it there.

In any event, these features meant that the Web, instead of just being a 
clever way to organize and find documents, was also a new GUI (Graphical 
User Interface) to interface to all sorts of database-backed 
applications: order entry, billing, inventory control, etc., etc., etc. 
  This was, to a database denizen, far more interesting than just the 
ability to find previously prepared documents.

So, we built an interface between a web server and a database server, 
and did *lots* of training to show anyone who would listen how to use 
this new technology.  Most of the action at first was on customers' 
intranets, so you probably didn't see it on the public Internet until 
they got comfortable enough to put web servers online for their 
customers, suppliers, etc. to use.

Oracle had a pretty broad reach even in the 1990s.  We joined W3C 
immediately to have some influence on the technology.  I don't think 
there was much interaction with the traditional Internet crowd (IETF 
etc.) since they were focused on the lower layers.

Lots of trade shows, users' groups, and other venues in the database 
universe got the word out.  I recall giving lots and lots of talks/demos 
to various customer groups and it was pleasing to see the "light bulbs 
go on" as they understood what they could do with this new technology in 
their *existing* business systems.

Nobody ever even mentioned Gopher...

The rest as they say is history...   I have no idea how much this 
activity affected Gopher's fate, or the Web's.  Some historian may 
figure that out someday.

But it was a lot of fun...

Hope some historian finds this useful,
/Jack Haverty


On 09/07/2016 06:49 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> ?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>> probably would have died.? ?
>
> Nice try.
>
> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
> web would have won anyway.
>
> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
> future, because full text search was so powerful.
>
> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
> FTP, and everything else.
>
> R's,
> John
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>


From jeanjour at comcast.net  Thu Sep  8 03:17:30 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 06:17:30 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
Message-ID: <48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>

It is reasonably clear that there are roughly 6 operations that can be performed remotely: create/delete, read/write, and start/stop.  Hence, one could get by with one application protocol using different ?object models.? IOW, what is different about application protocols are the models they are applied to more than the protocol itself.

Was the advantage of the web (and I think it probably was) that it was more easily adapted to that than Gopher and WAIS?  Were the object models too deeply embedded in the protocols to make them easily adaptable?  Or was it that someone wrote a browser for the web, rather than Gopher or WAIS?  

(I am guessing that it was, and also to Jack?s point in the other email that the web worked at a finer granularity than Gopher.)

Take care,
John

> On Sep 7, 2016, at 21:49, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
>> ?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>> probably would have died.? ?
> 
> Nice try.
> 
> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
> web would have won anyway.
> 
> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
> future, because full text search was so powerful.
> 
> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
> FTP, and everything else.
> 
> R's,
> John
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From jeanjour at comcast.net  Thu Sep  8 03:19:04 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 06:19:04 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <47F23B0F-FB9A-4C50-8B66-CA3473398EB5@comcast.net>

Jack,

How much of this was the web and how much was the browser?  Had someone done a ?browser? to Gopher or WAIS would that have made a difference?

Take care,
John


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 00:38, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> Well, I guess I have a view of that era of history from a different 
> direction.  So, as another input for the historians, here's what it 
> looked like to me back then.
> 
> In the 90s, I was "Internet Architect" at Oracle, and wasn't paying much 
> attention to the "lower layers" anymore, except as it applied to 
> building and operating our own internal corporate intranet.  Our 
> customers were database users, with a focus on business processes and 
> not much awareness of the communications layers.
> 
> I knew about Gopher, WAIS, et al, but they didn't seem particularly 
> useful to our customers.  As you might expect, the focus was on data, 
> and all of the data was in an Oracle database.   There wasn't any 
> obvious way to use Gopher or WAIS.  They were designed to help someone 
> find existing documents.  Databases typically create documents on the 
> fly - you specify in SQL how you want to look at your data and the 
> results are formatted and displayed on the screen or printer.   Apps on 
> your workstation/desktop/etc might connect to a database over a wire, or 
> a TCP connection, or a Novell SPX, etc., but that detail was mostly 
> hidden from the business users.
> 
> When I first encountered the Web, somewhere around 1992, it immediately 
> struck me as a new idea with lots of promise.  We had all been waiting 
> for a long time - 20+ years - for the next "killer app" to complement 
> the Telnet/FTP/Email workhorses.  The Web looked like maybe, finally, 
> possibly, "it".
> 
> I showed the web to everyone from the Chairman of the Board to the 
> receptionist in the lobby.  The ease of downloading the software made 
> this easy.   If we had to negotiate a license agreement, it never would 
> have happened.
> 
> The Web had two key features from a database perspective.  One was the 
> ability to have documents that "linked" to other documents in a very 
> unconstrained way.  So a report could have links to more detailed 
> information, related reports, etc.
> 
> But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was 
> called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved 
> by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying 
> arguments to the call.   This meant that a "document" could also be 
> created on-the-fly by a clever program -- a perfect match to how 
> databases worked.
> 
> Of course the "forms" interface also meant that the user could become an 
> active participant in a session, with the ability not only to read data 
> presented from a server as documents, but also the ability to input data 
> and control the servers' actions.
> 
> As far as I remember, there was no such capability with Gopher or WAIS, 
> or maybe I just hadn't found it there.
> 
> In any event, these features meant that the Web, instead of just being a 
> clever way to organize and find documents, was also a new GUI (Graphical 
> User Interface) to interface to all sorts of database-backed 
> applications: order entry, billing, inventory control, etc., etc., etc. 
>  This was, to a database denizen, far more interesting than just the 
> ability to find previously prepared documents.
> 
> So, we built an interface between a web server and a database server, 
> and did *lots* of training to show anyone who would listen how to use 
> this new technology.  Most of the action at first was on customers' 
> intranets, so you probably didn't see it on the public Internet until 
> they got comfortable enough to put web servers online for their 
> customers, suppliers, etc. to use.
> 
> Oracle had a pretty broad reach even in the 1990s.  We joined W3C 
> immediately to have some influence on the technology.  I don't think 
> there was much interaction with the traditional Internet crowd (IETF 
> etc.) since they were focused on the lower layers.
> 
> Lots of trade shows, users' groups, and other venues in the database 
> universe got the word out.  I recall giving lots and lots of talks/demos 
> to various customer groups and it was pleasing to see the "light bulbs 
> go on" as they understood what they could do with this new technology in 
> their *existing* business systems.
> 
> Nobody ever even mentioned Gopher...
> 
> The rest as they say is history...   I have no idea how much this 
> activity affected Gopher's fate, or the Web's.  Some historian may 
> figure that out someday.
> 
> But it was a lot of fun...
> 
> Hope some historian finds this useful,
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> On 09/07/2016 06:49 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>> ?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>>> probably would have died.? ?
>> 
>> Nice try.
>> 
>> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
>> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
>> web would have won anyway.
>> 
>> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
>> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
>> future, because full text search was so powerful.
>> 
>> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
>> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
>> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
>> FTP, and everything else.
>> 
>> R's,
>> John
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From mfidelman at meetinghouse.net  Thu Sep  8 05:13:24 2016
From: mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 08:13:24 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <47F23B0F-FB9A-4C50-8B66-CA3473398EB5@comcast.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
	<47F23B0F-FB9A-4C50-8B66-CA3473398EB5@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <89d9cc46-7cf1-6517-bc45-f715c775196f@meetinghouse.net>

There were graphical Gopher browsers, and for a long time Mosaic 
supported Gopher (maybe WAIS too).  Maybe Mozilla still does.

Back in my Center for Civic Networking days, we published a lot of our 
early materials on gopher, and then had a long period of overlap when we 
published on both gopher and http.  When we did public access in the 
Cambridge Public Library, we had Mosaic fronting both gopher & web sources.

On the other hand - I'm convinced that, if it weren't for Mosaic and the 
NCSA daemon, something would have come along to replace the web.

Miles


On 9/8/16 6:19 AM, John Day wrote:
> Jack,
>
> How much of this was the web and how much was the browser?  Had someone done a ?browser? to Gopher or WAIS would that have made a difference?
>
> Take care,
> John
>
>
>> On Sep 8, 2016, at 00:38, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>
>> Well, I guess I have a view of that era of history from a different
>> direction.  So, as another input for the historians, here's what it
>> looked like to me back then.
>>
>> In the 90s, I was "Internet Architect" at Oracle, and wasn't paying much
>> attention to the "lower layers" anymore, except as it applied to
>> building and operating our own internal corporate intranet.  Our
>> customers were database users, with a focus on business processes and
>> not much awareness of the communications layers.
>>
>> I knew about Gopher, WAIS, et al, but they didn't seem particularly
>> useful to our customers.  As you might expect, the focus was on data,
>> and all of the data was in an Oracle database.   There wasn't any
>> obvious way to use Gopher or WAIS.  They were designed to help someone
>> find existing documents.  Databases typically create documents on the
>> fly - you specify in SQL how you want to look at your data and the
>> results are formatted and displayed on the screen or printer.   Apps on
>> your workstation/desktop/etc might connect to a database over a wire, or
>> a TCP connection, or a Novell SPX, etc., but that detail was mostly
>> hidden from the business users.
>>
>> When I first encountered the Web, somewhere around 1992, it immediately
>> struck me as a new idea with lots of promise.  We had all been waiting
>> for a long time - 20+ years - for the next "killer app" to complement
>> the Telnet/FTP/Email workhorses.  The Web looked like maybe, finally,
>> possibly, "it".
>>
>> I showed the web to everyone from the Chairman of the Board to the
>> receptionist in the lobby.  The ease of downloading the software made
>> this easy.   If we had to negotiate a license agreement, it never would
>> have happened.
>>
>> The Web had two key features from a database perspective.  One was the
>> ability to have documents that "linked" to other documents in a very
>> unconstrained way.  So a report could have links to more detailed
>> information, related reports, etc.
>>
>> But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was
>> called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved
>> by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying
>> arguments to the call.   This meant that a "document" could also be
>> created on-the-fly by a clever program -- a perfect match to how
>> databases worked.
>>
>> Of course the "forms" interface also meant that the user could become an
>> active participant in a session, with the ability not only to read data
>> presented from a server as documents, but also the ability to input data
>> and control the servers' actions.
>>
>> As far as I remember, there was no such capability with Gopher or WAIS,
>> or maybe I just hadn't found it there.
>>
>> In any event, these features meant that the Web, instead of just being a
>> clever way to organize and find documents, was also a new GUI (Graphical
>> User Interface) to interface to all sorts of database-backed
>> applications: order entry, billing, inventory control, etc., etc., etc.
>>   This was, to a database denizen, far more interesting than just the
>> ability to find previously prepared documents.
>>
>> So, we built an interface between a web server and a database server,
>> and did *lots* of training to show anyone who would listen how to use
>> this new technology.  Most of the action at first was on customers'
>> intranets, so you probably didn't see it on the public Internet until
>> they got comfortable enough to put web servers online for their
>> customers, suppliers, etc. to use.
>>
>> Oracle had a pretty broad reach even in the 1990s.  We joined W3C
>> immediately to have some influence on the technology.  I don't think
>> there was much interaction with the traditional Internet crowd (IETF
>> etc.) since they were focused on the lower layers.
>>
>> Lots of trade shows, users' groups, and other venues in the database
>> universe got the word out.  I recall giving lots and lots of talks/demos
>> to various customer groups and it was pleasing to see the "light bulbs
>> go on" as they understood what they could do with this new technology in
>> their *existing* business systems.
>>
>> Nobody ever even mentioned Gopher...
>>
>> The rest as they say is history...   I have no idea how much this
>> activity affected Gopher's fate, or the Web's.  Some historian may
>> figure that out someday.
>>
>> But it was a lot of fun...
>>
>> Hope some historian finds this useful,
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>> On 09/07/2016 06:49 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>>> ?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>>>> probably would have died.? ?
>>> Nice try.
>>>
>>> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
>>> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
>>> web would have won anyway.
>>>
>>> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
>>> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
>>> future, because full text search was so powerful.
>>>
>>> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
>>> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
>>> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
>>> FTP, and everything else.
>>>
>>> R's,
>>> John
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra



From johnl at iecc.com  Thu Sep  8 08:02:30 2016
From: johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine)
Date: 8 Sep 2016 11:02:30 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.11.1609081058290.38586@ary.lan>

> It is reasonably clear that there are roughly 6 operations that can be performed remotely: create/delete, read/write, and start/stop.  Hence, one could get by with one application protocol using different ?object models.? IOW, what is different about application protocols are the models they are applied to more than the protocol itself.
>
> Was the advantage of the web (and I think it probably was) that it was more easily adapted to that than Gopher and WAIS?  Were the object models too deeply embedded in the protocols to make them easily adaptable?  Or was it that someone wrote a browser for the web, rather than Gopher or WAIS?

The key difference wasn't the host->client protocol, it was that gopher 
only gave you a list of links, and the web gave you a page of HTML.  All 
gopher clients could do was show you the list of links and let you select 
one of them.  The later gopher+ could display a few media types such as 
pictures, but only the web could embed the links and later the other media 
in pages of text.

WAIS was just a text search engine, where you gave it some search terms 
and it gave you back a set of documents.  Again, that was easy to embed in 
the web, so it made little sense as a standalone service.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Thu Sep  8 08:52:59 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 08:52:59 -0700
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <6c8349a2-31c7-e220-dcd4-b1ad64fdeee5@dcrocker.net>

On 9/7/2016 9:38 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was
> called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved
> by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying
> arguments to the call.   This meant that a "document" could also be
> created on-the-fly by a clever program -- a perfect match to how
> databases worked.
>
> Of course the "forms" interface also meant that the user could become an
> active participant in a session, with the ability not only to read data
> presented from a server as documents, but also the ability to input data
> and control the servers' actions.


This gets at the larger set of functionality differences between the web 
and gopher.  Gopher was much easier to get started with, since it 
immediately was useful with existing (text) documents, of which there 
were many.  And initially the web really didn't work with text 
documents; everything was expected to be html.

But gopher's node-walking behavior and feature set were far more 
limited.  With gopher, there was no pay-off until the last click in the 
tree walk.  The web could give a 'reward' to the user for each click 
down the path, by way of allowing each intermediate node to have real 
content.  And it was multi-media, which, again, made for a much richer 
user experiences.  And as Jack notes, it had a means for invoking a 
back-end document-creation process on the fly.

The late 80s saw a variety of efforts to create basic search mechanisms, 
as well as better document-publishing mechanisms.  (For some reasons, 
average users found anonymous ftp to be cumbersome and inadequate.  No 
idea why...)

It was certain that both the search and publishing efforts would produce 
some successes.  IMO that was only a matter of time.  As for the details 
of the winners, well...

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From joly at punkcast.com  Thu Sep  8 10:53:22 2016
From: joly at punkcast.com (Joly MacFie)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 13:53:22 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <6c8349a2-31c7-e220-dcd4-b1ad64fdeee5@dcrocker.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
	<6c8349a2-31c7-e220-dcd4-b1ad64fdeee5@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <CAM9VJk1dRGvwYi5gbSEbdKGopbZcdN-Prq0rcSqh-9NMxzxLjQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 11:52 AM, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:

> The late 80s saw a variety of efforts to create basic search mechanisms,
> as well as better document-publishing mechanisms.  (For some reasons,
> average users found anonymous ftp to be cumbersome and inadequate.  No
> idea why...)
>

?What I noticed, coming as I do from the punk rock side of things, was that
anonymous ftp was winning as far as music went in the late 90s, up until
the advent of napster etc.

While the record labels struggled with cumbersome front-ends and restricted
content, fan-based ftp sites for certain artists, Bjork and Prodigy come to
mind, that contained every known remix, live session, gave these artists
great leads in engagement and exposure, reflected in wider chart success.

j



-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
--------------------------------------------------------------
-
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From jack at 3kitty.org  Thu Sep  8 12:30:55 2016
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 12:30:55 -0700
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>

IIRC, the availability of a browser was necessary, but just one part of 
the story.

If you put a web server online, it wasn't very useful unless there was a 
way to use it.   Yes, you could connect to port 80 and type "GET xxx" 
but even techie nerds would find that tedious.   So, when I think of the 
early web, it includes the browser client as well as the server as 
critical elements.

Gopher provided a slightly more friendly user interface than 
tried-and-true FTP, and an index/search capability, but it was still 
text-based.   That was fine for us techie nerds, but it wasn't exciting 
to all the non-techie users sitting in front of PCs and used to 
somewhat-graphical applications.

Besides, we techies had all become quite comfortable using FTP, and the 
"README" convention as a poor-man's index, for a decade or two.  By the 
90s NFS/SMB/Netware/Appletalk/etc made it much easier to have a "public" 
repository (although AFAIK mostly on intranets) seamlessly integrated 
into our computing environments.  Sales stuff was on the "SALES" server, 
technical info on "ENGRNG", etc.  You didn't even know you were using 
the network.

In the broader world, even non-tech businesses had similar internal 
systems, often a hodgepodge of proprietary environments.  They also 
typically had "document management" systems, which kept track of 
corporate documents and usually included capabilities beyond 
index/search/retrieval.  In a business environment, you often need 
mechanisms like review/approval, distribution lists, version management, 
etc.

So, as a document search/retrieval system, in the early 90s, Gopher was 
interesting, but at best just an incremental improvement to existing 
mechanisms, with no obvious way to integrate it with those mechanisms.

-----

As I recall, Tim B-L's original idea for the web was a sort of 
collaborative notebook, where people could create and change documents, 
and link them together, as well as read them.  There was no "search" per 
se.

But the initial thrust of the browser was to view the web as a read-only 
system - you could "browse" an existing melange of documents, and set 
bookmarks to help find them again.  No way (that I could see) in the 
browser to make any changes to documents, new documents, etc.

So the first days of the Web started with slightly-dynamic documents 
(Tim's collaborative notebook vision), and with the advent of the 
browser regressed to being primarily a static document repository 
(browsers and servers, with documents created externally).

People quickly started producing indices of what was on the Web.  When I 
first encountered Yahoo, it advertised itself as "Yet Another 
Hierarchical Officious Organizer" and was essentially a Gopher-like 
index tree of interesting websites, one of many.  For a while, I 
maintained a similar in-house list of interesting websites out on the 
public Internet, and made it available within the company, along with 
instructions on how to get browsers and servers.   As people in various 
departments inside the company put up their own webservers, my list of 
interesting Internet pages was expanded to include a list of interesting 
intranet pages.   Search engines like AltaVista came along too.

All of this could probably have been done with Gopher.   But it wasn't.

The ease of getting the Web server and browser running, and of creating 
simple linked-document internal corporate webs, and the ability to 
create user-friendly documents with rich linking and formatting, all 
helped push the Web forward.

Gopher (IIRC) provided none of these, and no obvious way to integrate 
Gopher into any of the existing systems.  At least I didn't run across 
anyone who had done it.

-----

None of this was "mainstream" technology at the time; no one was using 
the web as a primary component of their business IT machinery.   I think 
the CGI was at least one of the primary elements that moved the web to 
dominance.

At the time, Microsoft had a catchphrase "Where Do You Want To Go 
Today?" or something like that.  It reflected the "browser" perspective 
of the web as a library or document repository. It was interesting to 
browse the virtual aisles, find an interesting thing to read, and go to 
investigate whatever you found there.

I gave a lot of talks/demos using the next-generation catchphrase "What 
Do You Want To Do Today?" as a theme.  The CGI made that possible. 
Instead of just browsing documents, you could have the server do 
something, and create a document on the fly to show you the results of 
whatever it did.   That document could have links that did something 
else, and forms that allowed the user to pass parameters in to guide 
that activity.

Instead of just browsing, a user could now actually cause that remote 
server to do stuff.  Essentially, the Web browser, with CGI, had become 
a new universal GUI - graphical user interface, with a new API that 
could be linked to any kind of program behind any server on any kind of 
computer -- in effect a universal standard RPC mechanism that could be 
used to access programs on any kind of computer that you could get a web 
server on.

Of course, some of this had been done ages before -- e.g., the Coke 
machine on the ARPANET.  But in the 90s the WWW made it now easy with 
the key components pre-installed, freely distributed, and mostly free 
(IIRC, the early browser cost just $25 or something like that - a 
bargain compared to typical software costs of the era for all those PCs 
out there).

In business, government, and other parts of the "real world", computers 
are used to do stuff.  As techies, we understood that, but I think all 
we really understood was using computers to write code, and maybe an 
occasional document or two.  Telnet was good enough to get to that far 
away computer.  FTP was good enough to move code and RFCs around.  Email 
was good enough to hold endless debates until someone finally wrote the 
code.

Non-techies use computers for other things - order entry, market 
research, inventory control, shipping tracking, customer support, etc., 
etc.   Much of that activity involves interacting with databases of some 
kind.  So the web technology, integrated with databases through CGI, 
suddenly provided a whole new way of doing all those activities, and 
could be deployed without the massive disruptions often required to 
introduce new systems.

Security was also a concern of course.  With the web technology, 
businesses, their customers, and their suppliers could all be 
interconnected through carefully structured web portals into their 
various internal business computers.   Their various intranets would be 
connected and even use the Internet to do so, but without the risk and 
exposure of IP-level router interconnections.

Done carefully, web servers act as firewalls so that users could only do 
what they should be able to do.  A web server is essentially a "router" 
interconnecting two organizations or customers, but the "connectivity" 
is not for IP packets.  Rather, connectivity is limited to a set of 
activities that can be performed through that connection.

I can order a book from Amazon through the web, but I can't cause Amazon 
to order 10,000 copies of a book I wrote - assuming their webserver 
designer didn't make that function accessible through a public CGI.

I can interact with a computer deep within a corporation, but I can (if 
they're careful) only do certain things that they want me to do.  I most 
likely can't "ping" that computer, or open an FTP connection to it.  But 
I can use it.

The Web has enabled an internet of internets, with computers able to 
interact across public and corporate boundaries.  "On the Internet" has 
a new meaning (Dave, time for an update to that RFC...)

The CGI made that feasible.  As I explained this to customers - usually 
non-techie managers in non-tech companies - you could see the "light 
bulbs" as they realized how the web technology could be used in their 
business interactions - not just to browse and read documents but to do 
the various activities involved in commerce, internally as well as with 
their customers and business partners.   That was a very potent attraction.

-----

I imagine all of the above could have been done with a continuous 
evolution of Gopher.  But it wasn't.  The WWW "won" because people took 
the base technology of the early web, figured out how to use it in their 
own world, and just did it.   Rough consensus and running code...!

The 90s were interesting times....
/Jack Haverty






From jeanjour at comcast.net  Thu Sep  8 13:11:06 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 16:11:06 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
	<a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <038920CD-370F-437E-ADB6-2942F614B1E3@comcast.net>

One quarter we haven?t heard from are those who actually created it:  the web or the browser.  

One of the reasons NCSA was interested in creating a browser was that they were interested in the visualization/management of data to and from supercomputing problems. To some extent, the browser was intended to address their data management and visualization needs.


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 15:30, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> IIRC, the availability of a browser was necessary, but just one part of 
> the story.
> 
> If you put a web server online, it wasn't very useful unless there was a 
> way to use it.   Yes, you could connect to port 80 and type "GET xxx" 
> but even techie nerds would find that tedious.   So, when I think of the 
> early web, it includes the browser client as well as the server as 
> critical elements.
> 
> Gopher provided a slightly more friendly user interface than 
> tried-and-true FTP, and an index/search capability, but it was still 
> text-based.   That was fine for us techie nerds, but it wasn't exciting 
> to all the non-techie users sitting in front of PCs and used to 
> somewhat-graphical applications.
> 
> Besides, we techies had all become quite comfortable using FTP, and the 
> "README" convention as a poor-man's index, for a decade or two.  By the 
> 90s NFS/SMB/Netware/Appletalk/etc made it much easier to have a "public" 
> repository (although AFAIK mostly on intranets) seamlessly integrated 
> into our computing environments.  Sales stuff was on the "SALES" server, 
> technical info on "ENGRNG", etc.  You didn't even know you were using 
> the network.
> 
> In the broader world, even non-tech businesses had similar internal 
> systems, often a hodgepodge of proprietary environments.  They also 
> typically had "document management" systems, which kept track of 
> corporate documents and usually included capabilities beyond 
> index/search/retrieval.  In a business environment, you often need 
> mechanisms like review/approval, distribution lists, version management, 
> etc.
> 
> So, as a document search/retrieval system, in the early 90s, Gopher was 
> interesting, but at best just an incremental improvement to existing 
> mechanisms, with no obvious way to integrate it with those mechanisms.
> 
> -----
> 
> As I recall, Tim B-L's original idea for the web was a sort of 
> collaborative notebook, where people could create and change documents, 
> and link them together, as well as read them.  There was no "search" per 
> se.
> 
> But the initial thrust of the browser was to view the web as a read-only 
> system - you could "browse" an existing melange of documents, and set 
> bookmarks to help find them again.  No way (that I could see) in the 
> browser to make any changes to documents, new documents, etc.
> 
> So the first days of the Web started with slightly-dynamic documents 
> (Tim's collaborative notebook vision), and with the advent of the 
> browser regressed to being primarily a static document repository 
> (browsers and servers, with documents created externally).
> 
> People quickly started producing indices of what was on the Web.  When I 
> first encountered Yahoo, it advertised itself as "Yet Another 
> Hierarchical Officious Organizer" and was essentially a Gopher-like 
> index tree of interesting websites, one of many.  For a while, I 
> maintained a similar in-house list of interesting websites out on the 
> public Internet, and made it available within the company, along with 
> instructions on how to get browsers and servers.   As people in various 
> departments inside the company put up their own webservers, my list of 
> interesting Internet pages was expanded to include a list of interesting 
> intranet pages.   Search engines like AltaVista came along too.
> 
> All of this could probably have been done with Gopher.   But it wasn't.
> 
> The ease of getting the Web server and browser running, and of creating 
> simple linked-document internal corporate webs, and the ability to 
> create user-friendly documents with rich linking and formatting, all 
> helped push the Web forward.
> 
> Gopher (IIRC) provided none of these, and no obvious way to integrate 
> Gopher into any of the existing systems.  At least I didn't run across 
> anyone who had done it.
> 
> -----
> 
> None of this was "mainstream" technology at the time; no one was using 
> the web as a primary component of their business IT machinery.   I think 
> the CGI was at least one of the primary elements that moved the web to 
> dominance.
> 
> At the time, Microsoft had a catchphrase "Where Do You Want To Go 
> Today?" or something like that.  It reflected the "browser" perspective 
> of the web as a library or document repository. It was interesting to 
> browse the virtual aisles, find an interesting thing to read, and go to 
> investigate whatever you found there.
> 
> I gave a lot of talks/demos using the next-generation catchphrase "What 
> Do You Want To Do Today?" as a theme.  The CGI made that possible. 
> Instead of just browsing documents, you could have the server do 
> something, and create a document on the fly to show you the results of 
> whatever it did.   That document could have links that did something 
> else, and forms that allowed the user to pass parameters in to guide 
> that activity.
> 
> Instead of just browsing, a user could now actually cause that remote 
> server to do stuff.  Essentially, the Web browser, with CGI, had become 
> a new universal GUI - graphical user interface, with a new API that 
> could be linked to any kind of program behind any server on any kind of 
> computer -- in effect a universal standard RPC mechanism that could be 
> used to access programs on any kind of computer that you could get a web 
> server on.
> 
> Of course, some of this had been done ages before -- e.g., the Coke 
> machine on the ARPANET.  But in the 90s the WWW made it now easy with 
> the key components pre-installed, freely distributed, and mostly free 
> (IIRC, the early browser cost just $25 or something like that - a 
> bargain compared to typical software costs of the era for all those PCs 
> out there).
> 
> In business, government, and other parts of the "real world", computers 
> are used to do stuff.  As techies, we understood that, but I think all 
> we really understood was using computers to write code, and maybe an 
> occasional document or two.  Telnet was good enough to get to that far 
> away computer.  FTP was good enough to move code and RFCs around.  Email 
> was good enough to hold endless debates until someone finally wrote the 
> code.
> 
> Non-techies use computers for other things - order entry, market 
> research, inventory control, shipping tracking, customer support, etc., 
> etc.   Much of that activity involves interacting with databases of some 
> kind.  So the web technology, integrated with databases through CGI, 
> suddenly provided a whole new way of doing all those activities, and 
> could be deployed without the massive disruptions often required to 
> introduce new systems.
> 
> Security was also a concern of course.  With the web technology, 
> businesses, their customers, and their suppliers could all be 
> interconnected through carefully structured web portals into their 
> various internal business computers.   Their various intranets would be 
> connected and even use the Internet to do so, but without the risk and 
> exposure of IP-level router interconnections.
> 
> Done carefully, web servers act as firewalls so that users could only do 
> what they should be able to do.  A web server is essentially a "router" 
> interconnecting two organizations or customers, but the "connectivity" 
> is not for IP packets.  Rather, connectivity is limited to a set of 
> activities that can be performed through that connection.
> 
> I can order a book from Amazon through the web, but I can't cause Amazon 
> to order 10,000 copies of a book I wrote - assuming their webserver 
> designer didn't make that function accessible through a public CGI.
> 
> I can interact with a computer deep within a corporation, but I can (if 
> they're careful) only do certain things that they want me to do.  I most 
> likely can't "ping" that computer, or open an FTP connection to it.  But 
> I can use it.
> 
> The Web has enabled an internet of internets, with computers able to 
> interact across public and corporate boundaries.  "On the Internet" has 
> a new meaning (Dave, time for an update to that RFC...)
> 
> The CGI made that feasible.  As I explained this to customers - usually 
> non-techie managers in non-tech companies - you could see the "light 
> bulbs" as they realized how the web technology could be used in their 
> business interactions - not just to browse and read documents but to do 
> the various activities involved in commerce, internally as well as with 
> their customers and business partners.   That was a very potent attraction.
> 
> -----
> 
> I imagine all of the above could have been done with a continuous 
> evolution of Gopher.  But it wasn't.  The WWW "won" because people took 
> the base technology of the early web, figured out how to use it in their 
> own world, and just did it.   Rough consensus and running code...!
> 
> The 90s were interesting times....
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Thu Sep  8 13:27:28 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2016 08:27:28 +1200
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <a11132b2-9fe6-012b-b7b7-4bcc0f56fbdc@gmail.com>

On 08/09/2016 22:17, John Day wrote:
> It is reasonably clear that there are roughly 6 operations that can be performed remotely: create/delete, read/write, and start/stop.  Hence, one could get by with one application protocol using different ?object models.? IOW, what is different about application protocols are the models they are applied to more than the protocol itself.

I don't think we should forget that when Tim conceived the web (along with Robert
Cailliau, who gets less credit than he deserves), Tim's day job was to implement
remote procedure calls for data acquisition at CERN physics experiments. RPC of
course can support all those 6 operations. Without POST, the web wouldn't have been
able to, even in a primitive way.

[Robert and I introduced Tim to the concept of RPC in 1980, during his first
stint at CERN. Robert introduced him to document markup at that time, too.
There's a lot of detail in Robert's book, "How the Web Was Born: The Story
of the World Wide Web", James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Oxford University
Press, 2000.]

   Brian

> 
> Was the advantage of the web (and I think it probably was) that it was more easily adapted to that than Gopher and WAIS?  Were the object models too deeply embedded in the protocols to make them easily adaptable?  Or was it that someone wrote a browser for the web, rather than Gopher or WAIS?  
> 
> (I am guessing that it was, and also to Jack?s point in the other email that the web worked at a finer granularity than Gopher.)
> 
> Take care,
> John
> 
>> On Sep 7, 2016, at 21:49, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>>> probably would have died.? ?
>>
>> Nice try.
>>
>> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
>> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
>> web would have won anyway.
>>
>> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
>> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
>> future, because full text search was so powerful.
>>
>> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
>> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
>> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
>> FTP, and everything else.
>>
>> R's,
>> John
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 




From johnl at iecc.com  Thu Sep  8 14:04:33 2016
From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)
Date: 8 Sep 2016 21:04:33 -0000
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <d78b4392-4b2c-471c-c25b-8ddbbd860645@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <20160908210433.38721.qmail@ary.lan>

>But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was 
>called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved 
>by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying 
>arguments to the call.

It's still called CGI -- my Apache server runs CGI scripts several
times a minute.

>Of course the "forms" interface also meant ...
>As far as I remember, there was no such capability with Gopher or WAIS, 
>or maybe I just hadn't found it there.

Gopher got about halfway there.  A gopher server returned a menu of
items, of which there were three types, menus, documents, and search.
A search item let you send along some search terms, and the server
constructed a menu on the fly to respond to it.  As far as I can tell,
all anyone ever did with it was to search lists of FTP sites or local
phone books or other gopher servers, but there's nothing in the
protocol that would prevent a general retrieval service beyond the
limitation that the result had to look like a menu.

The Gopher RFC talks about Gopher-to-FTP or Gopher-to-WAIS gateways,
but I never heard of anyone actually building them.  The gopher
protocol was designed to be extended (menus were type 0, documents
type 1, searches, type 7) but it wasn't.

R's,
John


From jack at 3kitty.org  Thu Sep  8 14:11:07 2016
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 14:11:07 -0700
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <038920CD-370F-437E-ADB6-2942F614B1E3@comcast.net>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
	<a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>
	<038920CD-370F-437E-ADB6-2942F614B1E3@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <9a38504d-8762-7cd5-2330-edd57c9a0f11@3kitty.org>

Yes, that might explain why there was a CGI at all; perhaps it was 
necessary in Tim's original vision as a means to make changes to 
documents, and then NCSA saw a way to use that CGI for accessing 
supercomputer data and created a browser to do it?  All speculation on 
my part; it would be good to hear from more of the people who were 
directly involved about what, and why, they did what they did...

IMHO, the History of The Internet is full of situations where a piece of 
technology was developed with one use in mind, and then adapted by 
someone else to use in a very different way.

The Internet was built by McGyvers, rather than by committees with piles 
of documents.

/Jack


On 09/08/2016 01:11 PM, John Day wrote:
> One quarter we haven?t heard from are those who actually created it:  the web or the browser.
>
> One of the reasons NCSA was interested in creating a browser was that they were interested in the visualization/management of data to and from supercomputing problems. To some extent, the browser was intended to address their data management and visualization needs.
>
>
>> On Sep 8, 2016, at 15:30, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>
>> IIRC, the availability of a browser was necessary, but just one part of
>> the story.
>>
>> If you put a web server online, it wasn't very useful unless there was a
>> way to use it.   Yes, you could connect to port 80 and type "GET xxx"
>> but even techie nerds would find that tedious.   So, when I think of the
>> early web, it includes the browser client as well as the server as
>> critical elements.
>>
>> Gopher provided a slightly more friendly user interface than
>> tried-and-true FTP, and an index/search capability, but it was still
>> text-based.   That was fine for us techie nerds, but it wasn't exciting
>> to all the non-techie users sitting in front of PCs and used to
>> somewhat-graphical applications.
>>
>> Besides, we techies had all become quite comfortable using FTP, and the
>> "README" convention as a poor-man's index, for a decade or two.  By the
>> 90s NFS/SMB/Netware/Appletalk/etc made it much easier to have a "public"
>> repository (although AFAIK mostly on intranets) seamlessly integrated
>> into our computing environments.  Sales stuff was on the "SALES" server,
>> technical info on "ENGRNG", etc.  You didn't even know you were using
>> the network.
>>
>> In the broader world, even non-tech businesses had similar internal
>> systems, often a hodgepodge of proprietary environments.  They also
>> typically had "document management" systems, which kept track of
>> corporate documents and usually included capabilities beyond
>> index/search/retrieval.  In a business environment, you often need
>> mechanisms like review/approval, distribution lists, version management,
>> etc.
>>
>> So, as a document search/retrieval system, in the early 90s, Gopher was
>> interesting, but at best just an incremental improvement to existing
>> mechanisms, with no obvious way to integrate it with those mechanisms.
>>
>> -----
>>
>> As I recall, Tim B-L's original idea for the web was a sort of
>> collaborative notebook, where people could create and change documents,
>> and link them together, as well as read them.  There was no "search" per
>> se.
>>
>> But the initial thrust of the browser was to view the web as a read-only
>> system - you could "browse" an existing melange of documents, and set
>> bookmarks to help find them again.  No way (that I could see) in the
>> browser to make any changes to documents, new documents, etc.
>>
>> So the first days of the Web started with slightly-dynamic documents
>> (Tim's collaborative notebook vision), and with the advent of the
>> browser regressed to being primarily a static document repository
>> (browsers and servers, with documents created externally).
>>
>> People quickly started producing indices of what was on the Web.  When I
>> first encountered Yahoo, it advertised itself as "Yet Another
>> Hierarchical Officious Organizer" and was essentially a Gopher-like
>> index tree of interesting websites, one of many.  For a while, I
>> maintained a similar in-house list of interesting websites out on the
>> public Internet, and made it available within the company, along with
>> instructions on how to get browsers and servers.   As people in various
>> departments inside the company put up their own webservers, my list of
>> interesting Internet pages was expanded to include a list of interesting
>> intranet pages.   Search engines like AltaVista came along too.
>>
>> All of this could probably have been done with Gopher.   But it wasn't.
>>
>> The ease of getting the Web server and browser running, and of creating
>> simple linked-document internal corporate webs, and the ability to
>> create user-friendly documents with rich linking and formatting, all
>> helped push the Web forward.
>>
>> Gopher (IIRC) provided none of these, and no obvious way to integrate
>> Gopher into any of the existing systems.  At least I didn't run across
>> anyone who had done it.
>>
>> -----
>>
>> None of this was "mainstream" technology at the time; no one was using
>> the web as a primary component of their business IT machinery.   I think
>> the CGI was at least one of the primary elements that moved the web to
>> dominance.
>>
>> At the time, Microsoft had a catchphrase "Where Do You Want To Go
>> Today?" or something like that.  It reflected the "browser" perspective
>> of the web as a library or document repository. It was interesting to
>> browse the virtual aisles, find an interesting thing to read, and go to
>> investigate whatever you found there.
>>
>> I gave a lot of talks/demos using the next-generation catchphrase "What
>> Do You Want To Do Today?" as a theme.  The CGI made that possible.
>> Instead of just browsing documents, you could have the server do
>> something, and create a document on the fly to show you the results of
>> whatever it did.   That document could have links that did something
>> else, and forms that allowed the user to pass parameters in to guide
>> that activity.
>>
>> Instead of just browsing, a user could now actually cause that remote
>> server to do stuff.  Essentially, the Web browser, with CGI, had become
>> a new universal GUI - graphical user interface, with a new API that
>> could be linked to any kind of program behind any server on any kind of
>> computer -- in effect a universal standard RPC mechanism that could be
>> used to access programs on any kind of computer that you could get a web
>> server on.
>>
>> Of course, some of this had been done ages before -- e.g., the Coke
>> machine on the ARPANET.  But in the 90s the WWW made it now easy with
>> the key components pre-installed, freely distributed, and mostly free
>> (IIRC, the early browser cost just $25 or something like that - a
>> bargain compared to typical software costs of the era for all those PCs
>> out there).
>>
>> In business, government, and other parts of the "real world", computers
>> are used to do stuff.  As techies, we understood that, but I think all
>> we really understood was using computers to write code, and maybe an
>> occasional document or two.  Telnet was good enough to get to that far
>> away computer.  FTP was good enough to move code and RFCs around.  Email
>> was good enough to hold endless debates until someone finally wrote the
>> code.
>>
>> Non-techies use computers for other things - order entry, market
>> research, inventory control, shipping tracking, customer support, etc.,
>> etc.   Much of that activity involves interacting with databases of some
>> kind.  So the web technology, integrated with databases through CGI,
>> suddenly provided a whole new way of doing all those activities, and
>> could be deployed without the massive disruptions often required to
>> introduce new systems.
>>
>> Security was also a concern of course.  With the web technology,
>> businesses, their customers, and their suppliers could all be
>> interconnected through carefully structured web portals into their
>> various internal business computers.   Their various intranets would be
>> connected and even use the Internet to do so, but without the risk and
>> exposure of IP-level router interconnections.
>>
>> Done carefully, web servers act as firewalls so that users could only do
>> what they should be able to do.  A web server is essentially a "router"
>> interconnecting two organizations or customers, but the "connectivity"
>> is not for IP packets.  Rather, connectivity is limited to a set of
>> activities that can be performed through that connection.
>>
>> I can order a book from Amazon through the web, but I can't cause Amazon
>> to order 10,000 copies of a book I wrote - assuming their webserver
>> designer didn't make that function accessible through a public CGI.
>>
>> I can interact with a computer deep within a corporation, but I can (if
>> they're careful) only do certain things that they want me to do.  I most
>> likely can't "ping" that computer, or open an FTP connection to it.  But
>> I can use it.
>>
>> The Web has enabled an internet of internets, with computers able to
>> interact across public and corporate boundaries.  "On the Internet" has
>> a new meaning (Dave, time for an update to that RFC...)
>>
>> The CGI made that feasible.  As I explained this to customers - usually
>> non-techie managers in non-tech companies - you could see the "light
>> bulbs" as they realized how the web technology could be used in their
>> business interactions - not just to browse and read documents but to do
>> the various activities involved in commerce, internally as well as with
>> their customers and business partners.   That was a very potent attraction.
>>
>> -----
>>
>> I imagine all of the above could have been done with a continuous
>> evolution of Gopher.  But it wasn't.  The WWW "won" because people took
>> the base technology of the early web, figured out how to use it in their
>> own world, and just did it.   Rough consensus and running code...!
>>
>> The 90s were interesting times....
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>


From jeanjour at comcast.net  Thu Sep  8 14:28:34 2016
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 17:28:34 -0400
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
	of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <9a38504d-8762-7cd5-2330-edd57c9a0f11@3kitty.org>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
	<a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>
	<038920CD-370F-437E-ADB6-2942F614B1E3@comcast.net>
	<9a38504d-8762-7cd5-2330-edd57c9a0f11@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <E2B6A1C1-A3F9-4D68-859E-04AF02732E10@comcast.net>

Committees and McGyvers achieve pretty much the same result. The major difference is it is ?our result.?  The contrast is rather with a unifying vision that achieves simplifications, rather than accrues complexity, which the both do. The former on purpose to thwart their competitors, the latter more accidentally by short term action.


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 17:11, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> Yes, that might explain why there was a CGI at all; perhaps it was necessary in Tim's original vision as a means to make changes to documents, and then NCSA saw a way to use that CGI for accessing supercomputer data and created a browser to do it?  All speculation on my part; it would be good to hear from more of the people who were directly involved about what, and why, they did what they did...
> 
> IMHO, the History of The Internet is full of situations where a piece of technology was developed with one use in mind, and then adapted by someone else to use in a very different way.
> 
> The Internet was built by McGyvers, rather than by committees with piles of documents.
> 
> /Jack
> 
> 
> On 09/08/2016 01:11 PM, John Day wrote:
>> One quarter we haven?t heard from are those who actually created it:  the web or the browser.
>> 
>> One of the reasons NCSA was interested in creating a browser was that they were interested in the visualization/management of data to and from supercomputing problems. To some extent, the browser was intended to address their data management and visualization needs.
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sep 8, 2016, at 15:30, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> IIRC, the availability of a browser was necessary, but just one part of
>>> the story.
>>> 
>>> If you put a web server online, it wasn't very useful unless there was a
>>> way to use it.   Yes, you could connect to port 80 and type "GET xxx"
>>> but even techie nerds would find that tedious.   So, when I think of the
>>> early web, it includes the browser client as well as the server as
>>> critical elements.
>>> 
>>> Gopher provided a slightly more friendly user interface than
>>> tried-and-true FTP, and an index/search capability, but it was still
>>> text-based.   That was fine for us techie nerds, but it wasn't exciting
>>> to all the non-techie users sitting in front of PCs and used to
>>> somewhat-graphical applications.
>>> 
>>> Besides, we techies had all become quite comfortable using FTP, and the
>>> "README" convention as a poor-man's index, for a decade or two.  By the
>>> 90s NFS/SMB/Netware/Appletalk/etc made it much easier to have a "public"
>>> repository (although AFAIK mostly on intranets) seamlessly integrated
>>> into our computing environments.  Sales stuff was on the "SALES" server,
>>> technical info on "ENGRNG", etc.  You didn't even know you were using
>>> the network.
>>> 
>>> In the broader world, even non-tech businesses had similar internal
>>> systems, often a hodgepodge of proprietary environments.  They also
>>> typically had "document management" systems, which kept track of
>>> corporate documents and usually included capabilities beyond
>>> index/search/retrieval.  In a business environment, you often need
>>> mechanisms like review/approval, distribution lists, version management,
>>> etc.
>>> 
>>> So, as a document search/retrieval system, in the early 90s, Gopher was
>>> interesting, but at best just an incremental improvement to existing
>>> mechanisms, with no obvious way to integrate it with those mechanisms.
>>> 
>>> -----
>>> 
>>> As I recall, Tim B-L's original idea for the web was a sort of
>>> collaborative notebook, where people could create and change documents,
>>> and link them together, as well as read them.  There was no "search" per
>>> se.
>>> 
>>> But the initial thrust of the browser was to view the web as a read-only
>>> system - you could "browse" an existing melange of documents, and set
>>> bookmarks to help find them again.  No way (that I could see) in the
>>> browser to make any changes to documents, new documents, etc.
>>> 
>>> So the first days of the Web started with slightly-dynamic documents
>>> (Tim's collaborative notebook vision), and with the advent of the
>>> browser regressed to being primarily a static document repository
>>> (browsers and servers, with documents created externally).
>>> 
>>> People quickly started producing indices of what was on the Web.  When I
>>> first encountered Yahoo, it advertised itself as "Yet Another
>>> Hierarchical Officious Organizer" and was essentially a Gopher-like
>>> index tree of interesting websites, one of many.  For a while, I
>>> maintained a similar in-house list of interesting websites out on the
>>> public Internet, and made it available within the company, along with
>>> instructions on how to get browsers and servers.   As people in various
>>> departments inside the company put up their own webservers, my list of
>>> interesting Internet pages was expanded to include a list of interesting
>>> intranet pages.   Search engines like AltaVista came along too.
>>> 
>>> All of this could probably have been done with Gopher.   But it wasn't.
>>> 
>>> The ease of getting the Web server and browser running, and of creating
>>> simple linked-document internal corporate webs, and the ability to
>>> create user-friendly documents with rich linking and formatting, all
>>> helped push the Web forward.
>>> 
>>> Gopher (IIRC) provided none of these, and no obvious way to integrate
>>> Gopher into any of the existing systems.  At least I didn't run across
>>> anyone who had done it.
>>> 
>>> -----
>>> 
>>> None of this was "mainstream" technology at the time; no one was using
>>> the web as a primary component of their business IT machinery.   I think
>>> the CGI was at least one of the primary elements that moved the web to
>>> dominance.
>>> 
>>> At the time, Microsoft had a catchphrase "Where Do You Want To Go
>>> Today?" or something like that.  It reflected the "browser" perspective
>>> of the web as a library or document repository. It was interesting to
>>> browse the virtual aisles, find an interesting thing to read, and go to
>>> investigate whatever you found there.
>>> 
>>> I gave a lot of talks/demos using the next-generation catchphrase "What
>>> Do You Want To Do Today?" as a theme.  The CGI made that possible.
>>> Instead of just browsing documents, you could have the server do
>>> something, and create a document on the fly to show you the results of
>>> whatever it did.   That document could have links that did something
>>> else, and forms that allowed the user to pass parameters in to guide
>>> that activity.
>>> 
>>> Instead of just browsing, a user could now actually cause that remote
>>> server to do stuff.  Essentially, the Web browser, with CGI, had become
>>> a new universal GUI - graphical user interface, with a new API that
>>> could be linked to any kind of program behind any server on any kind of
>>> computer -- in effect a universal standard RPC mechanism that could be
>>> used to access programs on any kind of computer that you could get a web
>>> server on.
>>> 
>>> Of course, some of this had been done ages before -- e.g., the Coke
>>> machine on the ARPANET.  But in the 90s the WWW made it now easy with
>>> the key components pre-installed, freely distributed, and mostly free
>>> (IIRC, the early browser cost just $25 or something like that - a
>>> bargain compared to typical software costs of the era for all those PCs
>>> out there).
>>> 
>>> In business, government, and other parts of the "real world", computers
>>> are used to do stuff.  As techies, we understood that, but I think all
>>> we really understood was using computers to write code, and maybe an
>>> occasional document or two.  Telnet was good enough to get to that far
>>> away computer.  FTP was good enough to move code and RFCs around.  Email
>>> was good enough to hold endless debates until someone finally wrote the
>>> code.
>>> 
>>> Non-techies use computers for other things - order entry, market
>>> research, inventory control, shipping tracking, customer support, etc.,
>>> etc.   Much of that activity involves interacting with databases of some
>>> kind.  So the web technology, integrated with databases through CGI,
>>> suddenly provided a whole new way of doing all those activities, and
>>> could be deployed without the massive disruptions often required to
>>> introduce new systems.
>>> 
>>> Security was also a concern of course.  With the web technology,
>>> businesses, their customers, and their suppliers could all be
>>> interconnected through carefully structured web portals into their
>>> various internal business computers.   Their various intranets would be
>>> connected and even use the Internet to do so, but without the risk and
>>> exposure of IP-level router interconnections.
>>> 
>>> Done carefully, web servers act as firewalls so that users could only do
>>> what they should be able to do.  A web server is essentially a "router"
>>> interconnecting two organizations or customers, but the "connectivity"
>>> is not for IP packets.  Rather, connectivity is limited to a set of
>>> activities that can be performed through that connection.
>>> 
>>> I can order a book from Amazon through the web, but I can't cause Amazon
>>> to order 10,000 copies of a book I wrote - assuming their webserver
>>> designer didn't make that function accessible through a public CGI.
>>> 
>>> I can interact with a computer deep within a corporation, but I can (if
>>> they're careful) only do certain things that they want me to do.  I most
>>> likely can't "ping" that computer, or open an FTP connection to it.  But
>>> I can use it.
>>> 
>>> The Web has enabled an internet of internets, with computers able to
>>> interact across public and corporate boundaries.  "On the Internet" has
>>> a new meaning (Dave, time for an update to that RFC...)
>>> 
>>> The CGI made that feasible.  As I explained this to customers - usually
>>> non-techie managers in non-tech companies - you could see the "light
>>> bulbs" as they realized how the web technology could be used in their
>>> business interactions - not just to browse and read documents but to do
>>> the various activities involved in commerce, internally as well as with
>>> their customers and business partners.   That was a very potent attraction.
>>> 
>>> -----
>>> 
>>> I imagine all of the above could have been done with a continuous
>>> evolution of Gopher.  But it wasn't.  The WWW "won" because people took
>>> the base technology of the early web, figured out how to use it in their
>>> own world, and just did it.   Rough consensus and running code...!
>>> 
>>> The 90s were interesting times....
>>> /Jack Haverty
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>> 




From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Fri Sep  9 15:54:19 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2016 10:54:19 +1200
Subject: [ih] =?utf-8?q?Filmmaker_Werner_Herzog_interviews_Elon_Musk_for_i?=
 =?utf-8?q?nternet_doco_=E2=80=A2_The_Register?=
Message-ID: <2461f392-391e-39c4-3f92-0d923e280261@gmail.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/09/herzog_net_documentary/

Anybody seen this yet?

   Brian Carpenter


From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Fri Sep  9 18:10:53 2016
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2016 18:10:53 -0700
Subject: [ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall
 of the Gopher Protocol
In-Reply-To: <9a38504d-8762-7cd5-2330-edd57c9a0f11@3kitty.org>
References: <20160908014915.34868.qmail@ary.lan>
	<48167B2C-7AAD-49B9-A8F1-FF580C1E55BF@comcast.net>
	<a048afa3-dcd9-82d3-1b1f-a90d2d13f327@3kitty.org>
	<038920CD-370F-437E-ADB6-2942F614B1E3@comcast.net>
	<9a38504d-8762-7cd5-2330-edd57c9a0f11@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <8af49e2c-8f3e-ea7a-7fa1-28dd97dca63e@dcrocker.net>

On 9/8/2016 2:11 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> IMHO, the History of The Internet is full of situations where a piece of
> technology was developed with one use in mind, and then adapted by
> someone else to use in a very different way.


+1

What's most interest about this, to me, is that it represents a balance 
between simplicity and extensibility.  On the average, the designs tend 
to be quite minimalistic.  Rather than try to handle a wide range of 
scenarios that could reasonably be envisioned, they tried to do 
something basic, well.  But with some hooks.  But only some, and again 
basic.

Then when a concrete need was encountered, the an extension or overlay 
was created for that purpose.

Back in the early 90s when folk were trying to compare Internet 
technical work with OSI work, I characterized this as the difference 
between focusing on satisfying people's core, immediate needs, versus 
trying to satisfying people's complete range of imagined, eventual needs.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net


From bill.n1vux at gmail.com  Fri Sep  9 19:45:50 2016
From: bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker)
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2016 22:45:50 -0400
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_=5Bih=5D_Filmmaker_Werner_Herzog_interviews_Elon_Mus?=
	=?UTF-8?Q?k_for_internet_doco_=E2=80=A2_The_Register?=
In-Reply-To: <2461f392-391e-39c4-3f92-0d923e280261@gmail.com>
References: <2461f392-391e-39c4-3f92-0d923e280261@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAAbKA3WBVjnAADCog69+5CJv7LGkSnoH16GpG3kit_Uw9Q_g1w@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/09/herzog_net_documentary/
>
> Anybody seen this yet?


?Not me. (Or, Not I, for pedants.)

El Reg lists Kleinrock, but IMDB doesn't, lists only

    Lawrence Krauss     ...     Himself
    Kevin Mitnick     ...     Himself
    Elon Musk     ...     Himself
    Sebastian Thrun
    Lucianne Walkowicz     ...     Herself ?

??
?Odd selection of history ? ?

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
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From vint at google.com  Fri Sep  9 20:02:38 2016
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2016 23:02:38 -0400
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_=5Bih=5D_Filmmaker_Werner_Herzog_interviews_Elon_Mus?=
	=?UTF-8?Q?k_for_internet_doco_=E2=80=A2_The_Register?=
In-Reply-To: <CAAbKA3WBVjnAADCog69+5CJv7LGkSnoH16GpG3kit_Uw9Q_g1w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <2461f392-391e-39c4-3f92-0d923e280261@gmail.com>
	<CAAbKA3WBVjnAADCog69+5CJv7LGkSnoH16GpG3kit_Uw9Q_g1w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggfkUZ1JjxLCj7_BDBR2MGsQPsgbJUaeZN1ijnQedOXXNA@mail.gmail.com>

definitely odd.

v


On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/09/herzog_net_documentary/
>>
>> Anybody seen this yet?
>
>
> ?Not me. (Or, Not I, for pedants.)
>
> El Reg lists Kleinrock, but IMDB doesn't, lists only
>
>     Lawrence Krauss     ...     Himself
>     Kevin Mitnick     ...     Himself
>     Elon Musk     ...     Himself
>     Sebastian Thrun
>     Lucianne Walkowicz     ...     Herself ?
>
> ??
> ?Odd selection of history ? ?
>
> --
> Bill Ricker
> bill.n1vux at gmail.com
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>
>


-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Fri Sep  9 20:50:30 2016
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2016 15:50:30 +1200
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re:_[ih]_Filmmaker_Werner_Herzog_interviews_Elon_Musk_for?=
	=?UTF-8?Q?_internet_doco_=e2=80=a2_The_Register?=
In-Reply-To: <CAHxHggfkUZ1JjxLCj7_BDBR2MGsQPsgbJUaeZN1ijnQedOXXNA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <2461f392-391e-39c4-3f92-0d923e280261@gmail.com>
	<CAAbKA3WBVjnAADCog69+5CJv7LGkSnoH16GpG3kit_Uw9Q_g1w@mail.gmail.com>
	<CAHxHggfkUZ1JjxLCj7_BDBR2MGsQPsgbJUaeZN1ijnQedOXXNA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <c6fc06ec-5787-5871-94a6-cdd44372f9dd@gmail.com>

Most Werner Herzog movies are odd. As it happens my wife went
to see this one at a film festival, and left in the middle due
to extreme oddness.

   Brian
On 10/09/2016 15:02, Vint Cerf wrote:
> definitely odd.
> 
> v
> 
> 
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
>> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/09/herzog_net_documentary/
>>>
>>> Anybody seen this yet?
>>
>>
>> ?Not me. (Or, Not I, for pedants.)
>>
>> El Reg lists Kleinrock, but IMDB doesn't, lists only
>>
>>     Lawrence Krauss     ...     Himself
>>     Kevin Mitnick     ...     Himself
>>     Elon Musk     ...     Himself
>>     Sebastian Thrun
>>     Lucianne Walkowicz     ...     Herself ?
>>
>> ??
>> ?Odd selection of history ? ?
>>
>> --
>> Bill Ricker
>> bill.n1vux at gmail.com
>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>
>>
> 
> 




From johnl at iecc.com  Sat Sep 10 08:24:22 2016
From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)
Date: 10 Sep 2016 15:24:22 -0000
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re:
	_[ih]_Filmmaker_Werner_Herzog_interviews_Elon_Musk_for?=
	=?UTF-8?Q?_internet_doco_=e2=80=a2_The_Register?=
In-Reply-To: <c6fc06ec-5787-5871-94a6-cdd44372f9dd@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20160910152422.46454.qmail@ary.lan>

In article <c6fc06ec-5787-5871-94a6-cdd44372f9dd at gmail.com> you write:
>Most Werner Herzog movies are odd. As it happens my wife went
>to see this one at a film festival, and left in the middle due
>to extreme oddness.

The trailer features Leonard Kleinrock showing off the first IMP,
Danny Hillis saying something inscrutable, Elon Musk planning his trip
to Mars, a woman who moved to WV because she believes radio waves make
her sick, and monks in orange robes tweeting.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1tZ8JsZvg

Trailer with Herzog pontificating between scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5SMsd6sfcY





From pnr at planet.nl  Tue Sep 27 15:24:08 2016
From: pnr at planet.nl (Paul Ruizendaal)
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:24:08 +0200
Subject: [ih] "network unix"
Message-ID: <DAB5DE9D-8F20-422D-A3EA-C112E95232D6@planet.nl>

Hi all,

I'm interested in "Network Unix" as described in RFC681 and here https://archive.org/details/networkunixsyste243kell. My purpose is to understand the early history of networking in Unix, much in the style of Warren Toomey's work on early Unix in general (see http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl).

Would anybody know if the source code of this Network Unix survived to the present?

Many thanks,

Paul