[ih] First Eurociscos [was Ethernet, was Why TCP]

[Jack Haverty]

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
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