[ih] Internet history - code and people (was Re: BBN C-series computers)
Alan Maitland
AMaitland at Commerco.Com
Thu Oct 26 06:05:03 PDT 2017
HP had a proprietary DS/3000 (Distributed Systems) networking solution
(announced around Spring 1977), allowing their HP3000 Business Systems
and HP1000 real time systems to network together. Still remember going
to the HP sales office in NJ in 1979 as a customer to watch the
introduction via satellite by John Young (then HP's President) demoing
the solution between the Palo Alto and Santa Clara HP Sales offices.
That got replaced with NS/3000 in 1986 (or thereabouts) which was
compliant with basic TCP/IP standards of that time. Also recall getting
introduced to and trained on TCP/IP that year, then as an HP SE in the
South Bay Area.
Using NS/3000, HP was able to have its commercial business systems
coexist on a standards based network to interact with PC clients and
other compliant vendor systems. The cities of Sunnyvale and Palo Alto
implemented such networks using "ThickLAN" (thick ethernet cabling
10Mb/s), "ThinLan" (thin eithernet cabling 10Mb/s) and "StarLAN"
(Twisted Pair initially at 1Mb/s, later upgraded to 10Mb/s and rebranded
"StarLAN 10") hardware and the NS/3000 solution with HP OfficeShare for PCs.
Seems a lifetime ago.
Alan
On 10/25/2017 4:44 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> i think the DEC and HP implementations may have been from scratch (?)
> while the IBM Labs version might had had contact with Univ Wisconsin
> (Larry Landweber would know) or UCLA (Bob Braden). Landweber was
> involved in an IP/X.25 implementation also. The DEC implementation might
> have had help from BBN (does anyone on the list recall)?
>
> vint
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 5:52 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org
> <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> wrote:
>
> I've always been curious about the ways, other than technical committees
> as documented in RFCs et al, that Internet history was driven.
>
> E.G., did the DEC/IBM/HP implementations in their respective labs use
> any of the code developed by ARPA for their machines? Recruit the
> people? Or did they start from the spec? Did the 30+ vendors of
> DOS/Windows TCP products spring from the work by Jim Mathis, Dave Mills,
> et al?
>
> There was a lot of talk back then about "Technology Transfer" as a
> government goal - basically saying that the government didn't want to
> fund development forever. Just wondering how that worked out... Did
> TCP/IP spread because the availability of free code enabled it? Or
> because the people moved from the research to product worlds and brought
> the knowledge (and code) with them?
>
> I'm sure some of this happened. Maybe some historian will tackle the
> problem of uncovering the various paths and timing that people and code
> took over the early decade or so. And how important that was to how
> things turned out.
>
> /Jack
>
> On 10/25/2017 12:28 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> > sorry "when" Microsoft not "with" ....duh
> >
> > v
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 3:27 PM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com
> <mailto:vint at google.com>
> > <mailto:vint at google.com <mailto:vint at google.com>>> wrote:
> >
> > FTP Software - TCP/IP for DOS/Windows - went belly up with
> Microsoft
> > integrated this into a version of their OS.
> >
> > IBM, DEC and HP did implementations in the research labs without
> > charge to DARPA.
> >
> > v
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Jack Haverty
> <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>
> > <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>> wrote:
> >
> > The history of TCP implementations was driven by
> non-technical
> > forces
> > too. As the saying goes -- "Follow the money."
> >
> > ARPA paid for the development of most if not all of the very
> > early TCP
> > implementations: the BBN-TENEX and LSI-11 for the Packet
> Radio
> > project,
> > my own PDP-11/40 Unix implementation as part of a Network
> Security
> > research program, Sax/Edmond's HP-3000 code, Braden's IBM
> work
> > at UCLA,
> > Clark/Chiappa at MIT, Mills LSI-11 at UDel, and Gurwitz Vax
> > implementation. Probably more I've forgotten. Wingfield's
> > PDP-11/70
> > was funded, IIRC, by DCEC, the research arm of DCA - so it
> > represented a
> > tiny step from the research/ARPA world into the
> operational side.
> >
> > ARPA also paid for development of OSes, in particular
> BSD. As
> > the TCP
> > implementations were completed, ARPA stopped funding further
> > TCP-specific work, and, also IIRC, made those baseline
> > implementations
> > generally available. Berkeley continued BSD with ARPA
> funds, which
> > evolved into Sun. Big government contractors (motivated
> by the
> > contractual requirement to support TCP) built TCPs as
> they needed.
> >
> > Note also that the "await/capac" Unix interface was
> created by Randy
> > Rettberg and I to be the minimal functionality, with absolute
> > minimal
> > kernel code footprint, that we knew was needed to be able
> to write
> > network applications - ftp, telnet, etc. The goal was to
> cram
> > it into
> > the PDP-11/40, not to make a definitive interface for general
> > Unix use.
> > So it's not surprising that sockets took over.
> >
> > Also, someone commented that it would have been possible
> to do
> > networking with standard Unix primitives at the time, by
> having
> > multiple
> > processes interacting. We actually tried that. More
> > accurately, Ray
> > Tomlinson (yes the same one) ported a network security
> > application that
> > had been running on BBN-TENEX into a Unix implementation
> with a
> > dozen or
> > so interacting processes. With all of the context
> switching it
> > was so
> > slow that it was totally unusable. Plan B was await/capac to
> > make it
> > possible to use a single Unix process instead.
> >
> > Hardware vendors built TCPs too, such as the C/70. IIRC,
> the C/70
> > development for network management was partially funded
> by DCA,
> > so that
> > would have provided support for TCP development too.
> >
> > Startups popped up to fill gaps. Microsoft was a tad late to
> > the party,
> > and a slew of small companies created TCPs for
> DOS/Windows. I
> > recall
> > circa 1990 we had to deal with testing our software using 30+
> > different
> > TCP implementations for Windows that were then in common use.
> >
> > Historians may find DNA traces of some of those baseline
> 1980-ish
> > implementations in the later systems. My gut feeling is
> that the
> > choices that were made were not necessarily driven much
> by technical
> > evaluations, but more often by pragmatic considerations -
> > availability
> > of code, or of personnel with relevant experience.
> >
> > So, when you seek to unravel the history of TCP (and the
> > Internet), I'd
> > suggest also following the trails of the money, the
> people, as
> > well as
> > the software to understand why things happened the way they
> > did. That
> > won't be easy...
> >
> > HTH,
> > /Jack
> >
> > On 10/25/2017 08:27 AM, James J Dempsey wrote:
> > > Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl <mailto:pnr at planet.nl>
> <mailto:pnr at planet.nl <mailto:pnr at planet.nl>>> wrote:
> > >
> > >>> On 24 Oct 2017, at 20:52, James J Dempsey
> <jjd at jjd.com <mailto:jjd at jjd.com>
> > <mailto:jjd at jjd.com <mailto:jjd at jjd.com>>> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> The C/70 (as well as the C/60) definitely did have a
> TCP/IP
> > stack. One of
> > >>> the first uses of the C/70 was to build and run the NU
> > Network Monitoring
> > >>> system. When I arrived at BBN in the Summer of 1981, we
> > were already on
> > >>> track to transition ARPANET to TCP/IP, which as we know
> > eventually happened
> > >>> on 1 Jan 1983.
> > >>
> > >> Thanks for confirming that. Would you recall if the
> C/70 used
> > the sockets API
> > >> or the earlier arpanet API? (I would suspect the latter).
> > >>
> > >> If the former, it would be the only back port of
> sockets to
> > V7 that I?m
> > >> aware of (unless one thinks of 2.8BSD/2.9BSD as being V7).
> > >
> > > If you check out RFC 801 (written Nov 1981), Rob
> Gurwitz (who
> > wrote BBN's
> > > UNIX TCP implementation) says of "BBN C70 UNIX":
> > >
> > > The C/70 processor is a BBN-designed system with
> a native
> > > instruction set oriented toward executing the C
> > language. It
> > > supports UNIX Version 7 and provides for user
> processes
> > with a
> > > 20-bit address space. The TCP/IP implementation
> for the
> > C/70 was
> > > ported from the BBN VAX TCP/IP, and shares all of its
> > features.
> > >
> > > This version of TCP/IP is running experimentally
> at BBN,
> > but is
> > > still under development. Performance tuning is
> > underway, to make
> > > it more compatible with the C/70's memory
> management system.
> > >
> > > In the same RFC, Rob writes of the BBN VAX UNIX TCP
> > implementation:
> > >
> > > The VAX TCP/IP implementation is written in C for
> > Berkeley 4.1BSD
> > > UNIX, and runs in the UNIX kernel. It has been
> run on
> > VAX 11/780s
> > > and 750s at several sites, and is due to be generally
> > available in
> > > early 1982.
> > >
> > > The implementation conforms to the TCP and IP
> > specifications (RFC
> > > 791, 793). The implementation supports the new
> extended
> > internet
> > > address formats, and both GGP and ICMP. It also
> > supports multiple
> > > network access protocols and device drivers.
> Aside from
> > ARPANET
> > > 1822 and the ACC LH/DH-11 driver, experimental
> drivers
> > have also
> > > been developed for ETHERNET. There are user
> interfaces for
> > > accessing the IP and local network access layers
> > independent of
> > > the TCP.
> > >
> > > Higher level protocol services include user and
> server
> > TELNET,
> > > MTP, and FTP, implemented as user level
> programs. There
> > are also
> > > tools available for monitoring and recording network
> > traffic for
> > > debugging purposes.
> > >
> > > Continuing development includes performance
> > enhancements. The
> > > implementation is described in IEN-168.
> > >
> > > IEN-168 (available here
> > https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien168.txt
> <https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien168.txt>
> > <https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien168.txt
> <https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien168.txt>> ) does not
> > > contain the word "socket", so I suspect that that means the
> > BBN-UNIX
> > > implementation of TCP didn't contains the socket interface,
> > initially.
> > >
> > > In "Networking Implementation Notes 4.4BSD Edition" (
> > > https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/18.net/paper.pdf
> <https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/18.net/paper.pdf>
> > <https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/18.net/paper.pdf
> <https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/18.net/paper.pdf>> ) Sam
> > Leffler and Bill
> > > Joy acknowledge the BBN TCP/IP implementation:
> > >
> > > Many of the ideas related to protocol modularity,
> memory
> > management, and
> > > network interfaces are based on Rob Gurwitz’s TCP/IP
> > implementation for the
> > > 4.1BSD version of UNIX on the VAX [Gurwitz81].
> > >
> > > [Gurwitz81] is IEN-168.
> > >
> > > Finally, at http://www.xbbn.org/note-12.html
> <http://www.xbbn.org/note-12.html>
> > <http://www.xbbn.org/note-12.html
> <http://www.xbbn.org/note-12.html>> there is this description of
> > > sockets and BBN's TCP implementation:
> > >
> > > The BBN BSD TCP was the standard TCP for 4BSD and BSD
> > UNIX 4.1. However, in
> > > BSD 4.2, the team at U.C. Berkeley created their
> own and
> > very different
> > > implementation of TCP/IP (using the now familiar
> socket
> > interface developed
> > > by Bill Joy and Sam Leffler of Berkeley along with
> > Gurwitz). BBN promptly
> > > revised its TCP implementation to use the socket
> > interface, and for about a
> > > year there was a battle to determine whose networking
> > code would take
> > > precedence. Although the BBN code won some
> adherents,
> > and was licensed to
> > > several computer vendors, the Berkeley code won
> the battle.
> > >
> > > I hope this clears that up.
> > >
> > > --Jim Dempsey--
> > >
> > > _______
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