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

[Greg Skinner]

The system that Barbara described was called UTACCS (USAREUR Tactical Automated Command and Control System).  SRI’s involvement began sometime around the late summer of 1987.  The system (including the cisco routers) was maintained at USAREUR in Heidelberg, and used in several field exercises in Europe over the next few years.  Eventually, it evolved into the STACCS (Standard Theater Army Command and Control System) <http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a250861.pdf>.

—gregbo

> On Sep 2, 2016, at 4:24 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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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
>> 
> 

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