[ih] Hello to the list, plus some comments

[Karl Auerbach]

Hello - I had not heard about the existence of this list until recently.

So I'll begin with some background:

I was a student at UCLA from 1967.  I had a student job with the folks 
who were doing automobile traffic studies (tracking how cars existed 
freeways, crashing cars, etc).  I learned programming on the IBM 7094 - 
which was in the room right next to the Sigma Seven where IMP #1 lived.

I was part of the UCLA Computer Club.  We were a troublesome group 
(don't ask what we did to a non-responsive ice cream machine in the 
hallway outside of the computer club office.)  And one thing that folks 
like Mark Kampe and others did was to drop things off the top of Boelter 
Hall to see what would happen.  We dropped things like super balls (at 
room temperature and also frozen in liquid nitrogen), an empty lead 
radiation container, etc.  IMP #1 was just so very attractive in that 
regard - it looked like an armored refrigerator with a hook on the top, 
so we just were so very tempted to see how rugged it was.  Good thing we 
did not give into that temptation.

I began my actual non-academic work on some projects dealing with 
satellites and other stuff - go see the movie War Games or Dr. 
Strangelove.  We built that stuff for real.  One of my lesser moments 
was when I instructed the operators of a 60 meter dish in the middle of 
Australia to point the thing directly towards the ground.  But I did 
gain a lot of real-life experience about the issues of receiving and 
handling a relentless stream of network data (from satellites.)

Anyway, later on - around 1971 I began working in the network and 
operating system research group at System Development Corporation (SDC) 
in Santa Monica.  I worked with Dave Kaufman and, later, Frank Heinrich 
(who came from Dave Farber's DCS, Distributed Computer System, project 
at UC Irvine.)  By-the-way, I am of the opinion that DCS deserves a far 
more prominent place in the history of the internet, or perhaps in the 
history of cloud computing, than it has received.

(It was during my time at SDC that I got the chance to do a small amount 
of work with Donald Davies - we were all working in a research site 
located on the top floors of the Stoke Poges golf club - for those of 
you who don't know, that was the venue where Goldfinger and James Bond 
played a round of golf and Odd Job used his hat to slice the head off of 
a marble statue.)

Since then I've worked on lots of stuff ranging from Unix/Linux kernels 
to early email (pre-sendmail), ATM (banking) networks, protocols (most 
particularly SNMP and some "I wish we had done better" work on 
netbios-over-TCP, RFC 1001/1002 - yes, I sort of deserved it when Paul 
Mokapetris glowered at me (from the top of a table) and declared that I 
had destroyed DNS. ;-)  I've also done work with network video (a period 
in which Steve Casner taught me how much I didn't know) and IP 
multicast.  I've also spent a great deal of time doing interoperability 
testing - both at the Interop shows (I was part of the design team from 
nearly the start) and at the old TCP/IP bakeoff events.

But my largest interest is in the question of repair of the net. My 
grandfather was a radio repairman, my father had a shop that repaired 
TV's that other guys couldn't repair.  So fixing things is kinda 
genetic.  Back in the early 1990's I formed a company to build the first 
internet buttset - a tool for people on cold floors in wiring closets or 
up on poles in the rain who needed to get busy diagnosing and repairing 
within a few seconds.  That tool was quite impressive, well received, 
and very useful but I did not then know how to run a company and that 
tool, and the product vanished (pieces remain in products from companies 
such as Fluke.)  One thing that I have observed about the development of 
the internet, as compared to how old Ma Bell's approached the telephone 
network, is the lack of formal and mandated test and loopback hooks in 
internet protocols.

However, I have remained intrigued by the notion of homeostatic 
networking - how the internet can be made not just more readily 
diagnosed and repaired but also more self healing.  The internet is 
being perceived as something approaching a lifeline grade utility and 
it's been my feeling that this ought to drive a change in the way we 
engineer the net.  But that's a huge topic for another time but to plant 
a hook, I'll just suggest that perhaps we can learn a lot of network 
tricks by looking at how plants and animals enhance their ability to 
survive change.

One set of tools that I've produced is Jon Postel's notion of a flakeway 
- in his view a router that intentionally did things wrong.  I've 
extended that notion to have tools for developers (I emphasize that 
these tools are to help developers build more robust code, not to 
develop attacks) that can statefully (or not) do things ranging from 
dropping/duplicating packets to coercing a TCP intial three way exchange 
into a four packet exchange (by splitting the typically merged middle 
SYN+FIN packet) or adding/removing options ... and beyond.

You all know about my ICANN adventures, to avoid going into the weeds, 
let's not talk about that at the moment.  ;-)

Of late I have been bemoaning the slow erosion of the end-to-end 
principle.  I wrote a large (26 page) blog entry about how I see the 
present-era internet evolving into something reminiscent of the 
political landscape of 15th century Europe, an internet composed of 
isolated islands that are connected by highly protected bridges. 
https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis/

Oh yeah, I'm also an attorney, recipient of the Norbert Wiener Award for 
Social and Professional Responsibility, was named a fellow of law and 
technology at Caltech and Loyola Law (Los Angeles), and was understudy 
crocodile in a production of Peter Pan.

Now some comments:

One of our first projects at SDC (circa 1972) was for the US Joint 
Chiefs of Staff - a group with a decidedly military point of view - 
regarding the surviveability of packet switching networks, most 
particularly networks derived from ARPAnet ideas.  It was very 
explicitly part of our project to wonder about the impact of nuclear war 
- we quite openly spoke of the impact of "gateways" (routers) and links 
being vaporized.

However, our work was done under a layer of US and UK secrecy - it was 
often classified or, if not, it was considered sensitive information.  
As a consequence few people ever heard of our work. (Although eventually 
our work created the first protected VPNs, first working operating 
systems written to and formally validated against formal models of 
security, capability based operating systems, key distribution systems, 
etc.)

By-the-way, my wife and I, having no experience in making videos or 
sound recordings, much less in documentary film making, but both of us 
with a bit of background in theatre, set forth a few years back to 
gather interviews about the internet from about 1965 through 1995 and 
create a series of short (5 minute) videos about the creation of the 
internet.  (We plan about 200 episodes.) We've only released a very few 
- and our lack of skill shows through, but we are improving.  For 
various reasons we had to lay the project aside a few years back, but we 
intend to resume with our interviewing.  (A typical interview runs for a 
couple of hours.)  You can see our series trailer at 
https://history-of-the-internet.org/videos/trailer/

         --karl--