[ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?

[Karl Auerbach]

There was perhaps another stage, one that ran in parallel to the others.

I am thinking of things like the Air Force ULANA (Unified Local Area 
Network Architecture) effort during the mid-to-late 1980's as well as 
the Interop trade show network (which existed separate from the vendor 
stuff at the shows) that had its heyday from about 1987 through the 
early 2000's (it's still going on, but it's not what it once was.)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4794963

> https://books.google.com/books?id=4hwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=ULANA+air+force&source=bl&ots=L26lgcBVRj&sig=ACfU3U1yxuJrO5uyVc9hKSkxn0hQkdJnYQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjPwo6tmaPhAhXFsJ4KHcxwCF8Q6AEwBXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=ULANA%20air%20force&f=false

By-the-way, I worked with the TRW ULANA team (btw, we won, but the award 
was protested.)

ULANA was, at the time, a huge effort to bring commercial off the shelf 
(COTS) material into a cohesive and interoperable set of parts that 
could largely be simply purchased and plugged together (user 
configuration required, of course.)  It covered everything from wiring 
to routers to desktop machines to workstations to large mainframes. 
It's scope was both local and long-haul.  In other words, everything.

That project put energy into things like the John Romkey's "Packet 
Driver" idea for a universal way to add device drivers to PC-DoS 
machines.  John wrote the first packet driver - I think it was for a 
3COM NIC. I did the second for the TRW ethernet card (based on Intel's 
then very flakey NIC chips) we did for the project. And Russ Nelson took 
it further with his Crynwr packet driver collection.  (Russ deserves a 
pair of Internet angel wings for his packet driver work.)  The result 
was that all of the TCP stack venders for PC's - FTP Software, Beame and 
Whiteside, WRQ, NRC, Netmanage, etc were freed from the burden of 
writing device driver code.  That significantly enhanced the spread of 
TCP/IP based PCs in the years before Microsoft squished everything when 
they came out with the built-in stack - but even they used the notion of 
a plug in driver (which they called NDIS).

And ULANA was one of the early customers for companies that were then in 
the literal garage stage, like Cisco.

ULANA also built a fire under the notion that networks needed to be 
monitored and managed - that was the era of ideas like HEMS, CMOT, and 
SNMP.  (It was also the era of OSI - which ULANA largely rejected in 
favor of TCP/IP based networking.)

Overall, the ULANA project forced a lot of attention onto the notion of 
TCP/IP interoperability.  That notion later was picked up by the first 
decade of Interop trade show networks (and many of us from the ULANA 
project were involved in the design and deployment of the yearly and 
then bi-yearly Interop net.)

(I would also suggest that the metronome effect of the Interop trade 
shows created an intense pressure on vendors to improve products and pay 
serious attention to compatibility with other vendors.)

	--karl--