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

[Richard Bennett]

I remember packet drivers - lots of data copying going on, gave us a reference point to improve on in years to come.

RB

> On Mar 27, 2019, at 3:15 PM, Karl Auerbach <karl at CAVEBEAR.COM> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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--
> 
> 
> 
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—
Richard Bennett
High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org/> Founder
Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator

Internet Policy Consultant

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