[ih] UDP Length Field?

[Vint Cerf]

David Reed's timing comports with what I remember. I got to ARPA in Sept
1976. TCP2 came out in (early?) 1977, then the split of TCP/IP; TCP 2.5,
TCP 3 (at which point I think the IP doc and new TCP doc appear. Then
TCP/IP v4 in 1978 (from memory; have not checked RFCs). David is also right
about Internet and TCP going along in parallel with ARPANET and documents:
Internet Experiment Notes. We did publish RFC 675 in Dec 1974 Internet
Transmission Control Protocol.

I have a fairly clear recollection of being at USC/ISI with Jon, Danny
Cohen and David Reed in 1977 discussing the real-time application needs
that TCP would not satisfy owing to retransmission delays.

v




On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 1:07 PM David P. Reed <dpreed at deepplum.com> wrote:

> Noel - you are plain wrong that UDP happened after the split.  UDP was
> created in 1977, by me and Jon Postel and Danny Cohen, primarily. The
> "spec" was a sketch in Jon's notes, not an RFC. (RFC's dont tell the full
> history, not by far! Especially back then, where the TCP working group was
> working on its own, separate from the ARPANET process of RFC's. Our work
> was in email and in meetings. The split was done on the blackboard at
> Marina del Rey, with IP, TCP and UDP all defined. UDP at that time
> satisfied Danny, me, and John Schoch who were the main "users" demanding a
> datagram user level.
>
>
>
> As I recall, you, Noel, were not involved at all in the Internet project
> at that time (nor was Dave Clark directly). I was the guy. I had spent
> summer 1976 designing DSP, and in the fall Bob Kahn and Vint strongly
> discouraged continuing with DSP for LANs, and encouraged me to join the TCP
> project to bring my ideas into that framework. Which I did, until early
> 1978, when demands of completing my doctoral thesis forced me to stop
> direct participation and Dave Clark became involved.
>
>
>
> As I recall, you were engaged with token ring hardware during that time,
> not TCP or IP, along with Clark and Pogran, right?
>
>
>
> PS: I've given up, mostly, on trying to help clarify Internet "history".
> Because of the egos involved seeking credit as the "father", claiming the
> Internet was just ARPANET (BBN) and not a separable concept about
> internetworking, etc. what I find is that books like Katie Hafner's BBN
> propaganda are accepted as the truth, along with propaganda from UCLA etc.
> In fact, the history is far more complex than these tales of "heroic"
> inventions of things like the "@" that is said to be Tomlinson's only
> contribution! (Ray did FAR more, including sorting out sequence numbering
> and encouraging the use of 32-bit oriented frame structures, even on 36-bit
> machines like PDP-10's and GE645's.
>
>
>
> I have very little interest in getting "credit" to stroke my ego, unlike
> some in the community. But I do wish people would get it right.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sunday, November 29, 2020 2:28pm, "Vint Cerf" <vint at google.com> said:
>
> Noel,
> yes, we did the split to support real-time and then concluded that UDP was
> the best way to present the "service" vs running over raw IP.
> v
>
> On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 1:46 PM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>>     > From: Craig Partridge
>>
>>     > Recall that the creation of UDP meant TCP and IP had to be split
>> apart
>>
>> No. The TCP/IP split _long_ predates the creation of UDP. The former is
>> already apparent as of IEN-21, "TCP 3 Specification" (see pages 56 and 59
>> for
>> the IP and TCP header formats), from January 1978. UDP is IEN-71, from
>> 21-Jan-79 (and as I recall, there was not a lengthy discussion before it
>> came
>> out).
>>
>> Oh, looking at IEN-71, in the packet format description, it says "data,
>> padded
>> with zero octets at the end to make a multiple of two octets". So Vint's
>> comment
>> about the length was right on target.
>>
>> It mentions host name lookup (_not_ DNS; it was servers which had a copy
>> of
>> the host table) as the intended appplication. Time was also early, IIRC.
>> My
>> recollection is that TFTP was the first non-datagra protocol (i.e. not
>> single-packet transactions) to make use of UDP, but my memory mmay be
>> failing
>> me there.
>>
>>    Noel
>>
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>
> --
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> Vint Cerf
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>


-- 
Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
Vint Cerf
1435 Woodhurst Blvd
McLean, VA 22102
703-448-0965

until further notice