[ih] UDP Length Field?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "David P. Reed"

    > 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.

I wrote of the creation of UDP as a protocol spec, not the origin of the basic
concept of user access to an unreliable datagram service, and thus the
neccessity of splitting TCP-1 into IP and TCP (none of which I was around
for). (It was easy to look up the date for the spec in IEN-Index.txt...)

If one re-reads Craig's comment:

    >>> Recall that the creation of UDP meant TCP and IP had to be split apart

in terms of the basic idea, rather than the spec (discussion of which is what
the thread started out as), then yeah, it was to allow the creation of UDP (as
a distinct user-accessible service model) that IP and TCP were split. Sorry if
I misunderstood you, Craig.

    > As I recall, you, Noel, were not involved at all in the Internet project
    > at that time

I joined the MIT group in the fall of '77. (I did a deal with Dave Clark to do
diagnostics for the LNI, in return for machine time to explore my OS ideas -
which never happened, I pretty quickly drifted into internet work. Nobody in
the group knew anything about PDP-11's, which is why Dave roped me in.)

The first INWG meeting I went to was in August of 1978, the one at Lincoln;
you and I went for MIT.

    > As I recall, you were engaged with token ring hardware during that time,
    > not TCP or IP, along with Clark and Pogran, right?

I don'r recall Dave ever having much to do with the LNI; Ken Pogran did
essentially all the hardware work, once we got the design from Irvine. (I
recall studying the UNIBUS handbook, so may have helped a bit with the bus
interface part, but I don't recall recall.)

I did only software; test programs and simple diagnostics, and then moved on
to a Unix driver. Shortly thereafter I did TFTP (which was simply a ripoff of
EFTP) to give us a way to get bits into and out of the machine. It was the
first serious application to use UDP (although not in the complex ways you
mention; we just wanted the simplest possible thing).

	 Noel