[ih] Recently restored and a small ARPANET was run using simulated IMP hardware. (was: TTL [was Exterior Gateway Protocol])

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

jack, vis-a-vis packet radio (PR) wireless email vs. the NTP/RIM litigation
yours truly consulted on:

For Sure there was an Internet connection in yours truly's experience:

the first thing yours truly brought up was Norm Abramson's ALOHANET in the
early 70's with respect to wireless email (over the ARPANET) -- for which
yours truly had first hand/personal experience during multiple "vacations"
to Hawaii with telneting from/via the menehune application level gateway at
UH Manoa to SRI-AI. :D

BUT, in the NTP/RIM litigation case: the ALOHANET "experience" (or "prior
art" if you will) didn't "count" against vis-a-vis the various NTP patents
"legitimacy" -- for which there were multiple -- for each NTP patient had
many claims in them and were constructed around "machine-to-machine"
protocol "interaction" via/with an X.25 network, MTA's and a (one-way)
paging wireless network vs. our collective ARPANET(NCP)/Internet(TCP/IP)
Packet Radio net telnet/terminal "experiences" we all had in the 70's and
80's.

geoff


On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 9:39 AM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> Hi Geoff - thanks for that bit of history and kudos!
>
> I think there's an Internet connection in your experience.  I'm not sure
> what, legally, "wireless email" means.  But I suspect that email was being
> sent and received, wirelessly, well before even 1982, if only to and from
> the SRI Packet Radio van that could occasionally be seen then roaming
> around the Bay Area.
>
> Of course, technically, that probably involved a Telnet connection,
> wirelessly, to some PDP-10 running an email program.   But, legally, it
> might meet the court accepted definition of "wireless email".   I learned
> from the lawyers that much of litigation involves arguing about the meaning
> of words and phrases.
>
> So, perhaps someone could have looked for mouldering Packet Radio (aka PR)
> hardware and software, and demonstrated wireless email circa 1978 over one
> or more PRNETs.
>
> Sadly, although I was pretty sure that interesting "prior art" would be
> found in the PR environment, we had little success 7 years ago while trying
> to find anything that might show exactly how PR equipment "downloaded
> instructions".
>
> There's remarkably little readily discoverable material about lots of the
> computer and network systems of the 70s/80s, especially internal details of
> operation, tools, procedures, etc.   Plenty of stuff on Routing, but little
> on other mechanisms, or other types of networks of that era, at least that
> the lawyers and I could find.   IMHO, that's a huge gap even in Internet
> History, since the Internet did not evolve in a vacuum, was itself composed
> of more than the ARPANET, and was surrounded by competitors (remember
> multiprotocol routers).
>
> /Jack
>
> On 9/6/20 11:58 AM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow wrote:
>
> Jack, you're a Most Eloquent purveyor of history and that WHY explain is
> exactly what yours truly was hoping for... Thank You for the elucidation! :D
>
> along the lines vis-a-vis:
>
> So, that's a bit about the "Why", for history to ponder.  The experience
> got me wondering about the "patent history" of The Internet.  Clearly there
> was a lot of innovation in those days.  My recollection is that very little
> was patented, even if only to make sure no one else could.  Maybe someone
> will document the patent-related aspects of Internet History someday.
>
> please excuse/pardon this immodesty: yours truly had a kinda similar
> "lawyered" experience with respect to WHO was the purported
> "inventor"/originator of wireless email in a patent litigation case and the
> "challenge" of finding/presenting any extant legally submissive
> "artifactual proof" to that effect -- for which John Markoff at the New
> York Times wrote about in this 2006 article:
>
> In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/business/technology/in-silicon-valley-a-man-without-a-patent.html
>
> for which some links of "proof" exist -- for some stuff mentioned in the
> above NYT article -- on my website https://iconia.com/ under "wireless
> email" (in case any historians are duly interested)...
>
> geoff
>
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 8:24 AM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>
>> Geoff,
>>
>> Dave's IEEE paper does an excellent job of the Who/What/When/Where.  He's
>> right that it was about 7 years ago.   Time flies... but I guess it's still
>> "recent" when viewed as part of Internet History.
>>
>> For the curious, I can add a bit more about the Why.
>>
>> Sometime in 2013, I got an email out of the blue from Charlie Neuhauser,
>> someone I didn't recognize or remember at all, asking if I was the "Jack
>> Haverty" who authored IEN 158 - documenting the XNET protocol in 1980.
>> Figuring that the statute of limitations must have expired after 30+ years,
>> I cautiously said yes.  Over the next few days, he hooked me up with the
>> lawyers who were involved in a patent dispute - one that had been going on
>> for several decades by then.  In fact, the patent involved had been issued,
>> ran its 17 year lifetime, and expired, but there was still litigation in
>> process about whether or not the patent was valid, and 17 years of
>> violations were alleged cause for compensation in the many millions.   For
>> the next few years I was involved in the battles, working with the lawyers
>> scattered all over the country.  I never met any of them.  All our work was
>> done by email and telephone.   No Zoom then or we probably would have used
>> it.
>>
>> The core issue in the patent battle concerned "downloading instructions",
>> mechanisms such as would be involved in patching or issuing new software
>> releases to remote equipment.   XNET seemed to them to possibly have
>> something to do with that, hence the interest.  The goal was to find hard
>> evidence that such procedures were being done by 1980, which would prove
>> that prior art existed.  Hard evidence literally means "hard" - opinions
>> help, but physical equipment and running code is much more impressive in a
>> courtroom.
>>
>> They hadn't found any XNET artifacts, and I couldn't point them to any
>> surviving implementations.   But I pointed out that my XNET document simply
>> captured the technology that we "stole" from the ARPANET IMP experience,
>> and that the IMPs routinely "downloaded code" from their neighbors and the
>> NOC all during the life of the ARPANET.
>>
>> Since the IMPs had existed since the early 70s, that really sparked their
>> interest, and a search (worldwide) ensued to find old IMPs, in the hope
>> that just maybe one of them still had the IMP software in its magnetic-core
>> memory.  A few IMPs were located, but none were functional.  The one in the
>> museum at UCLA seemed promising, but the owners were reluctant to even hook
>> it up to power after sitting idle for so many years, expecting it might go
>> up in smoke.
>>
>> Then I learned from the BBN alumni mailing list that an ancient IMP
>> listing had been found in a basement.   The story from that point is pretty
>> well described in Dave's paper.
>>
>> Personally, it was an interesting experience.  I worked extensively with
>> one lawyer in San Diego.  I taught him how computers and networks actually
>> work; he taught me a lot about the legal system regarding patents.   IMHO,
>> they are equally convoluted and complex when viewed from the other's
>> perspective.
>>
>> I also learned a lot about the IMP code, which I had never even looked at
>> while I was at BBN.  One task I took on was to exhaustively analyze the
>> parts of the IMP code that implemented the "download new instructions"
>> functionality, writing up an instruction-by-instruction description of how
>> the code accomplished that by interacting with a neighboring IMP.   It was
>> a very clever design, and extremely tight code, even including
>> self-modifying instructions.   Not easy to figure out (or explain in
>> language amenable to a non-technical judge or jury).  So there was great
>> interest in being able to demonstrate the code in action using real
>> software from the 70s and hardware simulators.   Tangible evidence is much
>> better than even expert opinions.
>>
>> The whole legal project came to a sudden end just a few months prior to
>> the first court date.    I was looking forward to going to Delaware (legal
>> action was filed in Federal court in Delaware), and finally meeting some of
>> the people.   But the parties settled suddenly, the case was dropped, and
>> AFAIK the patent question was never resolved.
>>
>> So, that's a bit about the "Why", for history to ponder.    The
>> experience got me wondering about the "patent history" of The Internet.
>> Clearly there was a lot of innovation in those days.   My recollection is
>> that very little was patented, even if only to make sure no one else
>> could.   Maybe someone will document the patent-related aspects of Internet
>> History someday.
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>>
>> On 9/6/20 12:34 AM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow wrote:
>>
>> jack, you've raised my curiosity with respect to:
>>
>> ... There
>> *is* ARPANET IMP software which was recently restored and a small
>> ARPANET was run using simulated IMP hardware.
>>
>> Who/What/When/Where/Why?
>>
>> geoff
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:40 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Lukasz,
>>>
>>> I think that the earliest implementations of TTL called it "Time", but
>>> I'm not aware that anyone actually used time per se in gateways, at
>>> least in the early days (1977-1982 or so).
>>>
>>> TCP implementations didn't do anything with TTL other than set it on
>>> outgoing datagrams, and at least in my implementation (TCP for Unix), it
>>> was just set to some arbitrary value.  Until we had some data from
>>> experimentation it was hard to evaluate ideas about what routers, hosts,
>>> et al should actually do.   The early TCPs did use time in handling
>>> retransmission timers, and there was work a bit later to incorporate
>>> time more powerfully into TCP behavior, e.g., Van Jacobson's work.
>>>
>>> The early gateways, IIRC, used the terminology "time", but in practice
>>> used just hop counts, since time measurements were difficult to
>>> implement.   The exception to that may be Dave Mills' Fuzzballs, since
>>> Dave was the implementor most interested in time and making precise
>>> measurements of network behavior.   I *think* Dave may have used time
>>> values and delay-based routing amongst his "fuzzies".
>>>
>>> The BBN doc you're seeking might have been one of many that discussed
>>> the ARPANET internal mechanisms, e.g., ones with titles like "Routing
>>> Algorithm Improvements".  The ARPANET internal mechanisms did use time.
>>> It was fairly simple in the IMPs, since the delay introduced by the
>>> synchronous communications lines could be easily predicted, and the
>>> other major component of delay was the time spent in queues, which could
>>> be measured fairly easily.
>>>
>>> I even found one BBN ARPANET Project QTR from circa 1975 that discussed
>>> the merits of the new-fangled TCP proposal that some professor had
>>> published -- and seemed to conclude it couldn't possibly work.
>>>
>>> My involvement in implementations of TCPs and gateways lasted through
>>> about mid-1983, so I don't know much of the detail of subsequent
>>> implementations.  For the various BBN gateway/router equipment, Bob
>>> Hinden would probably be a good source.  The other major early player
>>> was MIT and spinoffs (Proteon), which perhaps Noel Chiappa will
>>> remember.   There's also at least one paper on the Fuzzballs which may
>>> have some details.
>>>
>>> One thing I'd advise being careful of is the various "specifications" in
>>> RFCs.  Much of the wording in those was intentionally non-prescriptive
>>> (use of "should" or "may" instead of "must"), to provide as much
>>> latitude as possible for experimentation with new ideas, especially
>>> within an AS.   The Internet was an Experiment.
>>>
>>> Also, there was no consistent enforcement mechanism to assure that
>>> implementations actually even conformed to the "must" elements.   So
>>> Reality could be very different from Specification.
>>>
>>> I don't know of any gateway implementations that have survived.   There
>>> *is* ARPANET IMP software which was recently restored and a small
>>> ARPANET was run using simulated IMP hardware.   I still have a ~1979
>>> listing of the TCP I wrote for Unix, but haven't scanned it into digital
>>> form yet.
>>>
>>> Jack
>>>
>>> On 9/5/20 7:38 PM, Łukasz Bromirski wrote:
>>> > Jack,
>>> >
>>> > I was reading a lot of old BBN PDFs thanks to all good souls on
>>> > this list that post nice URLs from time to time.
>>> >
>>> > I remember reading in at least one of them, that apparently first
>>> > TCP/IP implementations were indeed using TTL as literally “time”,
>>> > not hop count. I believe there somewhere there between PDP docs
>>> > and ARPANET docs I’ve read something to the effect “and from this
>>> > time we changed from measuring time to simply count routing hops”.
>>> > Of course, right now google-fu is failing me.
>>> >
>>> > Quoting RFC 1009 that was already brought up, there’s quite
>>> > direct “definition” of the field:
>>> >
>>> > "4.8.  Time-To-Live
>>> >
>>> >  The Time-to-Live (TTL) field of the IP header is defined to be a
>>> >  timer limiting the lifetime of a datagram in the Internet.  It is
>>> >  an 8-bit field and the units are seconds.  This would imply that
>>> >  for a maximum TTL of 255 a datagram would time-out after about 4
>>> >  and a quarter minutes.  Another aspect of the definition requires
>>> >  each gateway (or other module) that handles a datagram to
>>> >  decrement the TTL by at least one, even if the elapsed time was
>>> >  much less than a second.  Since this is very often the case, the
>>> >  TTL effectively becomes a hop count limit on how far a datagram
>>> >  can propagate through the Internet."
>>> >
>>> > Were there any implementations that survived somewhere and actually
>>> > did exactly that - counted actual time/processing delay, not hops?
>>> > And if it took 2s to process packet, did they really decrement TTL
>>> > by two?
>>> >
>>> > Thanks for any pointers,
>>>
>>> --
>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
>> living as The Truth is True
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True