[ih] Interop historical material?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 11/22/21 6:26 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> Speaking of Interop....
>
> Has any of the material from the Interops been preserved?   There were 
> administrative pieces, like lists of vendors, floor maps, titles of 
> sessions, speakers' presentations, attendee lists, and such as well as 
> mountains of presentation slides, papers, vendor handouts, and 
> promotional material.

I was a leader of the team that designed and deployed the Interop nets 
from the outset in the late 1980's.  Many of the early show nets were 
designed at my house.  My now wife worked at Dan Lynch's company ACE 
("Another Cute Employee") trying to manage the herd of cats that was the 
shownet team.

A lot of material from Interop exists.  There is an active body of folks 
who designed, deployed, and operated the show net over the years.

My own website has some ancient materials 
(https://cavebear.com/archive/interop/) including the handout from the 
tours we gave of the net infrastructure.  (BTW, the very first of those 
tours was the one I gave to you and Vint at one of our DC shows.)

There was also the Linda Feferman film from an early show - 
https://youtu.be/SMkKIaHee4c   I'd sure like to get a better print of 
that, or better the original, uncut footage.

Those of us who worked on the Interop net have masses of materials 
cached away, much of it online.

But some was definitely not preserved - we never talked about our movie 
nights when we'd take over some comfortable vendor booth at night when 
the show was closed and watch movies and pass around a lot of single 
malt - most of which we bought using Dan Lynch's credit card.

And more than one of us met our then-to-be spouses while working on the 
show net.

The show had a rule - connect and try to interoperate.  We were not nice 
to vendors who tried to be islands.  And when we did find a vendor that 
was doing bad things (whether by intent or accident) we were not slow to 
cut them off.

We had to make things work - this was practical networking at its finest 
and most stressful.  We had to cover every detail from connectors and 
splicing to multi-homed BGP to IP multicast to ATM VPI/VCI routing to 
dragging wire through parking lots and coring buildings.

There were several dimensions to the show net.  The most obvious was the 
topology.  We had 45/8 as our address space that we dragged around from 
place to place.  Not long after we started we multi-homed that address 
block, which often severely stressed the route damping of our external 
connectivity providers as we bounced up and down in the days when we 
brought up that block in a new location.

What was not seen was the evolution from a star configuration to a 
rather massive rib-and-spine physical topology.  We had to get the basic 
infrastructure into a convention center fairly quickly before the trucks 
came onto the floor.  We had to invent a system of pull-down drops with 
bungie cords to stay out of the way of the trucks.  And within minutes 
after closing we had to release those drops back to the ceiling to get 
out of the way of the trucks removing the vendors stuff.  And there was 
a lot of other network cable infrastructure that went out to areas other 
than the show floor.  For example, we often had laser scopes on building 
rooftops to provide links to other locations.

We had everything.  In the early shows we had TCP/IP, ISO/OSI, DECnet, 
and Netware.  We had lots and lots of routers - we had pairs of Cisco's 
and Wellfleets and I think some Proteon and 3COM routers.  We had lots 
of media types.  The early shows used yellow hose ethernet but we jumped 
onto Synoptics and David Systems twisted pair ethernet the moment we 
first saw it.  We also had FDDI (and we found bugs in the 
specifications) and ATM and just about everything else, including 
ethernet-over-barbed wire.  We were also fairly intent on making IP 
multicast work (and it did.)

Rarely seen were the warehouses where we built the intrastructure before 
the show and did a lot of testing (including full power-off/restore 
testing.)  We would build the net and pack it onto large trucks for 
shipping to the convention centers.  I remember us loading 46 large 
trucks on one occasion.  Dave Bridgham (FTP Software) and I were 
considering buying a used C130 as a way to move some of our gear, 
especially when we had a fast shift, such as from Las Vegas to Paris or 
Tokyo in a week or two.

The convention centers were large - it was physically impossible to get 
around when things went awry.  So we deployed an entirely separate 
physical network that we called the "spy network".  We used this for 
several things.  One was to get to terminal servers that attached to the 
RS232 serial ports of all our our infrastructure devices.  That way we 
could get control from our NOC.  We also had systems of mirrors mounted 
on piezo-electric crystal steering devices so that we could switch the 
fiber optic links of the spy network so that we could drop a packet 
sniffer anywhere we wanted.  (We had passive splitters on many of the 
fiber links.)

We also used a lot of rather heavy grade fiber cables - we ended up 
depleting the US military's stockpile of certain many-strand, 
quick-connect fiber connectors.

I developed the first Internet "butt set" as a tool to get out on the 
floor and begin diagnosing problems within seconds after arrival.  
(Parts of that still exist in some of the tools now sold by companies 
such as Fluke and one of my fellow designers of that went on to form 
other diagnostic tool companies, such as Air Magnet.)

We had a lot of fun doing the show net.  For instance we had very early 
VoIP - I remember being on a call with NTIA about the yet-to-be formed 
ICANN and mentioned that I was calling over the net (from the show 
floor) and hearing some very surprised sounds from people who did not 
know that such a thing was even possible.

And on another occasion I used some early RTP/RTCP based audio-video 
software from Precept Software - I had a camera+microphone duct-taped 
onto a hardhat and carried a laptop with a stack of batteries duct-taped 
on.  I sort of looked like a terrorist-in-training.  I interviewed 
people on the show floor. My wife called it the "husband cam" because 
she could see everyone I looked at - and I looked a lot: in those days 
the vendor booths often had what we referred to as "booth bunnies".

The show was a target for attack.  The very first attack was rather mild 
- Carl Malamud and I were setting up some NCD Xterms and suddenly a 
foreign desktop appeared on all of them.  Someone was trying to steal 
username/password pairs via faux login screens.

The net at the shows was just a thin layer over the work to get that net 
deployed.  We had to deal with immature technologies, new 
implementations, and constraints that were often far from technical.  
For instance, we had senior union electricians who figured they could 
bend, cut, and splice our coax cables - or worse, our fiber optic 
cables. We learned how to deal with the unions - from peeling off bills 
from thick wads of twenties, to pointing out that fiber optic cables are 
pipes for light and perhaps could be better handled by people from the 
plumbers' unions, to simply bringing along our own, and trusted, union 
electricians.)  We weren't always within the law - like when we pulled 
fiber optics through the active railroad tunnels at the Atlanta 
convention center.

We were a smelly bunch - convention centers are not air conditioned 
while the trucks are going in/out.  And in Las Vegas that meant working 
in 100F+ heat.  And we would work 24 hours a day for days on end.  We 
had to mandate sleep and shower periods.   (But even then we were a 
smelly bunch - for instance when we got snowed in in DC and trucks 
started dumping manure for a garden show days before we were able to get 
out networking gear out.)

In addition to the tech a lot of other stuff happened.  For instance I 
first met a friend by climbing through her car window as we went to blow 
off steam doing some white water rafting in western Pennsylvania.   
About 30 of us (all wearing Motorola radios that kept squawking) got 
mugged directly in front of the White House.  (Although the muggers had 
guns I think our group was better armed - one does not realize how 
useful to networking a good knife can be.)  We had parties, such as when 
we rented the Air and Space museum in DC, the roof of the the La Defense 
arch in Paris, and the Howard Hughes Suite (two floors) at the now gone 
Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

         --karl--