[ih] A paper

[vinton cerf]

Jack,

at DARPA request around 1975 (?), Paul B and I (and perhaps others)
prepared a paper regarding the disposition of the Arpanet. We proposed that
the IMPs become the property of the various participants and that the
operation become a cooperative. DARPA decided instead to simply carry on
with central management by handing operational responsibility to DCA and,
finally, to shut the system down in 1990. It isn't clear that the
cooperative idea would actually have worked but it's indicative of Paul's
proclivity for distributed operation.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 2:00 AM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> I don't have access to the IEEE archives, but IIRC Baran's point was a
> technical one - that there shouldn't be any single central computer that
> was managing the network by performing functions such as setting
> routes.    That's true, and was incorporated in the ARPANET IMPs, where
> no IMP was "in charge" and if any IMP (or even the NOC) failed, the
> remaining IMPs could continue operating just fine as a functional network.
>
> What I was referencing was a non-technical design decision -- the notion
> that there shouldn't be any single person, corporation, or organization
> "managing the network".   The ARPANET, and IIRC all other networks of
> the day, were under a single organization's control.   The Internet
> tried a different approach, where "no one in charge" was the design
> principle.   EGP/BGP was part of the technology to implement that
> policy, although at the time the motivation for EGP was simply to make
> it possible for other people to build a gateway and experiment, while
> keeping the "core" at least safe from disruption.
>
> As a side effect, such mechanisms may have introduced something like a
> "right to connect" enabling anyone with a router to join the Internet.
> But we didn't really think about that at the time.   You still had to
> find someone already inside the network willing to add a wire connecting
> their router to yours.
>
> Apologies if I got the Baran info wrong; I read that paper way too long
> ago....
>
> /Jack
>
>
>
> On 7/18/21 7:14 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > On 19-Jul-21 13:03, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> > ...
> >> One of the design principles of the network (which
> >> may not appear in "documentation") was that the network must not have
> >> any single point of control, no one in charge.
> > That was indeed the key to worldwide success, far beyond its necessity
> > for "national security" reasons. Even today, the Internet seems
> > remarkably hard to switch off, even in totalitarian states.
> >
> > I think it is in the documentation. Paul Baran wrote it down explicitly,
> > way before ARPANET was conceived.
> >
> > [BARAN, P. 1964. On Distributed Communication Networks, IEEE Trans. on
> > Communications Systems, CS-12:1-9]
> >
> >      Brian
>
>
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