[ih] distributed network control: Usenet

Brian E Carpenter brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
Wed Jul 21 13:57:20 PDT 2021


On 22-Jul-21 03:50, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
> Well... yes.  I wasn't quite sure if you were alluding to BBN - I kind 
> of thought you might have been referring to either DoD or the US Government.
> 
> Still - what about the various component networks - like NASA SPAN, and 

> the European nets?  Or did those come later?

SPAN, and the US version of HEPNET, were DECnet based (Phase IV, and migrating to Phase V == DECnet/CLNP as time went on). The European TCP/IP 
scene was pretty fragmented, that's why Carl Malamud's book is such a treasure, but there are at least four references, starting with Carl:

1. Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, Carl Malamud, Prentice 
Hall, 1992.

2. A History of International Research Networking, Howard Davies and Beatrice Bressan (editors), Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (A somewhat mistitled book, since it describes only the European scene, with much emphasis on OSI.)

3. The “hidden” history of European Research Networking, or “The sad saga of the obscurantism of some European networking leaders and their influence on European Research Networks”, Olivier H. Martin, 2012, available at http://www.ictconsulting.ch/papers.html. 
(Highly recommended!)

4. Network Geeks – How They Built the Internet, Brian E. Carpenter, 2013, Springer, ISBN: 978-1-4471-5024-4. (Badly titled by the publisher and not so highly recommended, but Chapters 7 & 8 are relevant.)

   Brian

> 
> Miles
> 
> 
> Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> Weren't those all managed by the same organization or its contractor, 
>> in the early 80s before EGP?
>>
>> I remember that at one point BBN was the contractor managing CSNET 
>> (Dick Edmiston).   NSFNET started in mid-80s and IIRC was thoroughly 
>> dominated by Dave Mills' Fuzzballs.  Our experiences when Dave was 
>> experimenting with connecting his Fuzzies to the core Internet was a 
>> primary motivator for EGP, which made it possible for Fuzzies to 
>> connect and do their thing without impacting the core.   BBN 
had some 
>> managerial role in NSFNET too IIRC.
>>
>> After EGP, and probably more importantly BGP, the world of 
>> Internetworking changed.
>>
>> /Jack
>>
>>
>> On 7/20/21 4:03 PM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jack Haverty wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>> Really?  NASA SPAN, DOEnet, then CSnet, and then the Supercomputer 
>>> Center Networks, and the NSFnet regionals & Backbone?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> 
> 




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