[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Dave Crocker]

On 11/22/2021 4:11 PM, Guy Almes via Internet-history wrote:
>    Recall that Cisco's first big product was the AGS, where the G stood 
> for Gateway.

Around 1986 (maybe 1987), at Ungermann-Bass we did a basic IP relaying 
product and my recollection is that the convention, by then, was the 
term 'router'.


>    I remember the word 'gateway' being used to refer to packet 
> forwarders at various levels in the protocol stack.
>    Eventually, roughly 1987-88, people started to be careful to use 
> 'router' to refer to a level-3 gateway and 'bridge' to a level-2 gateway.
>    And there were application-level gateways such as the various email 
> gateways, including the wonderful box that JANET had in London that 
> reversed the DNS names.

I believe that was a modified version of my MMDF system that had been... 
gatewaying email between the Arpanet and telephone-based systems for the 
Army and then CSNet, since about 1980.

As 'gateway' stopped being the term for simple s/f functionality, it 
came to be used to describe a package that translates between 
heterogeneous systems.  That is, systems that have similarities but are 
not interoperable.  At a minimum, there are differences in formats, but 
more typically differences in semantics.

The differences in semantics turn out to mean that the job of a gateway 
is to lose information, but only as little as is workable.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net