[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[John Shoch]

OK, because of Jeopardy, we are here again:  Arpanet vs Internet, IMP vs
packet switch vs gateway vs router, internetworking vs Internet, etc.,
etc.......

I'm sitting here suffering from complete sensory overload:
--I can "see" Vint Cerf, sitting there, smiling calmly, the epitome of
restraint and grace in the midst of ongoing confusion.
--I can "feel" Bob Metcalfe, gently kicking me under the table, and
whispering:  "Let it go, John....."
--I can "hear" Bob Taylor, spinning in his grave, yelling at me, "Speak up
you idiot! You promised me you would speak up!"

Moments like this, when I fibrillate because of conflicting inputs, only
get me in trouble.....sigh:

a.  The Jeopardy answer was posed as, "in 1969...sent the first message
over the Internet."  The answer is poorly framed, and there can be no
correct question.   That box (designed and built by BBN), no matter what
you call it, was not in 1969 the first to send bits over the Internet.
b.  I wonder how many other topics Jeopardy has mis-attributed.
c.  At the time, we would have called it a switch or a packet switch;
internetworking gateway emerged later, and then morphed into a router.  An
IMP certainly did routing, but most of us would say that "router" is a
shortened version of "internet router."
d.  Ginny, BBN, and others deserve a tremendous amount of credit for
implementing what was then a gateway, now an Internet router (with an
uppercase I) for TCP/IP.  As acknowledged by the Computer History Museum:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/networking/19/375/2071
e.  But we often forget that the process was a lot of work, with an
evolution over an extended period of time.
[One small example, just to remind us of what it was like over 40 years
ago, from IEN #25 in 1978:
"The gateways currently use a static routing procedure based on routing
tables assembled into each gateway.  In the near future, we plan to
implement a simple gateway routing scheme, which will improve internet
performance by providing the capability to route around failed gateways and
networks."  https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien25.pdf  To repeat, 1) it was
the best IP/TCP gateway of it's time, 1978, but 2) in order to add a new
network you had to reassemble the code for all gateways, and 3) there was
not yet dynamic routing around a failed network or gateway......]
f.  And let's not forget the earlier implementation of an internet gateway
(with a lowercase i) by Ed Taft and Dave Boggs [not me], ca. 1974-1975.
Also from the CHM:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/networking/19/375/2090

Jeopardy research must be hard;  so is computer history.

John


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