[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Steven G. Huter]

this is awesome! thank you for the excellent summation of the history and 
the key highlights.

steve huter

On Tue, 23 Nov 2021, John Shoch via Internet-history wrote:

> 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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