[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Greg Skinner]

> On Nov 23, 2021, at 6:25 PM, John Shoch <j at shoch.com> 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.

Arguably, the correct question was in the picture. :)

> b.  I wonder how many other topics Jeopardy has mis-attributed.

In all fairness to the Jeopardy researchers, there are many articles, videos, etc. on this aspect of Internet history, not all in agreement on the terminology.  Perhaps they just used something they thought the audience would relate to.

> 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

The Pup paper <https://web.archive.org/web/20080911135408/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8159/23925/01094684.pdf> you co-authored with Boggs, Taft, and Metcalfe uses the term ‘router’ in the “Naming, Addressing, and Routing” section:

"This routing process is associated with level 1 in the protocol hierarchy, the level at which packet formats and internet addresses are standardized.  The software implementing level 1 is sometimes referred to as a router."

—gregbo