[ih] More terminology (Was: multi-protocol routers, bridges)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Bill Nowicki

    > The PUP routing was running on what became the Sun hardware

This brings up another terminological point. To the best of my memory, the
below wasn't just _my_ style, but was widely used by people discussing the
internetworking layer in the IETF, after the Internet started to really take
off. Perhaps some others could weigh in, to confirm/comment? (And for all I
know, it's still in use; I'm no longer active in networking, so I don't know.)

We distinguished between two very different activities which 'routers'
performed; the handling of user traffic, which we called 'forwarding', and the
computation of routing data/tables (by routing protocols/algorithms), which
was often (but not always, IIRC) called 'routing'. (Slightly confusing, I
know! :-)


Anyway, by "routing" above, I assume you mean what I have denominated as
'forwarding' above. Of course, they also did PUP 'routing' (as above); and
some/all of them eventually did IP 'forwarding' too (to provide the IP traffic
for which Stanford needed an IP ARPANET router).

    Noel