[ih] Separation of TCP and IP

[Craig Partridge]

I looked at this question twenty (?) years ago and swapped notes with Dave
Reed and I think Danny Cohen.

>From what I recall (and I think I have notes somewhere but not immediately
to hand).  Yes Danny was doing voice experiments and TCP wasn't cutting
it.  There was a hallway discussion of Jon Postel, Danny and Dave (and I
think that's the list) in early '78 (so you've correctly dated it) and the
agreement was to split TCP in two and create UDP.   Key point is splitting
TCP and creating UDP happened at the same time.

Craig



On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 1:16 AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> I'm interested in finding out more about the process by which TCP and IP
> were
> separated: to begin with, how it came to be recognized that this separation
> was a good thing. (This split was what enabled the later creation of UDP,
> of
> course.) In particular, that the basic service model (of what later became
> the internet layer) should be directly usable by applications, and that the
> complete data network be accessible not _just_ only via TCP. I am also
> interested in who drove this change (if any players in particular stand
> out).
>
> I have poked around a bit in the early IEN's, but I didn't find much on
> this
> specific area - either why, or who. From comments in IEN-22 "Internet
> Meeting
> Notes - 1 February 1978" (in "Introduction and Objectives) it sounds like
> the
> formal decision to do the split was made at the TCP meeting the day before.
> The minutes from that meeting, IEN-67 "TCP Meeting Notes - 30 & 31 January
> 1978", don't provide much, though. IEN-66 "TCP Meeting Notes - 13 & 14
> October 1977" shows that there had been a drift in this direction for a
> while; it didn't seem to be present as of IEN-3, "Internet Meeting Notes -
> 15
> August 1977", though.
>
> I arrived on the scene shortly after this happened (my first meeting was
> the
> August 1978 one), but I retain some impressions (gained no doubt from
> discussions with people like Clark and Reed). These are the impressions
> that
> I retain: that Danny was _a_ significant force in making this happen,
> because
> of his voice work - for which timeliness was important, not correctness.
> (In
> IEN-67, "Arrangements - Cohen" Danny "complain[ed] about TCP-3 becoming all
> things to all people".) Is that correct? (If so, it's probably his most
> significant technical legacy.) For others, I think Dave Reed may have been
> in
> favour too (perhaps he'd already started to think of RPC-like things). And
> perhaps some of the other voice people - e.g. Forgie? And I'm sure the PARC
> guys were trying to throw a few clues our way. Am I missing anyone? Did
> anyone stand out as being a bigger influence than the rest?
>
> Maybe there's some significan paper that discusses the architectural
> benefit
> of making the basic unreliable data carriage substrate accessible to _some_
> applications, but the concept didn't seem to get much coverage in the IENs.
> Maybe it was so obviously the Right Thing that not much discussion was
> needed, and the only question was when/how to do it?
>
>         Noel
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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>


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