[ih] ULANA

[Karl Auerbach]

The ULANA project was a project by the US Air Force in the mid 1980s in 
which they went against the pressure for ISO/OSI and wanted something 
that they could actually buy and actually worked.  It was a big 
acquisition for those days, about $1billiion.

I worked with the TRW team to come up with a proposal (we won, but it 
was protested by AT&T and the whole project went down the drain.)

The idea was for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) TCP based products with 
demonstrated interoperability.

At that time there were a lot of nascent companies - Cisco was in a 
garage, there were small companies such as FTP Software (spin-off of the 
Romkey/Bridgham PC/IP project at MIT), Intercon, Beame & Whitside, WRQ, 
Phil Karn's KA9Q, TGV, my company Epilogue Technology, etc.  There was 
also Romkey's Packet Driver design (I wrote the first actual 
implementation) that Russ Nelson picked up on to create a packet driver 
for nearly every kind of Ethernet card for PCs.

The ULANA project put a lot of energy into these companies and helped 
create a world of reasonably interoperable TCP/IP based products that 
could run on commodity hardware for reasonable prices.

But ULANA is rarely mentioned even though it is, in my opinion, an 
extremely important driver of the expansion and evolution of the net.

(ULANA also pushed the Netbios notions of sharing - which is how I got 
attached to what ultimately became RFCs 1001 and 1002.)

I also find it interesting in that those of us who were involved in 
ULANA also tended to become busy with the Interop show net as began to 
grow and evolve around 1987 (under a different name), 1988, and later.

         --karl--