[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Jack Haverty]

Two excellent observations about the early days!  1) Someone was in 
charge and in control.  2) The goal was to make the system work and be 
actually used.

Back in late 1981, you (Vint) asked me to take on the Gateway Project at 
BBN, explicitly to make the Internet operate as a 24x7 reliable service, 
following the lead that the Arpanet had developed over more than a 
decade of operation as an infrastructure.   More about that here for the 
curious: 
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2019-November/005595.html

That task could have been a research effort, producing protocols, 
algorithms, and mechanisms documented in RFCs for anyone to use. But 
there wasn't time to wait, so instead we just copied the mechanisms of 
the Arpanet, translating them into the world of TCP/IP.   Much of the 
Arpanet "management" technology wasn't well known or documented, but by 
locating the "Gateway Group" physically near the Arpanet control center 
(NOC), and recruiting some people from that world, it was possible to do 
"technology transfer" (a buzzword at the time).   The Internet acquired 
"operations" tools by plagiarizing what had been working for years in 
the Arpanet.   That was the fastest way to "make it work".

Separately, there were efforts, initiated by someone, to orchestrate the 
"Flag Day" on the Arpanet, to declare TCP/IP a DoD Standard, to define 
and implement a formal certification program for new TCP 
implementations, and probably other efforts I never knew about.

Someone was in charge, and someone was doing lots of things to "make it 
work".

It wasn't perfect.   Actually it was a bit chaotic IIRC.

For example... Jon Postel took on the task of documenting TCP/IPV4 so it 
could be referenced as a Standard.  RFCs were released.   DoD declared 
them mandatory for all military systems that involved communicating 
computers.

A bit later, at BBN we were assisting various pieces of the government 
in getting their computer systems up and running with their vendor's 
brand-new, certified, standard TCPIPV4s.  It was a big surprise to 
discover that, although TCP/IP was there, none of the other "tools" we 
had been using for years had been implemented on those machines.

Much of that missing functionality was called "ICMP", well documented in 
RFC 792.  But only TCP/IP had been declared a DoD Standard.   Government 
contractors, who had not been involved in the research community, had to 
implement the Standard.   But the Standard didn't include ICMP.  So they 
didn't implement it.

That made it much more difficult to "make it work".  For example, 
without ICMP as the Internet's Swiss Army Knife, you couldn't even 
"ping" a DoD Standard computer.   I remember we raised quite a fuss 
about that, and implementations started to appear.  I'm not sure if the 
Standard was ever modified to require ICMP.

Other things, like SNMP, were useful but also missing.  Many people 
apparently didn't consider ICMP and its cohorts to be part of TCP/IP.   
We considered such technology essential to be able to "make it work".

-----

Looking back from 2023...

IMHO, one of the inflection points occurred when the culture shifted 
from "make it work" to "make money from the Internet". Interoperability 
(everyone can interact with everyone else) is part of "make it work", 
and conformance to Metcalfe's Law (google it...).   Silos (everyone can 
interact, as long as you stay in *our* silo) are (thought to be) 
preferable for "make money".

I wasn't very involved in the Internet growth as NSF joined and later as 
the first ISPs spun off to become commercial services. Perhaps someone 
remembers if they had any kind of "standards" or "certification" 
involved as the culture shifted.  E.g., was there a "FRICC Standard" for 
computers joining their 'nets?  I recall there were AUPs (Acceptable Use 
Policies), at least at first.   Did these "fade away" and turn into "pay 
us to get on the Internet and you can do whatever you want"?

It's still puzzling (to me) that the Internet has become a global 
infrastructure, and hasn't been surrounded by the web of regulations, 
laws, codes, agencies, treaties, and such non-technical mechanisms that 
have developed around other infrastructures.  Roads and vehicles, 
electric power, marine activities, air transport, railroads, finance, 
water, and even the air we breathe all have such mechanisms.

Is the Internet different?  Or just still too young to have accreted 
such "management" mechanisms?

Jack Haverty

On 9/2/23 02:19, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> I have only a brief moment to respond. The Arpanet, PRNET, SATNET, Internet
> sequence gets its primary stability from the sole source funding of ARPA,
> initially, and the pooling of resources from other DoD components using
> Arpanet. Arpanet was managed by BBN initially (later under contract to DCA
> vs ARPA). It really helped that the Internet development funding came from
> a single source. Decision making was largely in the hands of the ARPA
> program managers, well-informed by the people doing the work. In the
> mid-1980s, ARPA, NSF, DOE and NASA collaborated through the Federal
> Research Internet Coordinating Committee (FRICC) made up of program
> managers from each agency. ESNET, NSINET and NSFNET joined Arpanet as
> backbones of the Internet. Again, common purpose welded the effort into a
> coherent whole. MERIT played a major role in the NSFNET development which
> really elaborated on the multi-network aspect of Internet. MERIT had to
> deal with scaling of the Internet to a dozen or more intermediate level
> networks linked together through the NSFNET backbone. BGP came out of that
> work and has scaled well - now needing more security from abuse/mistakes.
>
> I think there was a common thread in all of this work: people who were
> working on different aspects of the Internet and its constituent networks
> really wanted this system to work. The goal was interoperability linking so
> many different packet switched networks together. Even the Xerox PARC team,
> whose work on PUP and later XNS was proprietary, did their best to give
> hints to the Stanford development team (mostly me and my graduate students
> during the 1974 campaign to specify TCP).
>
> It also helped that commonality and interoperability were key desirable
> properties of the Internet system. These were the metrics by which success
> was measured.
>
> That's all I have time for now - not sure this addresses your questions
> squarely.
>
> v
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 1, 2023 at 2:14 PM Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Vint!
>>
>> To follow up, if I might - since you were there from the beginning (I
>> landed at MIT in 1971, just before Ray's first email, and saw how MIT
>> adopted ARPANET technology, then got to BBN in 1985, just in time to help
>> split off the DDN - the period leading up to the Flag Day is mostly
>> anecdotal history for me)...
>>
>> I've long used the Internet as a model for how communities can approach
>> infrastructure master planning - serving as the basis for our work at the
>> Center for Civic Networking, running a growth planning exercise for
>> Cambridge, and later, in our work with communities around municipal
>> broadband.
>>
>> Now, I'm gearing up a new effort, focused on community-level crowdsourcing
>> for major infrastructure overhaul (as is started to be mandated by
>> electrification ordinances).  The simple notion being that of forming local
>> working groups, to run grand-challenge like exercises, design charettes,
>> crowd funding for projects like a complete infrastructure rebuild for a
>> condo complex (like the one I'm living in, and serving on the board of).
>> How to pull such groups together remains a black art - and insights from
>> the original model are always helpful.
>>
>> In that context, might you share some pithy observations of significant
>> events in the early life of the ARPANET & Internet - how various working
>> groups came together in the days following Lick's initial posting to
>> ARPA/IPTO.  Who did what, to whom, leading to a bunch of folks coming
>> together into ad hoc & ongoing working groups of various sorts?  And, in
>> particular, what conditions/events provided impetus, urgency, and built
>> momentum?
>>
>> Thanks Very Much,
>>
>> Miles
>>
>>
>>
>> vinton cerf wrote:
>>
>> TCP/IP came out of work that Bob Kahn and I did along with my graduate
>> students at Stanford. But the INWG (slightly more formal extension of NWG
>> when it became IFIP WG 6.1) contributed in a highly collaborative fashion.
>> So did UCL and BBN in early implementation phases of TCP and TCP/IP.
>>
>> I tend to associate NWG with Arpanet Host-Host Protocols (and application
>> protocols)
>> and IAB (later IETF) with TCP/IP and associated applications
>>
>> v
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 10:29 AM Miles Fidelman <
>> mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Well Vint might have a definitive voice on this.
>>>
>>> So... Vint,
>>>
>>> Would you consider TCP/IP to have been initiated by the NWG?
>>>
>>> What about SMTP - which originated as a late-night hack (that eventually
>>> became SMTP)?  As I recall, that was initially announced via a postal mail
>>> packet.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Miles
>>>
>>> vinton cerf wrote:
>>>
>>> +1
>>> v
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 9:57 AM Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Well...
>>>>
>>>> The original suite of protocols for the Arpanet -- NCP, Telnet, FTP, et
>>>> al
>>>> -- were developed by the Network Working Group (NWG).  The NWG evolved
>>>> over
>>>> the years into the IETF.  The formal creation of the IETF was roughly
>>>> mid-1980s.  The process of formally declaring a protocol a
>>>> proposed/draft/(full) standard evolved over the years.  Depending on how
>>>> precise you want to be about the existence of the IETF and the
>>>> formalization of protocols, I think you can make the case either way.
>>>> From
>>>> my perspective, I would say the original suite of protocols did indeed
>>>> originate in the (predecessor of) the IETF.
>>>>
>>>> Steve
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 12:48 PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <
>>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Traditionally, protocols have never "originated" with the IETF - they
>>>>> become standardized, and maybe standards through the RFC process, under
>>>>> the IETF aegis.  Right back to the original DoD Protocol Suite (did the
>>>>> IETF even exist when the DDN Protocol Handbook was first printed?).
>>>>>
>>>>> Miles
>>>>>
>>>>> Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>> On 29-Aug-23 05:52, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>> Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 8/24/2023 4:07 PM, John Klensin via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Probably a larger fraction of applications work has come to the
>>>>>>>>> IETF already half-developed and in search of refinement and
>>>>>>>>> validation by
>>>>>>>>> the community
>>>>>>>> I'm sure there are examples, but I can't think of an application
>>>>>>>> protocol that was originated in the IETF over, say, the last 25
>>>> years,
>>>>>>>> that has seen widespread success.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> d/
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Seems to me that HTTP remains under the IETF umbrella.
>>>>>> But it did *not* originate in the IETF. It actually originated about
>>>>>> 20 metres horizontally and 3 metres vertically from my office at
>>>> CERN,
>>>>>> more than a year before TimBL presented it at IETF 23 (I was wrong a
>>>> few
>>>>>> days ago to assert that IETF 26 was Tim's first attendance). The WWW
>>>> BOF
>>>>>> at IETF 26 was more than 2 years after HTTP was first deployed, to my
>>>>>> personal knowledge.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Is it not the
>>>>>>> RFC process, and IANA, that actually matter, in the scheme of
>>>> things?
>>>>>> In the case of HTTP, it was running code that long preceded both
>>>> rough
>>>>>> consensus and an RFC. I think this is completely normal and still the
>>>>>> best method. Second best is code developed in parallel with the spec.
>>>>>> Third best is OSI.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>      Brian
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>>>
>>>>> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
>>>>> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
>>>>> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
>>>>> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>
>>> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
>>> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
>>> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
>>> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
>>>
>>>
>> --
>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>
>> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
>> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
>> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
>> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
>>
>>