[ih] early internetworking

[Brian E Carpenter]

I couldn't find a well-defined date for the start of automatic Telex internetworking. Electronic switching of Telex seems to have arrived in early 1969, according to Wikipedia.

The first version of CCITT Recommendation F.68 ("Establishment of the Automatic Intercontinental Telex Network") was published in December 1972**. Given CCITT timelines, that presumably means that the work started in the late 1960s.

Of course that was very definitely circuit-switching, but it was also message-switching, and I think there was a sort of multicast provision.

Anecdote: While I was briefly in charge of CERN's phone system, the operators told me that the worst time of their year was when the Physics Nobel Prize was announced. There was an amazing peak in Telex traffic (inbound if the winner was at CERN, outbound otherwise) with paper jams, ink ribbon catastrophes, and multiple retransmission attempts, often overnight due to time zones. It was a horrible technology operationally.

** https://www.itu.int/ITU-T/recommendations/rec.aspx?rec=10965&lang=en

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 15-Apr-24 08:41, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> It appears that John Day via Internet-history <jeanjour at comcast.net> said:
>> I am surprised that there was not a lively discussion of this.  It is an honest question. It is unclear to me what precisely
>> the solution to internetworking was?  I don’t want to suggest anything and affect the answer, but I guess I could.
> 
> Seems to me it depends on what you mean by internetworking.
> 
> Telephone systems were fighting about interconnection in the early
> 1900s leading to the 1913 Kingsbury commitment in which AT&T promised
> to interconnect with other telcos so long as their service area didn't
> overlap with Bell's.
> 
> I suppose Mailgrams were sort of internetworking, kind of.
> 
> R's,
> John