[ih] early networking

[Lyman Chapin]

> On Apr 20, 2024, at 5:07 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On 20-Apr-24 23:31, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>> In the early 70s, people were trying to figure out how to interwork multiple networks of different technologies. What was the solution that was arrived at that led to the current Internet?
> 
> It's for Vint to comment, but I have always understood that Pouzin's two 1974 papers were the recipe. If that's not the case, I really don't understand the question. But it's not what they built. IPv4 is one protocol to rule them all.

I tried to make a similar point to Brian Berg when he was working on the IEEE TCP/IP Internet Milestone. He didn’t like my comments at all.

> I remain concerned that both the wording of the Plaque Citation and the abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed attribute to the May 1974 journal paper a concept that it does not in fact include. In that paper Vint and Bob describe the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks, but they do not introduce the idea that such an interconnection might be considered, architecturally, to be a higher-order entity—a network of networks—with properties different from those of the individual networks interconnected. That concept does appear in INWG 42, in which Louis Pouzin coined the term catenet—“an abstract PSN resulting from the juxtaposition of several PSNs.” The phrase “to form an internet” in the abstract is also misleading, as the 1974 paper does not use the word “internet” and does not describe the features that an internet might have.
> 


> From: Lyman Chapin <lyman at interisle.net>
> Subject: Re: Ready for Review! - TCP/Internet Milestone Proposal
> Date: November 9, 2023 at 10:50:26 AM EST
> To: Brian Berg <brianberg at gmail.com>
> Cc: Lyman Chapin <lyman at interisle.net>
> 
> Hello Brian -
> 
> A few comments after a first read; maybe more later.
> 
> 1. The following sentence appears in the "abstract describing the significance” section:
> 
> Appearing in May 1974, the paper described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that supported the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks to form an internet.
> 
> A similar sentence appears in the "What is the historical significance of the work” section:
> 
> This paper described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that supported the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks to form an internet.
> 
> Neither the word “internet” nor the concept of “an internet” appears in the 1974 paper, which discusses "the interconnection of packet switching networks” but does not consider what that interconnected set of networks might be called, or what it might mean (from the standpoint of network architecture).
> 
> Louis Pouzin used the term “catenet” to describe what we now call “an internet” in October 1973:
> 
> In October, Pouzin distributed INWG 42, a tutorial titled “Interconnection of Packet Switching Networks” that detailed the concepts that were being discussed in INWG. This paper introduced the term catenet (from concatenated network), defined as “an abstract PSN resulting from the juxtaposition of several PSNs.”
> 
> The first use of the word “internet” as a shorthand for “internetwork” is uncertain—the DARPA program was called “Internetting” and was based on Bob’s concept of "open architecture networking” (1972), but it’s not clear if they used “internet” to mean what we mean by that word today.
> 
> 2. The citation does not contain the “...to form an internet” phrase, but it does contain the following:
> 
> This paper described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that supported the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks into a "network of networks.”
> 
> The use of quotation marks implies that the term “network of networks” appears in the paper referenced. It does not.
> 
> 3. This clause in the “What is the historical significance of the work” section:
> 
> ...they teamed up to spell out the details of what became TCP/IP.
> 
> ...suggests that TCP, and the description of it in the 1974 paper, arose entirely from the Vint/Bob collaboration. But as we should all know, nothing like this happens in such a neatly delimited vacuum :-) Vint was the editor of the first draft of an International Transmission Protocol (ITP) that was produced at the second INWG meeting (7–8 June 1973) in New York and distributed at the meeting as a set of supplements to INWG 28. Roughly three months after that meeting Vint and Bob distributed INWG 39, which they described as an attempt to collect and integrate the ideas uncovered at the June 1973 INWG meeting, as well as some ideas worked out since then by "various other people” (they specifically named Gary Grossman and Gérard Le Lann). The 1974 paper was an update of INWG 39. While INWG and the other research groups were trying to consolidate and reconcile INWG 39 and INWG 61—leading to INWG 96 in July 1975—DARPA went all in on INWG 39/TCP, and the rest is history...
> 
> I understand that in the “Milestone” context the nuance that always attends an historical development is hard to convey without enervating the milestone itself, and I do not in any sense disagree with "Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Enables the Internet, 1974” as an important milestone. However, it would be unfortunate to promote the already widely-held impression that TCP as a technological achievement was entirely the product of a collaboration between two individuals.
> 
> - Lyman
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