[ih] Early History of the Internet

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Brian,

I concur - the ARPANET was not the Internet.  My personal history of 
Internet "conceptual leaps" that I remember would be:

1) Licklider creates the concept of the "galactic network", and drives 
it to the first stage of implementation by orchestrating the creation of 
ARPANET.   Many others create networks as well, and can argue about who 
was first.

2) Cerf/Kahn create the concept of interconnecting existing networks, 
and drive the implementation of the (first?) concatenation of dissimilar 
networks, first called the "catenet" and later renamed "The Internet".   
Where the ARPANET had created a way for dissimilar computers to 
communicate, The Internet created a way for dissimilar networks (and 
their attached computers) to communicate.

3) Kahn promoted the conceptual shift from unified to distributed 
management, so that The Internet could be managed and operated by 
multiple organizations and remain interoperable.  This resulted in Eric 
Rosen and I developing the concept of "autonomous systems" and 
implementation of EGP and its successors.

4) The Internet executed a "conceptual leap" from being an 
interconnection of networks to being a network itself, with the 
recognition that Internet nodes could be interconnected not only using 
existing networks, but also by using simple wires or fiber or radio 
links to connect nodes.   I'm not sure who was first to think of this 
(might have been me...), but I remember we implemented it at BBN while 
we were responsible for operating the "core" of The Internet in the 
early 1980s.

Over the years on this list I've written more about #3 and #4.  A common 
theme is the coupling of a conceptual leap with actual implementation.   
Concepts are just ideas until someone puts them into hardware, software, 
and wetware (policies, procedures, etc.)

Licklider was my mentor and I think his philosophy infected me.  For the 
8 years I worked in Lick's research group at MIT during the 1970s, other 
than some students' theses I don't recall we ever wrote an academic 
paper.  Instead we built hardware and wrote code. Building the Galactic 
Network was Lick's passion, using collaborating computers to help people 
do everything people do.

Fun times...
Jack Haverty


On 1/9/24 13:00, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Jack,
>
> Thanks, that's a nice article.
>
> But there is a bit of a category mistake. The APRPANET wasn't the
> Internet. I couldn't use the APRPANET in 1971-73 when I took my
> first baby steps in networking at CERN. I couldn't use it in
> 1974-1976 when we tried to set up an inter-university network in
> New Zealand, and I still couldn't use it in 1977 back at CERN.
> (There were a few lucky users in the UK and Norway by then,
> of course, but it was still a network, not a catenet.)
>
> The conceptual leap forward happened, as far as I can tell, in
> ~1974 thanks largely to Pouzin and it became reality in 1981
> (or a little bit earlier if you admit uucp).
>
> Regards
>    Brian Carpenter
>
> On 10-Jan-24 06:33, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> IMHO, this essay provides a good overview of the early history leading
>> to the development of the Internet:
>>
>> https://www.freaktakes.com/p/the-third-university-of-cambridge
>>
>> Professor Licklider was my thesis advisor, and later boss, at MIT, and
>> from 1977 to 1990 I worked at BBN in the same group that built and
>> evolved the ARPANET.   The history told in the essay agrees with my
>> recollections of the time span when I was involved at MIT and BBN.
>>
>> As told in the essay, Lick's vision of a "galactic network" was using a
>> collection of computers, communicating amongst themselves over some kind
>> of electronic means, to assist people in doing everything people do.
>> That was the mantra that drove creation of the ARPANET, and that we
>> tried (are trying) to evolve into today's Internet.
>>
>> Jack Haverty
>> (MIT 1966-1977; BBN 1977-1990)
>>
>>

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