[ih] Early History of the Internet

[vinton cerf]

Brian,
Bob Kahn and I were working on the interconnection of networks starting in
1973. The first I saw the idea of dropping the underlying networks and just
using routers with IP knowledge to build a network was when Cisco System
announced their router design. Maybe Pouzin had that idea (no distinct
network below the gateway) but I think all our implementations tended to
have some kind of underlying network. Even the Ethernets had gateways (and
ARP for the hosts). I thought Cigale was the packet network and it had an
underlying routing system (did it?) and that hosts and gateways would be
needed to interconnect the networks. Of course, Pouzin had only the one
CIGALE network (kind of like the Arpanet but with fixed datagrams rather
than variable length message transport. ) I don't recall that he was
working on a multi-network system?
vint


On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 4:00 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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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