[ih] Early History of the Internet

[Brian E Carpenter]

Vint,

Thanks; you were there and I wasn't. I just re-read McKenzie's paper from the Annals about INWG (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5723076) and I assume it's accurate.

I've never looked into the details of Cyclades and Cigale. But from what Pouzin wrote in 1972 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800280.811034, published January 1973), the addressing scheme was rather simple and I guess they had fixed routing tables. He certainly discussed interconnection issues - in fact I find the following insight very perceptive:

"Inter-network communications have still to demonstrate
their practical feasibility... In particular,
any function except sending packets is probably just
specific enough not to work in conjunction with a
neighbor."

That's still true. For example, the Internet is notoriously opaque to newly specified IPv6 extension headers.

Regards
    Brian

On 10-Jan-24 14:15, vinton cerf wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <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)
>      >
>      >
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>