[ih] Failures of the early Internet

[Jack Haverty]

Yes, there was TCP work in both pieces of BBN.  At first, Bill Plummer 
was doing Tenex on the PDP-10, and I was doing the first Unix 
implementation on a PDP-11/40.  Both of those were involved in the "TCP 
Bakeoff" that Jon Postel organized.  Later more implementations were 
done, e.g., Charlie Lynn in Div4, and in Div6 Gurwitz (Vax Unix), Hinden 
(TAC), Sax/Edmond (HP3000 Unix), Wingfield/Nemeth (11/70 Unix) and maybe 
some more I've forgotten now.   For the historians, lots of detail in 
the BBN QTRs of the era, accessible on DTIC.
Jack

On 1/22/24 17:09, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>   
>
> I am pretty sure Charlie Lynn was working on a TCP implementation in Div 4 (Packet Radio group) when I was  there.  I did figure out eventually that the gateway work was in Div 6.
> barbara
>      On Monday, January 22, 2024 at 03:28:15 PM PST, Jack Haverty via Internet-history<internet-history at elists.isoc.org>  wrote:
>   
>   Ahah!  Another piece of history falls into place.
>
> I recall Vint asking me at some point if I'd be willing to take over the
> gateway work and turn the core Internet into a 24x7 operation, as the
> Arpanet had become by then.  I didn't have a clue how to do that but it
> sounded like a fun project so I said "Sure".   That may have occurred at
> the same Internet meeting that Noel recalls.
>
> The gateway work moved shortly thereafter, from BBN Div4 (where Packet
> Radio work happened) to BBN Div6 (where Arpanet and various TCP
> implementations were done).
>
> I didn't find out until years later that some of the Div4 folks were
> sure that I had "stolen" their project.   That wasn't true, but I was
> blamed for it.
>
> Now we know the Truth.   Noel was the culprit!
>
> Jack Haverty
>
>
> On 1/22/24 15:11, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>> While I don't remember this specific incident it sounds authentic (I often
>> write down action items to remember them).
>> It may be that I was intending to move into an operation posture, in which
>> case I would want the same division that was monitoring the Arpanet IMPs to
>> be monitoring the gateways.
>>
>> v
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 5:55 PM Noel Chiappa<jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>        > On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 9:20 PM Jack Haverty wrote:
>>>
>>>        > Anybody else have recollections of early failures...?
>>>
>>> This may not be the _kind_ of failure you're thinking of, but I remember
>>> one...
>>>
>>> We had just brought up the first ARPANET-connected gateway at MIT, and we
>>> needed to let the BBN 'core' gateways (I forget what the jargon name for
>>> them
>>> was at that point) know where MIT (net 18.) was connected, now.
>>>
>>> So, I got a copy of the GGP spec (IEN-30, or IEN-109), but I was too
>>> busy/lazy to do a full implementation of GGP - I just typed in (in octal!)
>>> a
>>> 'routing update' packet that showed MIT-GW as connected to net 18, along
>>> with
>>> a few lines of code to send a copy, once a minute, to a list of gateways on
>>> the ARPANET (here:
>>>
>>>      GWTAB:.BYTE  12,3,0,50              ; BBN
>>>            .BYTE  12,2,0,31              ; CSS-GATEWAY
>>>            .BYTE  12,1,0,24              ; DCEC
>>>            .BYTE  12,3,0,110              ; RCC-GATEWAY
>>>
>>> is a copy of a later version of the table). I loaded this in to the MIT-GW,
>>> started it up - but it didn't seem to be working.
>>>
>>> Shortly thereafter, IIRC, I got a call from someone at BBN, saying
>>> something
>>> like 'are you sending us GGP packets?' Apparently all their gateways had
>>> crashed - after they got my routing update.
>>>
>>> It turns out they had changed the format of routing updates - but nobody
>>> had
>>> gotten around to updating the GGP documentation. So I had been sending them
>>> old-format routing updates - which gave the BBN gateways indigestion.
>>>
>>> I remember that at the next Internet meeting, I wound up telling Vint this
>>> story (probably because somebody had been giving me grief about 'crashing
>>> all
>>> the BBN gateways'), and he got this look on his face, and pulled out his
>>> little 'things to do' notebook and wrote something in it.
>>>
>>> We were later speculating that he'd written down 'fire Div 6' (or Div 4 -
>>> whichever one it was that Ginny worked for), because shortly thereafter, it
>>> was announced that Div 6 (or Div 4, whichever one it used to be) would be
>>> replaced by the other one in running the BBN gateways. I have no idea if
>>> there's any truth to that, but the change was made shortly afterwards!
>>>
>>>            Noel
>>>
>>> PS: A later version of the offending code still exists; here:
>>>
>>>      http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/gw/conf/sbr/route-1.mac
>>>
>>> if anyone is interested. Note that the update format there is _not_ the one
>>> in IEN-109! :-)
>>>
>>

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