[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 69, Issue 11

[vinton cerf]

Steve, that matches my recollection.

Peter Sevcik was deeply involved in Autodin II and subsequent DDN efforts
for BBN before starting his own company, NetForecast:
https://www.netforecast.com/employee/peter-sevcik/

vint


On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 10:13 PM Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Jack,
>
> It's my understanding that Western Union actually won the Autodin II
> contract, beating out BBN because it was viewed that the Arpanet didn't
> have enough security.  It was clear to Steve Walker that the government had
> made a poor choice.  By that time he was working in the Pentagon, no longer
> at DARPA.  Walker expected the program to run into trouble, so he had a
> study done showing that security issues could be handled adequately using
> Arpanet technology.  When the Autodin II development ran into the expected
> trouble and the government conducted a review, instead of, "yes, this is a
> mess but we have no choice so we have to keep plowing money into the
> project," Walker produced the study showing there actually was a choice.
> The Secretary of Defense called the head of Western Union, cancelled
> the contract, and BBN took over.  At least that's the story that was told
> to me.  Walker left DoD shortly thereafter, founded Trusted Information
> Systems, and the rest is history.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 9:59 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> > Gemini didn't catch some Internet-related aspects of History.
> >
> > AUTODIN encountered the ARPANET in the mid 1970s.  There was a program
> > called the "Military Message Experiment" (MME), intended to evaluate the
> > possibility of providing AUTODIN functionality but using the ARPANET.
> > It resulted in an actual experiment using military personnel.  The
> > after-action report is available at
> > https://archive.org/stream/DTIC_ADA155585/DTIC_ADA155585_djvu.txt
> >
> > I was in Lick's group at MIT during that time, and we were implementing
> > electronic mail, so we got involved in the MME.
> >
> > There were quite a few functions present in AUTODIN that weren't of much
> > interest to the ARPANET research community.  AUTODIN messages had
> > security markings.   They also had various levels of "priority", such as
> > ROUTINE, FLASH, FLASH OVERRIDE, et al, which dictated how messages
> > should be handled.  They had notions of "workflow", in which various
> > people in the command chain had to approve ("chop") a message before it
> > could actually be transmitted.
> >
> > Most of such features weren't available in the ARPANET email systems of
> > the era, and there was a strong desire in the community to keep email
> > things simple.  With Lick's oversight and Al Vezza's pressure, we tried
> > to get appropriate primitives for AUTODIN added into the email protocols
> > but mostly failed to reach "rough consensus and running code."
> >
> > One of the artifacts which you can still see today (e.g., in this
> > message) is the "Message-ID:" field which appears if your system lets
> > you view the full header of today's emails.  I lobbied hard to get that
> > included in the ARPANET mail header specs, so that it could be used for
> > functions such as tracking messages as they passed through an approval
> > chain, linking together replies, and other such functionality.  We
> > viewed the message header as a poor place to keep all that metadata.
> >
> > AUTODIN was due for replacement in the 1980s by AUTODIN II, with a
> > typical big government contractor expected to be awarded the contract.
> > After much outside pressure from ARPA and others, BBN reluctantly
> > submitted a proposal, to use the ARPANET technology as the replacement
> > for AUTODIN.
> >
> > We submitted what was probably the largest proposal BBN ever did. We
> > were surprised to receive an acknowledgement from the government
> > congratulating us for the brevity of our proposal.  All the other bids
> > were much more verbose, with lots of foldout color diagrams and such
> stuff.
> >
> > Our surprise turned to shock when we learned that we had won the
> > contract.   BBN had recently reorganized, and the contract landed in our
> > new division.   Since I was the one with the more "operational"
> > interest, I became the first program manager for the new DDN contract.
> > That seemed like a full time job, involving lots of paper pushing which
> > wasn't very interesting.  So we hired someone from a big government
> > contractor to run the contract.  He quickly observed that it was much
> > more than a full time job, and created a DDN Program Office at BBN, with
> > lots of staff to handle all of the contract paperwork, scheduling,
> > reports, and such stuff.  Whew, I escaped that one.
> >
> > Autodin II had become the Defense Data Network, and was basically a
> > larger clone of the proven ARPANET technology.
> >
> > As part of a "System Engineering" task, we helped get various
> > applications running on the DDN.  One I recall was a "mail gateway" for
> > the US Army in Europe, used for communicating between Army supply
> > officers and vendors out in the public world in Europe.  That was how
> > things like toilet paper were purchased for the various military bases.
> >
> > That "gateway" was extremely low tech.  A soldier was stationed at a
> > desk, with two terminals.  One terminal was on the "inside" mail system,
> > where security was highly important.  The other terminal was on the
> > "public" network (X.25 probably), where all the vendors were
> > accessible.  The soldier would retype messages to pass them "through"
> > the gateway.
> >
> > The Defense Message System (DMS) apparently happened after I had moved
> > into the networked database world in the 1990s.   So I don't know much
> > about DMS.  I wonder if the security, priority, and other issues
> > surfaced in the 1970s Experiment were solved in the DMS deployment.
> >
> > In any event, there was a lot of AUTODIN DNA in the Internet History.
> >
> > Jack Haverty
> >
> > On 8/16/25 14:25, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> > > one might also check the timeline for AUTODIN
> > >
> > > from gemini:
> > >
> > > The *Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN)* was built between 1959 and
> > 1963,
> > > with its initial operational phase beginning in 1962. It was officially
> > > declared fully operational in February 1963.
> > >
> > > The system was originally designed as the "Combat Logistics Network"
> > > (ComLogNet) to handle the U.S. Air Force's logistics challenges. In
> 1962,
> > > the U.S. Department of Defense realized its broader value and
> transferred
> > > it to the Defense Communications Agency, renaming it AUTODIN.
> > >
> > > The initial network consisted of five switching centers in the United
> > > States, with a global expansion beginning in 1966. AUTODIN remained a
> > > primary communication system for the DoD until it was replaced by the
> > > Defense Message System (DMS) in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM John Shoch via Internet-history <
> > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >> My friends at the Computer History Museum always warn me about
> declaring
> > >> "firsts":
> > >> a.  you better get the facts absolutely correct, and
> > >> b.  you better be fanatically precise in defining the terms (every
> noun,
> > >> every adjective, etc.) -- and you better include the definitions.
> > >>
> > >> The UCLA statement which started this exchange lacks both -- thus,
> > almost
> > >> by definition, it is ambiguous and imprecise (and thus probably
> wrong).
> > >>
> > >> Efforts at NPL and Sage are certainly worth looking at.
> > >>
> > >> In addition, there was earlier work at SDC -- apparently in 1963
> w/SRI,
> > and
> > >> ca. 1966 with MIT Lincoln Labs.  I will make no judgement about any
> > >> "firsts" but let me bring to everyone's attention a couple of items:
> > >>
> > >> --There is an interesting and comprehensive historical look at this
> Q-32
> > >> work in a paper by David Hemmendinger, published in 2016:
> > >> "Two Early Interactive Computer Network Experiments."
> > >>
> >
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2016/03/man2016030012/13rRUwciPgt
> > >> You can also access it at:
> > >> https://cs.union.edu/~hemmendd/History/network6.pdf --In that paper
> > >> he discusses an experiment in 1963 between SRI and SDC. At that time
> > >> Lick had taken over ARPA/IPTO, and ARPA had taken over the Sage Q-32
> > >> prototype that had been built for Sage at SDC. Lick wanted SRI to
> > >> connect to the Q-32. Doug Engelbart described the work at the History
> > >> of Workstations conference in 1986 [I spoke at the conference, and
> > >> heard Doug's talk, but 40 years later I do not remember these
> > >> comments]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/61975.66918 "Lick moved
> > very swiftly. By early 1963 we had a funded project. But,
> > >> whereas I had proposed using a local computer and building an
> > interactive
> > >> workstation, Lick asked us instead to connect a display to the System
> > >> Development Corporation's (SDC's) AN/FSQ32 computer, on site in Santa
> > >> Monica, to do our experimenting under the Q32's projected new
> > time-sharing
> > >> system. (Converting the Q32 to be a timeshared machine was SDC's IPTO
> > >> project.) Later that year, our project was modified to include an
> online
> > >> data link from Menlo Park to Santa Monica, with a CDC 160A
> minicomputer
> > at
> > >> our end for a communication manager, supporting our small-display
> > >> workstation."
> > >>
> > >> --Hemmendinger also discusses the more well-known work several years
> > later,
> > >> ca. 1966, by Tom Marill (at CCA) and Larry Roberts (at MIT) to connect
> > the
> > >> TX-2 to the Q-32 machine at SDC.
> > >>
> > >> --There seems to have been a CCA Technical Report in mid-1966, but I
> > have
> > >> never seen it;  Hemmendinger cites it as:
> > >> T. Marill, "A Cooperative Network of Time-Sharing Computers:
> Preliminary
> > >> Study," Technical Report No. 11, Computer Corporation of America,
> > >> Cambridge, Mass. (1966).
> > >> The preliminary study is also cited in a bibliography about the
> Arpanet:
> > >> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA026900.pdf
> > >> Marill, T. A cooperative network of time-sharing computers:
> preliminary
> > >> study. Cambridge, Ma., Computer Corporation of America, I Jun 66. 53
> p.
> > >> CCA-TR1-1 NIC 06458.  [Is this an SRI NIC identifier?]
> > >>
> > >> --The Preliminary Report may have been a predecessor or an early draft
> > or a
> > >> pre-print of a paper published later that year, to which Larry Roberts
> > is
> > >> added as a co-author:
> > >> Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts, “Toward a cooperative network
> of
> > >> time-shared computers” in Proceedings of the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer
> > >> Conference, pp. 425-431, ACM, New York, NY (November, 1966).
> > >> https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1464291.1464336
> > >>
> > >> --Some interesting highlights from the paper:
> > >> --They talk in passing about shipping programs from one machine to
> > another,
> > >> but then focus only on providing remote terminal access -- from a
> > terminal
> > >> on one computer, through a "network" to a program running on another
> > >> computer.
> > >> --An "elementary" model merely routes characters from a user's
> terminal
> > >> through to the local machine, and then out another terminal link to
> the
> > >> distant machine.  This requires no modifications at either end, but
> > runs at
> > >> terminal speeds.
> > >> --They then expand the model:  "Thus, a possible alternative technique
> > for
> > >> achieving increased data-rates without greatly increasing the burden
> on
> > the
> > >> monitor would be to use high-rate data-only links, supplementing these
> > by
> > >> low-rate command-plus-data channels over which communication to the
> > remote
> > >> monitor could take place."  But this would require changes to the OS
> or
> > >> monitor.
> > >> --"The first step in that direction is the establishment of a message
> > >> protocol, by which we mean a uniform agreed-upon manner of exchanging
> > >> messages between two computers in the network."
> > >> --These are point-to-point messages, but can provide error control:
> > "The
> > >> primary reasons for considering the establishment of a message
> protocol
> > are
> > >> the following: ... By formatting transmissions into messages, and
> > including
> > >> a check-sum with each message, transmission errors can frequently be
> > >> detected. If detected, the messages can automatically be retransmitted
> > in
> > >> accordance with the protocol."
> > >> --But this was (at the time the paper was written) still an
> experimental
> > >> work-in-progress:  "As will be seen below, work is proceeding on an
> > >> experimental network between the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Laboratory
> and
> > >> the Q-32 computer at System Development Corporation."
> > >> --"As soon as possible, a series of demonstrations and experiments
> will
> > be
> > >> performed using the experimental network. The experience gained will
> be
> > >> reported at the conference."  [Was anyone at the 1966 Fall Joint?]
> > >>
> > >> For more background on these early "networking" efforts I commend to
> you
> > >> the Hemmendinger paper from 2016.
> > >>
> > >> John Shoch
> > >> --
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