[ih] Nit-picking an origin story

[Jack Haverty]

I also heard a similar story while I was at BBN, probably from someone 
in the ARPANET group.  But it occurred after IMPs had been installed and 
were reporting to the NOC.  I'm not sure how the NOC could have put 
something out at the West Coast sites to remotely monitor lines.   IMPs 
did provide that function, but what other equipment could have been 
installed "before BBN had an IMP on the Net"?

A similar story circulated about SATNET, where the Intelsat IV operators 
(in DC IIRC) refused to believe that some company in Boston could 
predict an outage involving the satellite channel between the earth 
stations in West Virginia and England.  Until it happened again.  Most 
of the satellite usage at the time was to carry television feeds, which 
could tolerate some signal degradation.  The SIMPs used a satellite 
channel to create SATNET, and watched the behavior of the data flow 
continuously.  Incipient problems were reported back to the NOC at BBN, 
who had learned to spot the early signs of failures and called the 
Intelsat NOC to report them.   Intelsat quickly learned that those 
people up in Boston should be listened to.

My favorite ARPANET story concerned the TIP dialup lines, which were all 
over the country.  It went something like this:

Some computer in the NOC had the job of testing those lines.  It 
accomplished that by simply dialing out to each phone number, to see if 
it answered and the TIP was available.  With a lot of lines, it might 
take day(s) to get through the entire list.  Any non-responsive line was 
tagged for the next field-service visit to the site involved.

There was some line that had been tagged as "out of service", and Field 
Service had been unable to find anything wrong after several visits.  So 
someone in the NOC figured out when that line would be tested, and 
patched in to the phone line to listen.  The phone rang, and was picked 
up.  A woman's voice said "Hello?".  The modem screeched at her.   The 
woman said "Oh no, not you again!".

Somehow the phone number in the master list had been corrupted. The NOC 
had apparently been making annoying calls to someone (IIRC, in the US 
Midwest), probably for months.

My own similar personal experience with Operations was while I had a 
student job in the late 60s, writing some kind of analysis program for 
an MIT Metallurgy course.  I was using CTSS (the campus timesharing 
service at MIT in the late 60s).  When I tried to run my program CTSS 
crashed.  After it crashed a second time, I called the CTSS operator to 
report what I had done.  He was skeptical of course that a mere mortal 
user could crash CTSS.  I told him I'd try again as soon as CTSS was 
revived.  CTSS came up.  I ran my program.  CTSS crashed.    My phone 
rang.  It was the operator, who immediately said "Don't run that program 
again!".

I can't confirm the truth of the ARPANET and SATNET stories, but I 
remember my day spent crashing CTSS.   Operators can learn to listen to 
Users.   It just takes a bit to earn their trust and confirm your 
competence.

Jack


On 8/24/25 13:20, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> I think Bob Kahn might have been the origin of that story.
> v
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 2:34 PM John Day<jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> I heard a story, which I think is true (someone can correct me if not)
>> that in the very early days before BBN had an IMP on the Net, BBN could
>> monitor the lines of the ARPANET between UCLA, UCSB, SRI, and Utah. They
>> noticed a certain behavior on the line between UCSB (it might have been
>> UCLA) and SRI that always led to the line going down.  So one day, they saw
>> the behavior and called PacBell to tell them that this specific line
>> between USCB and SRI was about to go down. The conversation supposedly went
>> like this:
>> PacBell: You are at UCSB?
>> BBN: No.
>> PacBell: Then you are at SRI.
>> BBN: No
>> PacBell: Then where are you!?
>> BBN; Cambridge, Massachusetts.
>> PacBell: Yea, right. (click)
>> A few minutes later the line went down.  ;-)
>>
>> There was another phone call and this time the guy listened.
>>
>> John
>>
>>> On Aug 24, 2025, at 13:57, Ole Jacobsen via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> "A History of The ARPANET: The First Decade"
>>>
>>> Dated 1 April, 1981.
>>>
>>> Page 17:
>>>
>>> "DECCO was able to handle all the contractual details with the
>>> common carriers for circuit leases. Most of the required 50 kilobit
>>> circuits used in the ARPANET were leased through DECCO from AT&T,
>>> but a small number of circuits were leased from other carriers such
>>> as General Telephone. In addition, DARPA arranged for a special
>>> point of contact in AT&T (long lines), which greatly facilitated the
>>> interactions between the network system contractor, DARPA, and AT&T.
>>> The selection of network node locations and the internode
>>> connections (and, therefore, the location of circuit terminations)
>>> was a specialized topology problem and represented a difficult
>>> theoretical problem in its own right. To help solve this particular
>>> problem, DARPA contracted with the Network Analysis Corporation
>>> (NAC)."
>>>
>>> You can get the full report here:
>>>
>>>
>> https://ipj.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/A-History-of-the-ARPANet.pdf
>>>
>>>
>>> Ole J. Jacobsen
>>> Editor and Publisher
>>> The Internet Protocol Journal
>>> Office: +1 415-550-9433
>>> Cell:   +1 415-370-4628
>>> Docomo: +81 90 3337-9311
>>> Norway: +47 98 00 26 30
>>> Web: protocoljournal.org
>>> E-mail:olejacobsen at me.com
>>> E-mail:ole at protocoljournal.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
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>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
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