[ih] Some random thoughts about ICCC 72

[Alexander McKenzie]

As I recall, Bob Kahn was in charge of the ARPAnet demo.  As I recall, Al
Vezza was Bob's assistant.

ARPA had BBN send a TIP to the hotel.  AT&T donated (I believe) a 50kbps
circuit from some other nearby Washington site, including the loan of two
Bell 303 50kbps modems.

I believe ARPA paid for the lease of the ballroom, but it may have been
donated by the ICCC management.

Bob and Al arranged for the loan of a raised floor and about 60
character-at-a-time terminals, including one or two Imlacs, a line printer,
Model 33 TTY's, and glass TTYs.  Some contractor (MIT, BBN, .. ?) brought a
Logo turtle. Most of these terminals had never before been connected to a
TIP and there were exciting times getting them all working properly.  Most
of the work was done by engineers and grad students being supported by ARPA
contracts who were sent by their managers to support the demo.

IMPs/TIPs expected to be connected to the rest of the net by two or more
circuits.  They were quick to declare a circuit "down" so traffic would be
routed through an alternate path, rather than queuing for a flaky circuit.
In view of the fact that the demo TIP was connected by only a single
circuit, we patched the demo TIP and the IMP it was connected to to be a
lot slower to declare the line down, in hopes that a flaky line would get
at least some traffic to and from the demo.  This turned out to be a
disaster - when the line got flaky, congestion quickly spread through the
entire ARPAnet and the demos stopped working anyway.  After a little
experience we removed the patches.

Bob and AL had arranged to have a film made that would explain the ARPAnet
and why ARPA had built it - the title included the phrase "Heralds of
Resource Sharing."  For some reason the film wasn't finished in time, so
Bob and Al put together a slide show (one full slide carousel) that ran
continuously in a corridor outside the ballroom.

At one point, the Logo turtle appeared to have gone crazy.  It turned out
someone had switched TIP port assignments so the line printer output was
going to the turtle, and turtle commands were going to the line printer.

I believe most conference attendees arrived thinking packet switching was a
foolish departure from standard communication concepts, and thanks to the
demo went home believing that packet switching was a viable technology.  In
this sense the domo was a success.

A few months before the demo, many (most?) of the ARPAnet host sites were
not able to make use of the ARPAnet to provide access to other hosts or to
support remote users.  Pressure on every site by Larry Roberts to
participate in the demo got almost every site up to speed, and the ARPAnet
began to be used much more.  In this sense, too, the demo was a success.

Cheers,
Alex