[ih] Correct name for early TCP/IP working group?

[Vint Cerf]

Barry Leiner succeeded me at DARPA and created the Internet Advisory Board
as a successor to the Internet Configuration Control Board. He later
renamed the IAB: Internet Activities Board and created about ten task
forces of which INARC was one. The fastest growing task force was IETF run
first by Mike Corrigan and then by Phill Gross. Around 1989 it became clear
that the IETF was the big task force kahuna and the other task forces were
either abandoned or consolidated into the Internet Research Task Force,
first chaired by David Clark and then Jon Postel.

v


On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 12:14 PM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>     > From: Jack Haverty
>
>     > My recollections, all IIRC of course
>
> Thanks very much for those; I had previously set out to improve the "TCP
> and
> Internet Meetings" page:
>
>   https://gunkies.org/wiki/TCP_and_Internet_Meetings
>
> a bit (I'd be very pleased to hear any comments about any remaining errors,
> and what else it needs), and I 'borrowed' a few chunks of your message, to
> explain the context, and who came - I hope that's OK.
>
> I too did live through most of this (the first meeting I came to was the
> August 1978 one). I just re-read most of the early minutes, looking for
> mentions of TCP 2.5 (didn't find much, alas), and most of the discussion
> seems to be about topics that later turned out to have been irrelevant,
> like
> EOL/Urgent and fragmentation.
>
> Perhaps I have missed something, but it seems, in retrospect, that the only
> really significant change from TCP 2 to TCP 4 was the TCP/IP split, and the
> creation of UDP.
>
>
> Note to future historians: there may be some detail errors in that message
> (well, it does say "IIRC"), so cross-check. E.g. "The IETF was formed to
> Engineer the operational Internet as it grew. The IRTF was formed to pursue
> the Research" - There was an 'InArc' formed at the same time as the IETF:
>
>   https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/papers/inarc.pdf
>
> but it never went anywhere. I think the IRTF was created later - I'm not
> sure
> exactly when, perhaps around the time of RFC 2014? (I have this vague
> memory
> of the IETF and InArc being initially announced at the same West Coast
> meeting, around the time of IETF 1.) Maybe the IRTF was created to do what
> Inarc should have done?
>
> Another one:
>
>     > I had the impression that the INWG was part of the group that thought
>     > the datagram architecture was unworkable. Mentally, I associated it
>     > with X.25 and X.75 style of interconnecting networks. But perhaps
> that
>     > was a mistake.
>
> I wasn't there, but I get the impression that some considerable part of the
> INWG actually was sold on datagrams: Pouzin, whose CYCLADES/CIGALE was the
> key step from the ARPANET to internets, was a big player in INWG; and Cerf
> and Kahn's "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" originally came
> out as an INWG document. See Alexander McKenzie's "INWG and the Conception
> of
> the Internet: An Eyewitness Account":
>
>
> https://alexmckenzie.weebly.com/inwg-and-the-conception-of-the-internet-an-eyewitness-account.html
>
> for more detail.
>
>         Noel
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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