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

[Jack Haverty]

Short answer -- yes, well before 1983.

The planning for 1/1/1983 began before sometime before 21 September 
1981.   That was the date of the first ICCB meeting.  My notes from that 
meeting contain a list of technical issues that had to be worked out in 
anticipation of the "Jan 83 System (heavy load)".

The ARPANET was managed at that point by DCA, as an operational 
network.  So the task of getting ready for TCP fell on the guy in charge 
at DCA, who was Joe Haughney.  I'm not sure of all that he did, but he's 
the one who set the 1/1/1983 date for the cutover.

Joe's daughter Christine recently (2023) put together a podcast "The 
untold history of how the internet almost didn't happen", which contains 
more details about who did what during that timeframe. It's still online at:
https://www.inc.com/computerfreak  I don't recall everything in there 
(IIRC I'm on it a little bit too), but it might make a good historical 
resource, containing a view from the operations perspective.  On the 
podcast, Joe explains, somewhat gleefully, that he was the one who 
picked New Year's Eve for the cutover.

There was a *lot* of preparatory work before that cutover, which turned 
out to be somewhat boring.  We had engineers and programmers standing by 
to fix whatever problems occurred.   But after "the switch" was thrown 
--- nothing much happened.

For example, NBS (now NIST) created a program for testing new TCP 
implementations to make sure they followed the spec.   At BBN, in 
preparation for the later DDN activity, we set up a service which would 
run the NBS tests for clients (using a dialup link), and then help them 
as consultants to fix whatever wasn't working.   There was lots of work 
to convert older programs like Telnet, FTP, and mail to use TCP instead 
of NCP, and to get ancillary, but important, technologies such as SNMP 
and ICMP widely implemented.

Thanks to ARPA, TCP had already been implemented for many different 
types of computers, so the task was in many cases just getting the 
various owners of ARPANET machines to put TCP into their systems.  A 
threat (actually promise) was made that after the cutover date, NCP 
connections would no longer work at all.  That was apparently enough 
motivation.

It took well over a year, but the cutover went smoothly.  IMHO that was 
directly due to the advance planning and related work to get ready.  The 
cutover got all the attention, but the work beforehand made it successful.

I don't really remember what machines had TCP over what schedules. But 
DCA ran the ARPANET and had SRI with Jake Feinler managing the "NIC" 
(Network Information Center) on SRI-KL.  That's where I'd expect to find 
lists of machines (e.g., the HOSTS.TXT file that was used before DNS 
existed), as well as the DCA Newsletters which came out periodically and 
captured the status of the ARPANET and computers attached to it.   All 
that kind of information would have come from the NIC.

Jack

On 1/28/25 22:04, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Jack Haverty wrote:
>> SATNET, and ARPANET, were both continuously managed by the NOC at
>> BBN. TCP, and a collection of "core gateways" had become increasingly
>> important to users, especially in the UK in Peter Kirstein's group,
>> which had to rely on TCP through SATNET to access computers in the US.
> This would have been before 1983, correct?  I'm curious which
> (important) computers were avaiable through TCP?
>
> It seems to me the transition from NCP to TCP was somewhat gradual.
> Many histories make a big deal out of the 1/1/83 flag day, as if the
> entire network switched from NCP-only on one day, to TCP-only the next
> day.  But reading more carefully, I gather some hosts were TCP only or
> dual TCP/NCP long before that.  Is that correct?

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