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

[Gergely Buday]

https://www.inc.com/computerfreaks

is the working link.

- Gergely

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> ezt
írta (időpont: 2025. jan. 29., Sze 7:41):

> 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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