[ih] Host-Host vs NCP (Was Re: Confusion in the RFCs)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Steve Crocker

    > Somewhere along the way, people repurposed "NCP" to mean Network
    > Control *Protocol*

When there was only one protocol stack running on the ARPANET (HHP et al), it
didn't need a name. When the second one (TCP/IP) appeared, we needed names
for each, and we started using 'NCP' as the name for the first one ('NCP' was
sort of in use already to refer to that collection of things, as the name for
the software that implemented it), and backronymed it to the more
sensible/appropriate 'Network Control Protocol'.

Fun fact: the CHAOS people at MIT retained, for some years, 'NCP', and the
old expansion of it, as the name for the CHAOS protocol implementation; for
example, see:

  https://github.com/bill790/chaos/blob/master/ncp.c

	Noel