[ih] AOL in perspective

Fri Sep 5 11:48:28 PDT 2025

There was also TIPSERV to augment the TIP user interface.

> On Sep 5, 2025, at 14:15, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Telenet was before my time at BBN.  I don't recall ever hearing much about it other than it was an offshoot from BBN.
> 
> But your timeline seems skewed.  Terminal access to ARPANET began by using TIPs, which were an IMP with a multi-line TTY controller attached.   TIPs became TACs when TCP was added to them, which IIRC was done by Bob Hinden.
> 
> There was also a mechanism called "TIP Login", and a follow-on called "TACACS", which provided a way for humans to "log in to the network" by supplying their name and password.   Most host computers on the ARPANET had some kind of scheme for their users to log in to their machines - if only to know what account to charge their CPU time to.
> 
> I recall that Bob Kahn was especially interested in DLE - Double Login Elimination, with mechanisms to be added to TIP Login and/or TACACS.  The idea was that once you logged in to the ARPANET, the network could tell your computer who you were, so you didn't have to log in again after opening a Telnet connection.  I don't recall how much, if any, of that was implemented.
> 
> There was a battle brewing between the resource owners, who wanted to know who was using their stuff, and the users, many of whom valued privacy and anonymity more.
> 
> But whether or not any of those terminal access mechanisms were used in AOL, or who did it -- I have no idea.
> 
> Jack
> 
> On 9/5/25 09:11, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> Jack,
>> 
>> Do I recall correctly that BBN (or maybe Telenet) provided the dial-up network for AOL, modeled on the ARPANET TACs?
>> 
>> Miles
>> 
>> Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>> This "network status" usage was, IMHO, the beginning of a fundamental shift in how networks were used, and influenced how they were subsequently designed.
>>> 
>>> In the early ARPANET era (1970s), network traffic was dominated by Telnet, FTP, and a bit later email.  Human users connected to their computers using Telnet and worked for the duration of a "session", which lasted for minutes or perhaps hours.  During that session, they might also do file transfers between two computers.  The ARPANET was pretty slow, so file transfers could easily take minutes or more.  Sessions between two ARPANET hosts were relatively long and infrequently opened or closed.
>>> 
>>> So network traffic was largely short packets containing typing and responses, as well as larger packets associated with file transfers, mostly part of sessions lasting minutes or more.
>>> 
>>> Email added to this traffic with the addition of non-human users, i.e., mail servers, who transported mail around the net, including short messages as well as long documents.  But email servers were pretty patient compared to humans, and certainly didn't expect to see the characters they sent echoed immediately.
>>> 
>>> The internal mechanisms of the ARPANET (i.e., the mechanisms inside the IMP code) were designed to carry that mix of traffic - interactive and bulk transfers, carried out over "sessions". In particular, there were IMP mechanisms to set up end-to-end connections between the source and destination IMPs (not the attached hosts).  Those mechanisms created the reliable "virtual circuit" behavior, on top of the underlying unreliable packet switching machinery.  The IMPs delivered a "virtual circuit" reliable byte-stream service to their hosts - much like TCP does now between two devices on the Internet.   For anyone curious, the 1970s ARPANET IMP code has been resurrected and is available online.
>>> 
>>> Marc Seriff's SURVEY program broke the ARPANET traffic pattern. Sessions in SURVEY were extremely short, unlike sessions in human-based traffic.  I wasn't at BBN at the time (actually I was in Lick's group at MIT, same as Marc), but I suspect part of the backlash Marc received about SURVEY was because it was seriously "thrashing" the ARPANET with so many short connections continuously happening.  The ARPANET wasn't designed for that kind of continuous very short session traffic load.
>>> 
>>> Several years later, circa 1980, we had a similar experience with the ARPANET and the emerging Internet which was being built around it.  Lots of now inexpensive minicomputer gear had appeared on the Internet, connected by LANs to the ARPANET.  I was the "Internet guy" at BBN, and one day a NOC operator stuck his head in my office and said something like "What's your Internet doing!!?"  It was probably a bit more colorful than that.  The ARPANET was thrashing again, and the NOC had traced the problem to traffic to/from gateways.   That made it my problem.
>>> 
>>> Debug, XNET, SNMP, ... IIRC, it turned out that Berkeley had just released a new version of BSD, and announced it to the user community.  There were a lot of BSD systems out there.   The new BSD included a new feature, that probed all the gateways out on the ARPANET and generated a status report of "State of the Internet". Updated automatically of course.
>>> 
>>> The server that performed all that probing was part of the new OS release.  And... it was "enabled" by default.   So as the new release propagated out into all those systems, they all started probing every gateway continuously.   Like Marc's SURVEY program, this caused the ARPANET to internally hemorrhage.   A quick call to ARPA, and a quick order to Berkeley, and the cyberattack stopped. Took a while IIRC.
>>> 
>>> Looking back over the history, I see this as the progression of networking from the "human user" model of Telnet and FTP towards the model Licklider had envisioned in his "intergalactic network". Instead of humans interacting with remote computers, we were beginning the transition to computers interacting with each other over the Internet, in support of whatever humans wanted done.   That was Lick's vision - everyone would have their own computer, all able to communicate with each other, and active all the time.  Pretty much seems like what we have today.
>>> 
>>> I don't have the data, but I suspect the mix today of interactive/bulk traffic is quite different from what it was 50 years ago.  There's probably not a lot of Telnet-style activity any more.  But perhaps the growing population of "IOT" microcomputers will replace it.
>>> 
>>> Jack Haverty
>>> 
>>> On 9/4/25 17:27, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> There were complaints when it disappeared, but it also gotten too popular.
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 4, 2025, at 20:25, Vint Cerf<vint at google.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I had forgotten about that!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
>>>>> Vint Cerf
>>>>> Google, LLC
>>>>> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
>>>>> Reston, VA 20190
>>>>> +1 (571) 213 1346
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> until further notice
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Thu, Sep 4, 2025, 19:57 John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>>>>>> In the very early days, the NMC at UCLA did something similar. If you connected to a particular well-known socket, it would print a ASCII map of the current ARPANET and which hosts were up or down. It was discontinued when it would no longer fit on one page.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Take care,
>>>>>> John
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Sep 4, 2025, at 10:42, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Speaking of.  Marc Seriff was one of the co-founders of AOL.  He had
>>>>>>> previously been part of the MIT Dynamic Modeling group. He (along with
>>>>>>> Bob Metcalfe and others) had a hand in making the ARPANET "SURVEY"
>>>>>>> program, which would probe network hosts to see if they were up.  Marc
>>>>>>> told me this:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>   "I tell the story of SURVEY all the time.  For a few days, the whole
>>>>>>>   ARPANET was pissed at me since, in those days, all the systems logged
>>>>>>>   every connection attempt - typically to a model 33 teletype machine
>>>>>>>   sitting in front of the PDP/10 or whatever.  A decent system since the
>>>>>>>   few computers on the network at the time weren't likely to get more
>>>>>>>   than a few connections a day.  All of sudden, I'm poking them once a
>>>>>>>   minute or so.  System managers would come in in the morning to find
>>>>>>>   paper piled behind the teletype and, frequently, ink ribbons that had
>>>>>>>   been torn to shreds!"
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> They program has been recovered and seems to be working, lacking only an
>>>>>>> ARPANET to survey.  Watch your teletypes!
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Survey results were stored on the Datacomputer (also located in MIT's
>>>>>>> Tech Sq building.)
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>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>> 
>> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
>> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
>> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
>> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
> 
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