[ih] AOL in perspective

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Barbara,

I joined BBN in 1977.  BBN had its own clone of the ARPANET, called the 
RCCNET.  Offices at BBN were connected to some BBN computer. IIRC at 
first terminals were hardwired to some PDP-10, but later they were 
connected to a TIP (actually a Pluribus TIP, or PTIP). BBN used its 
ARPANET clone as an internal LAN.   It also made a good testbed for new 
ARPANET code.

All of the main timesharing machines were on the RCCNET.   But only a 
few were also on the ARPANET.  Those machines handled things like email 
or FTP transfers to/from the ARPANET.

Chances are your office terminal was connected to some PDP-10 which was 
on the RCCNET but not on the ARPANET.   So from your machine, you were 
possibly using a TIP, attached to the RCCNET, but didn't have an acount 
on any machine on the RCCNET which was also on the ARPANET.   You 
couldn't use the BBN internal TIP on RCCNET to directly access any 
ARPANET machines.

Connectivity between the RCCNET and ARPANET happened early in the 
development of the Internet, since the first gateways were developed by 
Ginny Strazisar at BBN.   You could then use TCP to get from a machine 
on the RCCNET to a machine on the ARPANET.  But TCP was still being 
developed (Bill Plummer was driving the PDP-10 TENEX implementation).   
You probably just didn't have the right wiring or accounts to be able to 
get to CMU from your office.

Rob Gurwitz wrote TCP for the Vax.  So it's possible that you went to 
the computer room where the Vax lived (bottom floor of the 50 Moulton 
tower IIRC) in order to use one of its terminals to get to CMU.

Jack

On 9/5/25 13:23, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>   I have been trying quite a while to remember whether I used a tip or a tac to get back to cmua from BBN (or perhaps something else?  Somehow I associate Rob Gurwitz with this).  My friends, who were working in the cs department at CMU, let me keep my account when I started to work at BBN (Not all undergrads had access to cmua. I worked as a programmer for the grad cs department so I had accounts on various machines). I used to go up to a computer room at BBN to do this. I don't remember having a way to do it from my office.  If the command set was different between the access mechanisms, I might be able to figure out which I was using.
> Actually having access to the network was one of the reasons I chose BBN for work after graduation.  I didn't really know much about networking at the point.  My part-time job in the CS department was a project called Gandalf which was a software engineering research project involving integrated programming environments.
> BTW,  in searching for information on cmua,  I found this write-up on the coke machine. I thought people might be interested in reading it if this hasn't been posted before.
> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
> barbara
>      On Friday, September 5, 2025 at 11:15:47 AM PDT, 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
>
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>    

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