[ih] History of Tier 1 Networks

[John Day]

Ahh, yes there were several people at Bell Labs who saw where this was going and were quite active in the standards work, especially in linking databases and networking. In fact, one of them was the International chair of the ISO OSI committee.

I was referring to the traditional part of AT&T (I somehow never saw Bell Labs as being that) ;-) The previous comments were about how the core AT&T ignored networking for a long time. In contrast, European PTTs picked up on the threat much earlier.

John

> On Apr 27, 2026, at 09:13, Anthony Martin <ality at pbrane.org> wrote:
> 
> John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> once said:
>>> I would agree. In the US, AT&T showed little interest in packet
>>> switching until very late in the game.
> 
> Leonard Kleinrock via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> once said:
>> Early on, AT&T argued that packet switching would not work, and
>> even if it did, they wanted nothing to do with it (notwithstanding
>> the fact that their scientists did do some worthwhile mathematical
>> modeling of it).
> 
> That isn't the whole story.
> 
> Sandy Fraser's work on packet switching at AT&T Bell Labs is notable.
> Spider started in the early 70s. This led to Datakit in the early 80s
> and commercialized by AT&T. It was still in use up to the early 2010s
> supported by Datatek Corp. Many of Fraser's papers have at least one
> reference to a Kleinrock paper.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Anthony