[ih] capacity v bandwidth

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jack Haverty 

    > In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called
    > "gateways". Today they're called "routers".  But why the change...?
    >
    > So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon,
    > ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities.

If my memory isn't failing me (it well might be), I can take part of the
blame. 

I do remember that I was pissed off because everyone and their brother
(across the industry generally) called any box that did digital
communications between two things a 'gateway'. E.g. a box that did email
forwarding from BITNET to the Internet was called a 'gateway'. I.e. 'gateway'
was useless as a technical term, because it covered an impossibly wide range
of functionalities.

(I am not sure if the p4200, the first Proteon router product,
post-dated the 'gateway' -> 'router' change; I'd have to try and find an
original manual. If it pre-dated, I may have taken Proteon experience into
account too.)

So I campaigned (I think it was me) in the IETF community to come up with a
term limited to internetwork-level datagra packet switches, and 'router' was
picked.


I don't know if that change post-dated the creation of the IETF or not. I
remember such large-scale questions (i.e. not within the purview of a WG,
after Phill set up the WG structure) were often discussed on the main IETF
mailing list, so if we still have the email archive from the start of that
list, someone can dig into it.

I remember that before the IETF existed, there was an email list (I think
hosted at CNRI maybe, although CNRI didn't exist until 1986 - Jon's minutes
of TCP/IP meetings stop at the end of 1980) where a lot of early TCP
internetworking discussions ('TCP internetworking' since there must have been
PUP internetworking discussions, too, inside Xerox) happened. Does anyone
remember what it was called?

Any technical history of the creation of TCP internetting would _really_
benefit from having access to that email archive (if it still exists
somewhere; if not, maybe it would be possible to re-create it by picking
through preserved emailboxes; or perhaps someone who printed out all their
email still has those printouts).

I feel sadly wary that a lot of our earliest history has been lost (since we
didn't use physical memos, which many technical histories depend on for 'nuts
and bolts' primary sources) - except for the copy stored in 'meat' CPUs (who
will soon start dying off - historians take note, and act now, while you can).

	Noel