[ih] capacity v bandwidth

[Barbara Denny]

 The only very, very vague memory i have of the router versus gateway topic is later. I think it came up when i was working  on the RP final report. I was talking to Jim Mathis.  It was more like what term should i use in the report. This is a very iffy memory so i don't think it is very useful or trustworthy. Jim left SRI in 1987.
barbara
    On Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 01:02:00 PM PDT, Greg Skinner <gregskinner0 at icloud.com> wrote:  
 
 On Jun 3, 2026, at 11:47 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:


 Oops.  Obviously I didn't mean to send the previous email out.   I was thinking about putting my thoughts down (Sometimes i use draft emails like a diary but never send them). Anyway, my preliminary thought is that the full context of  the word router in this email is for a service on the BRL gateway. The entity is still referred to as a gateway. I also used Gemini to check into the history of the  BRL vax. The story of the BRL vax it tells is interesting but probably has lots of problems (like linking it to packet  radio and logical addressing etc.   i haven't heard of any of this. I think it may be throwing stuff in based on my previous queries. I have been playing with it).
BTW, is RIP still around?
barbara
    On Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 10:26:13 AM PDT, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  



    On Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 10:11:58 AM PDT, Greg Skinner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  

 On Jun 2, 2026, at 6:14 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:


The proceedings of those early meetings are on line as scanned PDF,
at https://www.ietf.org/meeting/past/

For example, in the proceedings of IETF 9 (San Diego, March 1988)
there are ~18 mentions of "router" and ~63 of "gateway".
(Approximate numbers because there might be OCR errors in the PDF

By IETF 17 (Pittsburgh, May 1990) there were ~94 "routers" and
~65 "gateways".

Somebody asked about very old IETF mail archives. As far as I can tell,
the IETF has an archive of its main list from Thu, 09 April 1992 01:51 UTC
onwards, when the list was still at ietf at isi.edu. Any earlier archive
would be of interest and I'm sure they would tack it on.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ietf/?so=date

(Thence, I was led to my own first-ever message to the IETF list:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/8XWGMC_iHsUWlbsnswyeuo6n_-8/ )

As of right now, that archive contains 146146 messages.

Regards/Ngā mihi
  Brian Carpenter



There is some IETF list mail from December 1989 through December 1990 in the 1990-all <https://www.ietf.org/ietf-ftp/ietf-mail-archive/ietf/1990-all> file that is part of the collection that was formerly accessible via ftp.  I don’t know of an older online repository for the IETF list. I also find that regrettable.

The oldest mention of ‘router’ I was able to find in tcp-ip list mail that was gatewayed (lol) to USENET news was posted to mod.protocols.tcp-ip by Ron Natalie in 1985 <https://groups.google.com/g/mod.protocols.tcp-ip/c/YZI3-LftuF4/m/ougprRU0kiMJ>.

—gregbo



I can’t say for sure what service Ron Natalie might have been referring to, but the use of ‘router’ in his tcp-ip post seems consistent with other uses of it at that time, to describe a user space or kernel function implemented on host machines that exchanged routing information.  A couple of those ‘routers’ are actually described (with ‘router’ explicitly used) in RFC 898 (Paul Kirton’s and Mike Accetta’s). [1] For what it's worth, Mike Muuss’ home page has some information about the BRL computing environment, including a picture of a VAX-11/780. [2] (There is a broken link to RFC 898.)
Perhaps you or someone else (Noel or Bob Hinden, perhaps) who attended the RFC 898 meeting might remember if there was any particular mention of ‘router’ in this context.  That might be something to look for in any ICCB or IAB mailing lists from that time period, if they were currently available.
I don’t know of any current uses of RIP.  I found a mention of it on the rtgwg asking for the removal of reference to it because it is almost dead nowadays (paraphrased). [3]
--gregbo
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc898/[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192106/http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/[3] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rtgwg/jWN5rIoqaY1CJgRTfA8KG0b5DS0/