From nigel at channelisles.net Fri May 1 00:02:22 2026 From: nigel at channelisles.net (Nigel Roberts) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 08:02:22 +0100 Subject: [ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion In-Reply-To: <43834718-3eda-412b-9c48-c78600081fbd@gmail.com> References: <35177edbe7af32.dce75510fd9438@iit.demokritos.gr> <43834718-3eda-412b-9c48-c78600081fbd@gmail.com> Message-ID: <96bb27f0-1e58-4f51-a553-998d832b763b@channelisles.net> In (some parts of? London there were (I think) up to four deliveries per day. As a very small child in the 1960s I (very vaguely) remember there being a morning and an afternoon post in our village in the N. of England. On 4/30/26 22:16, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > On 27-Apr-26 14:13, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: >> I once heard that in Victorian England, at least some parts of it, the >> post >> was delivered four times a day. > > That was certainly the case within London, but it wouldn't work intercity. > (The Penny Post was introduced in 1840.) > > There are surviving letters between Babbage and Lovelace, for example, that > indicate quite rapid interaction. But they were rich people who could > likely > order a servant to deliver a letter on demand. > > I seem to remember that some Sherlock Holmes stories indicate very rapid > postal deliveries within London. > > ??? Brian > >> Thus you *could* carry on a lengthy debate >> with someone that only took a few days. Does anyone have a link to data >> like that? >> >> I was also wondering what the average time was to get a Reply to a >> question >> under that system. Nowadays it *might *be only seconds sometimes, but >> for a >> lot of people the average email response time is still measured in days. >> >> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 12:46?AM Yannis KOROVESIS/COROVESIS via >> Internet-history wrote: >> >>> Going further back than the Victorians wikipedia has the following about >>> "fryktoria" (translated from the Greek original ) as you suspect: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> https://el-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/ >>> %CE%A6%CF%81%CF%85%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1? >>> _x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=el&_x_tr_pto=wapp >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? Yannis >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? On Apr 22, 2026, at 5:14 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? I recently visited Tom Standage?s blog post about The Victorian >>> Internet < >>> https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/> and >>> noticed that he mentioned that Andrew Odlyzko < >>> https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> had read it.? Odlyzko?s name >>> also came up in some literature about the origins of Tier 1 ISPs.? He >>> used >>> to post here occasionally.? You might find some of the Internet system >>> level analysis you?re looking for in his papers. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? --gregbo >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ? -- >>> >>> ? Internet-history mailing list >>> >>> ? Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> >>> ? https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> >>> ? - >>> >>> ? Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? >>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? >>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> -- Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net From vgcerf at gmail.com Fri May 1 00:29:23 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 03:29:23 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <6c864dfa-00e5-4a50-bf0f-4988747b7d87@dcrocker.net> <8144A24F-6071-41B5-8A23-D48754421D38@comcast.net> <1AFA8864-DDE4-45B8-A00C-6E4F5A866955@tony.li> <35DAD7A4-49F9-43F7-8538-B2936C5DE0E0@tony.li> Message-ID: Dave, I think it was more than that - a real software problem requiring recompilation and reloading of the HP print system. I did have a connector problem but it was associated with the demonstration of Arpanet conducted in 1974 or 1975 from Sao Paulo, Brazil. On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:06?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 4/30/2026 4:55 PM, vinton cerf wrote: > > To add to Dave's story > > > Since MCI Mail wound up being relevant to Internet history, when Vint > used MMDF to interconnect with Internet mail, I'll add to his addition. > > MCI Mail was built using a collection of vendors for different parts of > the system. (HP had the remote laster printers.) > > Six months before the scheduled public demo was the first meeting, with > all the vendors in the same room. > > Vint got up to greet everyone and set the stage. He said we did not > have much time but we were going to meet the September deadline. Then > he said that if anything stopped us -- not that it would, but if it did > -- it would be a connector. > > As I recall, that middle-of-the-night-before-the-demo problem that Vint > described turned out to be a connector. > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 1 00:40:51 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 19:40:51 +1200 Subject: [ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion In-Reply-To: <96bb27f0-1e58-4f51-a553-998d832b763b@channelisles.net> References: <35177edbe7af32.dce75510fd9438@iit.demokritos.gr> <43834718-3eda-412b-9c48-c78600081fbd@gmail.com> <96bb27f0-1e58-4f51-a553-998d832b763b@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <4d3b5303-a9c9-48ed-8366-269c558b0b43@gmail.com> One must not forget the 'pneu' in Paris (1866-1984). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_pneumatic_post (If you wonder how to pronounce 'pneu' there's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbpWA3ChSSs) Regards/Ng? mihi Brian On 01-May-26 19:02, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > In (some parts of? London there were (I think) up to four deliveries per > day. > > As a very small child in the 1960s I (very vaguely) remember there > being a morning and an afternoon post in our village in the N. of England. > > > > On 4/30/26 22:16, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> On 27-Apr-26 14:13, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: >>> I once heard that in Victorian England, at least some parts of it, the >>> post >>> was delivered four times a day. >> >> That was certainly the case within London, but it wouldn't work intercity. >> (The Penny Post was introduced in 1840.) >> >> There are surviving letters between Babbage and Lovelace, for example, that >> indicate quite rapid interaction. But they were rich people who could >> likely >> order a servant to deliver a letter on demand. >> >> I seem to remember that some Sherlock Holmes stories indicate very rapid >> postal deliveries within London. >> >> ??? Brian >> >>> Thus you *could* carry on a lengthy debate >>> with someone that only took a few days. Does anyone have a link to data >>> like that? >>> >>> I was also wondering what the average time was to get a Reply to a >>> question >>> under that system. Nowadays it *might *be only seconds sometimes, but >>> for a >>> lot of people the average email response time is still measured in days. >>> >>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 12:46?AM Yannis KOROVESIS/COROVESIS via >>> Internet-history wrote: >>> >>>> Going further back than the Victorians wikipedia has the following about >>>> "fryktoria" (translated from the Greek original ) as you suspect: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> https://el-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/ >>>> %CE%A6%CF%81%CF%85%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1? >>>> _x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=el&_x_tr_pto=wapp >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ? Yannis >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ? On Apr 22, 2026, at 5:14 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history < >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ? I recently visited Tom Standage?s blog post about The Victorian >>>> Internet < >>>> https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/> and >>>> noticed that he mentioned that Andrew Odlyzko < >>>> https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> had read it.? Odlyzko?s name >>>> also came up in some literature about the origins of Tier 1 ISPs.? He >>>> used >>>> to post here occasionally.? You might find some of the Internet system >>>> level analysis you?re looking for in his papers. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ? --gregbo >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ? -- >>>> >>>> ? Internet-history mailing list >>>> >>>> ? Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> >>>> ? https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> >>>> ? - >>>> >>>> ? Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? >>>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? >>>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> > From jeanjour at comcast.net Fri May 1 03:19:11 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 06:19:11 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <6c864dfa-00e5-4a50-bf0f-4988747b7d87@dcrocker.net> <8144A24F-6071-41B5-8A23-D48754421D38@comcast.net> Message-ID: <4BF24791-8792-43F1-85A2-CBBDDE2818AE@comcast.net> Well for me science is a bit more than 'just find something that works.' It is about a deeper understanding of the problem space. It is in pursuit of teasing out a theory. And not just any theory, but the simplest with the greatest predictive power. In digging around, I finally came to what I call Newton?s Guidelines. I apologize for goiyng all pedantic, but it is important and something we need to keep in mind more. In my experience the extra effort has yielded considerable results in greater simplicity and less complexity. And on occasion pointed at results that were thought impossible. Regulae Philosophandi 1. Nature is essentially simple; therefore, we should not introduce more hypotheses than are sufficient and necessary for the explanation of observed facts. This is a hypothesis, or rule, of simplicity and verae causae. 2. Hence, as far as possible, similar effects must be assigned to the same cause. This is a principle of uniformity of nature. 3. Properties common to all those bodies within reach of our experiments are assumed (even if only tentatively) as pertaining to all bodies in general. This is a reformulation of the first two hypotheses and is needed for forming universals. 4. Propositions in science obtained by wide induction are to be regarded as exactly or approximately true until phenomena or experiments show that they may be corrected or are liable to exceptions. This principle states that propositions induced on the basis of experiment should not be confuted merely by proposing contrary hypotheses. paraphrased from Newton?s Principia 1726 by Gerald Holton in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought > On Apr 30, 2026, at 23:48, Miles Fidelman wrote: > > Rough Consensus, Running Code, Repeatable Results, and a literature. That's how science works. > > Rough Consensus, Confluence of Vision, and Collaboration. That's how Engineering works. > > Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. > Get Outlook for Android > > From: Internet-history on behalf of Bob Purvy via Internet-history > Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2026 9:37:58 PM > To: John Day > Cc: Dave Crocker ; internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > You are mistaking "process" as "results." Having all the "stakeholders" > present and following some kind of "democratic" process does absolutely > nothing to create a successful result. What it does is what Dave Crocker > said: taking the union of everyone's wishes, so that the end result is > garbage. > > Science doesn't operate as a democracy, corporations don't, and neither did > the IETF. If science worked like the CCITT, we'd still be thinking spicy > food causes stomach ulcers. > > On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 1:10?PM John Day via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Those must be some papers! I will have to check them out. They will rely > > on your years of experience in the IETF and all of the many ISO OSI > > meetings you attended! There is nothing like first-hand experience. > > > > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 12:25, Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > > On 4/29/2026 6:13 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > > >> Andrew Russell's argument in _Open Standards and the Digital Age: > > History, Ideology, and Networks_ (Cambridge UP, 2014) casts this cultural > > difference in another light: that the OSI approach embodied (or, and I > > think this is my gloss, "was hobbled by") old-fashioned governance models > > that were in an important sense more open than the ARPANET/Internet work > > that led to TCP/IP. For, he argues, the Internet innovators had to satisfy > > only one customer: the US Defense Department (or, depending on exactly > > when, [D]ARPA). By constrast, the OSI work as well as work that happened > > before that were international efforts that involved many different > > parties, sometimes with competing interests, and that used the mechanisms > > of co-operation used in other places in societies too (like voting etc.) to > > make decisions. In this account, the problem OSI and other such efforts > > faced is basically that they could not move as fast as those who needed > > only to satisfy a single "customer" of the work. > > > > Both Andrews pretty well describe the differences in the two groups. One > > based on a more authoritarian model and one on a more open representative > > model. > > > > I remember standing around at more than IETF meeting chuckling about how > > closely the IETF resembled a democratic Communist Party. An IETF meeting > > was a Party Congress, where standards were developed but large companies > > were free to stack meetings or just be able to hum loudly, their output > > went to an elite selection of stakeholders that corresponded to a Politburo > > (IESG). Some even suggested people of who were filling the roles of Stalin, > > Beria, Trotsky, etc. it was pretty funny. Nothing serious. When I remarked > > about it someone deeply involved, their remark was, ?O, yea, it is > > definitely organized to be run by an inner circle elite.? Surprising. > > > > Andrew Sullivan?s characteristic of the ISO process is also dead on, '"was > > hobbled by" old-fashioned governance models. Itdefinitely was. Models that > > had been around for over 250 years: Representative Democracy. Which we all > > know from Madison?s Federalist 10 are supposed to be slow and deliberative > > on purpose, Remember ISO standardizes a huge variety of topics: screw > > threads, paper size, nuclear reactors, traffic signs, computing and > > thousands of others. ISO standards arte voluntary. National bodies > > accredit committees to work on specific topic areas. > > > > The National Groups develop proposals for standards and comments and > > modifications to other National Body proposals. These groups consist of > > national corporations and organizations with an interest in the topic. The > > only requirement for membership in the US was ?show up at a meeting!? > > Beyond that there was a requirement to be at the last 2 of 3 meetings so > > one had some idea what was going on. ;-) Same held for International > > meetings. People going to international meetings needed to understand the > > concerns of their colleagues and you didn?t want people getting interested > > just because the meeting was in a nice place. There was work to do. > > Meetings generally lasted from 9am and often late into the night. If not > > meeting, then writing assignments. Meetings have been known to last until > > 4am and reconvene at 8:30 the next morning. I learned why a two hour lunch > > was necessary: 20 minutes to grab something and an hour and half to confer > > with others and try to find consensus. The rumors of lots of fine dinners > > were rare and probably no more often more likely less than at IETF meetings > > from what I have seen. > > > > Since a WG can be small, not all stakeholders may be represented at this > > low level. At International Working Group (WG) meetings on specific topics, > > (can range from 5 or 6 to over 100) all of that is discussed and debated > > and a consensus is formed. The attendees to an international meeting are > > not there to represent themselves but have been entrusted to represent > > their members who could not attend. (National Body delegations much larger > > than delegations are frowned on in the interests of collegial > > idiscussion.) Votes are generally unanimous and great lengths are gone to > > accommodate comments. Once a WG is satisfied with its work, it is forwarded > > to Study Committee (SC). The SC oversees the work of several WGs working on > > related aspects of a larger topic. Consequently, its membership is broader > > but still supposedly experts in this topic. They too do not represent > > themselves but the members of their corresponding National SC. Their > > purpose is to coordinate the work of their WGs and ensure consistency and > > catch errors that the WG missed. Potentially, all National Body > > stakeholders with an interest in the topic are represented by technical > > experts at the SC level. A proposed standard is reviewed by the SC area > > level experts and comments are submitted to be resolved by an editing > > committee (often with a lot of discussion). Eventually a consensus is > > reached and a Draft International Standard is proposed to the SC?s parent > > Technical Committee (TC). (Two levels of deliberation analogous to the > > House and Senate). The TC consists of all stakeholders for the broader > > level of the topic, experts concerned with the longer view, and perhaps a > > more managerial view of the role of the standard. Any last minute comments > > are accommodated, the Standard is voted on, and an International Standard > > is created. You can really see how the ISO process is structured to follow > > a Representative Democracy. Not surprising in that ISO was recreated in the > > post-WWII environment. > > > > I am sure David went into much more detail about how this whole process > > works in his articles. As you can see, it is a long deliberative process to > > ensure the widest input by all stakeholders at every level in the approval > > process. > > > > It is true that approval is by National Body balloting rather than humming > > or a meeting room indicating approval. This will seem strange for the IETF, > > but it can be advantageous, when there are big players to deal with. In the > > OSI work, if the PTTs weren?t proposing something dumb with many PTTs > > supporting it, it was IBM trying to stonewall the process. More than one > > once, I was able to use the voting to work around them and keep the work > > moving or even getting work started that they had been stonewalling for > > years. > > > > I would like to be able to say that one is better than the other, but > > technically I can?t. Both are quite inferior. But if you think about it, > > the purpose of Federalist 10 is slow deliberate process. The IETF likes to > > point to its success, which it has had. But that success is based on a long > > string of technical mistakes (better solutions were known at the time), it > > tended to act conservatively compensated by lots of money, and Moore?s Law. > > As Karl indicated earlier there were good ideas in OSI but well hidden and > > lots of bad ideas from the PTTs (the cost of consensus). OSI was really a > > constant battle between oil and water direction and no real synthesis > > possible. As I said, it was doomed once it was decided to collaborate with > > CCITT. But with no deregulation even on the horizon, it is not clear Europe > > had any other choice. The ISO faction was trying to do more what the IETF > > was doing but to move ahead from where we had gotten to. The PTTs were > > trying to drag telecom back into the Dark Ages. > > > > Karl, why would you go to ITU meetings!!?? They were clearly authoritarian > > and had nothing but bad ideas. > > > > I should read this over, but I am not going to. Sorry for any write-os I > > missed. > > > > Take care, > > John > > > > > > > > > > > > > For the Lynch/Rose book, I did a chapter on the standards process and > > included a superficial comparison with the OSI processes: > > > > > > *Evolving the system*. In Internet System Handbook, D. Lynch, and M. > > > Rose, eds. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. 1993 > > > https://archive.org/details/internetsystemha00erne > > > > > > I did a version of this for ACM Standardsview: > > > > > > *Making Standards the IETF Way* > > > https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/174683.174689 > > > > > > Pete Resnick did an RFC that included a point about the IETF I consider > > fundamental and significantly underappreciated: > > > > > > *On Consensus and Humming in the IETF* > > > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7282.html > > > > > > > > > Russel's focus 'governance model' is helpful, but it it is worth > > distinguishing between at least two venues for this. Also, I think he got > > a critical point wrong, albeit for an understandable reason. > > > > > > * Governance applies to the standards process itself, but also to the > > > operational model. > > > * Having centralized funding does not automatically mean centralized > > > decision-making > > > > > > > > > *Operational Model* > > > > > > The original Arpanet/Internet model had a centralized backbone, with > > > highly independent users (enterprises/hosts). Some ad hoc Internet > > > backbones emerged in the early 1980s, but NSFNet solidified the > > > requirement to permit multiple, independent backbones and finally > > > produced a routing protocol to support this. > > > > > > By contrast the OSI world was dominated by a model of tightly > > > controlled, monopolistic carriers providing backbone services. On > > > the surface, this might be thought to be similar to the Internet > > > model that developed, but the relationship among monopoly carriers > > > was/is profoundly different from the very loose 'co-opetition' model > > > prevalent in the Internet, including for backbone services. > > > > > > Note that X.400 addresses required specifying the email backbone > > > carrier. This led to bizarre business cards that might contain a > > > number of (very long) separate X.400 addresses, differing only by > > > that one attribute field. > > > > > > * > > > * > > > > > > *Standards Process* > > > > > > While it's true the original Arpanet and Internet work derived from > > > central funding and oversight -- and the oversight did, sometimes, > > > get asserted at important decision junctures -- the daily reality > > > for making decisions involved gaining agreement among a collection > > > of highly independent participants. (I see that Steve has made a > > > similar point.) > > > > > > It is worth having a thoughtful discussion to consider whether > > > the historical participation and decision model still, fully > > > applies in the IETF, but of course, that's not a history topic... > > > > > > The OSI world's model for decision-making is unanimity. The > > > Internet's is 'rough consensus', which translates to 'strongly > > > dominant agreement'. Leaving room for routing around minority > > > dissent has a profound effect on the the ability to make forward > > > progress. However, this has not meant ignoring minority concerns, > > > which is nicely discussed in Resnick's RFC. (However it also seems > > > to be far less applicable now.) > > > > > > The Internet approach was aided by an additional, major difference: > > > urgency. The early Arpanet/Internet work was dominated by a desire > > > to have something fielded quickly. Yesterday would have been ideal. > > > By contrast, the OSI world generally had a very casual approach to > > > schedule, measured in years rather than months. (Alas, this is now > > > true for most Internet work, too.) > > > > > > The Internet's reliance on email venues for work, with physical > > > meetings primarily used to focus on essential points of difficulty, > > > permitted steady, incremental progress. For the OSI world, all work > > > took place at occasional, long, face-to-face meetings. > > > Surprisingly, for the Fax-over-email work, I witnessed the latter > > > try to spontaneously make major design changes, literally overnight, > > > intending to make a final decision the next day. > > > > > > It is also significant that the Internet specifications documents > > > were openly available, all through the development process and > > > beyond. The OSI documents were paywalled. Added to this was that > > > participation in the Internet processes tended to be relatively open > > > -- and from around 1987 completely open -- whereas OSI participation > > > was tightly constrained. This meant the Internet work got much more > > > community review than the OSI work did. (A common experience for > > > folk involved in the early Internet work, when traveling around the > > > world, was to come across random technical folk who had read the > > > RFCs. Mine in 1997 was on the northern end of Borneo...) > > > > > > Lastly, the IETF world has tended to develop proof-of-concept > > > prototypes, as specifications are developed, and sometimes has even > > > mandated this. My understanding is that the OSI world did not. > > > > > > I've characterized the resulting difference between these two > > > processes as: The OSI world took the union of everyone's wish list; > > > the Internet world took the intersection. The former tended to be > > > lean and pragmatic. The latter tended to be large, cumbersome and > > > operationally challenging. > > > > > > d/ > > > > > > -- > > > Dave Crocker > > > > > > dhc at dcrocker.net > > > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > > > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > > > +1.408.329.0791 > > > > > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > > > Northern California Coastal Region > > > Information & Planning Coordinator > > > American Red Cross > > > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > > -- > > > Internet-history mailing list > > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > > - > > > Unsubscribe: > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From geoff at iconia.com Fri May 1 10:26:01 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 10:26:01 -0700 Subject: [ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion In-Reply-To: <4d3b5303-a9c9-48ed-8366-269c558b0b43@gmail.com> References: <35177edbe7af32.dce75510fd9438@iit.demokritos.gr> <43834718-3eda-412b-9c48-c78600081fbd@gmail.com> <96bb27f0-1e58-4f51-a553-998d832b763b@channelisles.net> <4d3b5303-a9c9-48ed-8366-269c558b0b43@gmail.com> Message-ID: btw, there also was/is the world's last preserved municipal pneumatic post system in Prague Czech called the *Pra?sk? potrubn? po?ta* that commenced operation in 1889 for which the network extended some 60 kilometres (37 mi). [1] sadly it was rendered inoperative by the August 2002 European floods (which also concurrently wiped out yours truly's basement alcohol/ beat.net dj cigar bar with some 6 feet of water, but luckily it was able to be rebuilt and then later sold to the Russian mafia... :) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_pneumatic_post [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20031011215044fw_/http://www.alcoholbar.cz/index.htm g On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 12:41?AM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > One must not forget the 'pneu' in Paris (1866-1984). > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_pneumatic_post > > (If you wonder how to pronounce 'pneu' there's a video > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbpWA3ChSSs) > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian > > On 01-May-26 19:02, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > In (some parts of? London there were (I think) up to four deliveries per > > day. > > > > As a very small child in the 1960s I (very vaguely) remember there > > being a morning and an afternoon post in our village in the N. of > England. > > > > > > > > On 4/30/26 22:16, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > >> On 27-Apr-26 14:13, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > >>> I once heard that in Victorian England, at least some parts of it, the > >>> post > >>> was delivered four times a day. > >> > >> That was certainly the case within London, but it wouldn't work > intercity. > >> (The Penny Post was introduced in 1840.) > >> > >> There are surviving letters between Babbage and Lovelace, for example, > that > >> indicate quite rapid interaction. But they were rich people who could > >> likely > >> order a servant to deliver a letter on demand. > >> > >> I seem to remember that some Sherlock Holmes stories indicate very rapid > >> postal deliveries within London. > >> > >> Brian > >> > >>> Thus you *could* carry on a lengthy debate > >>> with someone that only took a few days. Does anyone have a link to data > >>> like that? > >>> > >>> I was also wondering what the average time was to get a Reply to a > >>> question > >>> under that system. Nowadays it *might *be only seconds sometimes, but > >>> for a > >>> lot of people the average email response time is still measured in > days. > >>> > >>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 12:46?AM Yannis KOROVESIS/COROVESIS via > >>> Internet-history wrote: > >>> > >>>> Going further back than the Victorians wikipedia has the following > about > >>>> "fryktoria" (translated from the Greek original ) as you suspect: > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> https://el-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/ > >>>> %CE%A6%CF%81%CF%85%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1? > >>>> _x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=el&_x_tr_pto=wapp > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> Yannis > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> On Apr 22, 2026, at 5:14 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> I recently visited Tom Standage?s blog post about The Victorian > >>>> Internet < > >>>> https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/the-victorian-internet/> and > >>>> noticed that he mentioned that Andrew Odlyzko < > >>>> https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> had read it. Odlyzko?s name > >>>> also came up in some literature about the origins of Tier 1 ISPs. He > >>>> used > >>>> to post here occasionally. You might find some of the Internet system > >>>> level analysis you?re looking for in his papers. > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> --gregbo > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> -- > >>>> > >>>> Internet-history mailing list > >>>> > >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>>> > >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>>> > >>>> - > >>>> > >>>> Unsubscribe: > >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? > >>>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>>> -- > >>>> Internet-history mailing list > >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>>> - > >>>> Unsubscribe: > >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? > >>>> The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>>> > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From jack at 3kitty.org Fri May 1 12:23:50 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 12:23:50 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <6c864dfa-00e5-4a50-bf0f-4988747b7d87@dcrocker.net> <8144A24F-6071-41B5-8A23-D48754421D38@comcast.net> <1AFA8864-DDE4-45B8-A00C-6E4F5A866955@tony.li> <35DAD7A4-49F9-43F7-8538-B2936C5DE0E0@tony.li> Message-ID: Connectors are everywhere.? Even in software.? We call them APIs, or protocols, depending on how many computers are involved.? But they are essentially also "connectors".? ?Corrosion happens too, but in a different way from metal sliding on metal in plugs and sockets. Wherever there is a software connector, chances are that the things on either side were built by different people.? Specs are often incomplete or imprecise and different people interpret them differently.? Corrosion happens when new software is released and behaves differently when using an existing API or protocol. ?Connectors, of all types, are causes of many computer and network problems. When TCP2 was evolving into TCP4, we added a bunch of tools to help in diagnosing network problems.? One example was the various "source routing" mechanisms, which would be especially helpful when The Internet was experiencing some kind of problem in the routing mechanisms.? Many of these were subsequently discarded as being unnecessary, which was true, but only in the situation where the network was working perfectly. Modularity is considered a good thing, but implies a need for connectors.? When people actually experience troubleshooting and operational problems they find the problems with all types of connectors.? ?I think too few software or protocol designers ever actually get experience in operations, so they never learn the issues associated with connectors. I've wondered what effect "connectors" have on the users' and ISPs' experience in The Internet and how it's changed over time. For example, I suspect most ISPs pay some attention to their own system's handling of IP datagrams, perhaps collecting data through SNMP or other mechanisms, and fixing problems as they notice them. But does anybody watch how their computers behave?? TCP puts much of the error-control mechanisms in the users' devices, where it operates to compensate for lost datagrams and other failures of the underlying datagram service. When I was involved in operating pieces of The Internet, it was common to see problems in TCP behavior, such as excessive and persistent unnecessary retransmissions.? In effect, the "connector" of TCP between two computers was "corroded" and causing failures, which the human user often wouldn't even notice. SNMP had definitions useful for monitoring TCP behavior, and some TCP implementations actually provided them.? ?We found them to be a valuable tool for diagnosing network problems.? ?They were also valuable for detecting problems, by enabling comparisons of past "good" behavior versus measured behavior now. TCP is very good at hiding problems from both the human users and the operators tasked with keeping the datagrams flowing. In today's Internet, does anyone monitor TCP behavior?? ?A TCP connection may involve paths through several ISPs, and their "connectors".? How are users' problems diagnosed?? How has that part of network management changed over time? Fortunately, our cat hasn't figured out how to use software "connectors" to get a human's attention.? He does know how to do so by chewing through an Ethernet cable.? He does also attack the software connectors, so far unsuccessfully.? Walking on a keyboard, even with paws, may eventually do something really nasty. /Jack Haverty On 5/1/26 00:29, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > Dave, > I think it was more than that - a real software problem requiring > recompilation and reloading of the HP print system. I did have a connector > problem but it was associated with the demonstration of Arpanet conducted > in 1974 or 1975 from Sao Paulo, Brazil. > > > > > On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:06?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> On 4/30/2026 4:55 PM, vinton cerf wrote: >>> To add to Dave's story >> >> Since MCI Mail wound up being relevant to Internet history, when Vint >> used MMDF to interconnect with Internet mail, I'll add to his addition. >> >> MCI Mail was built using a collection of vendors for different parts of >> the system. (HP had the remote laster printers.) >> >> Six months before the scheduled public demo was the first meeting, with >> all the vendors in the same room. >> >> Vint got up to greet everyone and set the stage. He said we did not >> have much time but we were going to meet the September deadline. Then >> he said that if anything stopped us -- not that it would, but if it did >> -- it would be a connector. >> >> As I recall, that middle-of-the-night-before-the-demo problem that Vint >> described turned out to be a connector. >> >> d/ >> >> -- >> Dave Crocker >> >> dhc at dcrocker.net >> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >> +1.408.329.0791 >> >> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >> Northern California Coastal Region >> Information & Planning Coordinator >> American Red Cross >> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From steve at shinkuro.com Fri May 1 12:28:56 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 15:28:56 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> Indeed! I learned the hard way to check performance issues as well as correctness when lashing separate services together. Interactions that look like they'll happen in microseconds sometimes take millions of microseconds, ie seconds, with very unpleasant consequences. Steve Sent from my iPhone > On May 1, 2026, at 3:24?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > ?Connectors are everywhere. Even in software. We call them APIs, or protocols, depending on how many computers are involved. But they are essentially also "connectors". Corrosion happens too, but in a different way from metal sliding on metal in plugs and sockets. > > Wherever there is a software connector, chances are that the things on either side were built by different people. Specs are often incomplete or imprecise and different people interpret them differently. Corrosion happens when new software is released and behaves differently when using an existing API or protocol. Connectors, of all types, are causes of many computer and network problems. > > When TCP2 was evolving into TCP4, we added a bunch of tools to help in diagnosing network problems. One example was the various "source routing" mechanisms, which would be especially helpful when The Internet was experiencing some kind of problem in the routing mechanisms. Many of these were subsequently discarded as being unnecessary, which was true, but only in the situation where the network was working perfectly. > > Modularity is considered a good thing, but implies a need for connectors. When people actually experience troubleshooting and operational problems they find the problems with all types of connectors. I think too few software or protocol designers ever actually get experience in operations, so they never learn the issues associated with connectors. > > I've wondered what effect "connectors" have on the users' and ISPs' experience in The Internet and how it's changed over time. > > For example, I suspect most ISPs pay some attention to their own system's handling of IP datagrams, perhaps collecting data through SNMP or other mechanisms, and fixing problems as they notice them. > > But does anybody watch how their computers behave? TCP puts much of the error-control mechanisms in the users' devices, where it operates to compensate for lost datagrams and other failures of the underlying datagram service. > > When I was involved in operating pieces of The Internet, it was common to see problems in TCP behavior, such as excessive and persistent unnecessary retransmissions. In effect, the "connector" of TCP between two computers was "corroded" and causing failures, which the human user often wouldn't even notice. > > SNMP had definitions useful for monitoring TCP behavior, and some TCP implementations actually provided them. We found them to be a valuable tool for diagnosing network problems. They were also valuable for detecting problems, by enabling comparisons of past "good" behavior versus measured behavior now. > > TCP is very good at hiding problems from both the human users and the operators tasked with keeping the datagrams flowing. > > In today's Internet, does anyone monitor TCP behavior? A TCP connection may involve paths through several ISPs, and their "connectors". How are users' problems diagnosed? How has that part of network management changed over time? > > Fortunately, our cat hasn't figured out how to use software "connectors" to get a human's attention. He does know how to do so by chewing through an Ethernet cable. He does also attack the software connectors, so far unsuccessfully. Walking on a keyboard, even with paws, may eventually do something really nasty. > > /Jack Haverty > >> On 5/1/26 00:29, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: >> Dave, >> I think it was more than that - a real software problem requiring >> recompilation and reloading of the HP print system. I did have a connector >> problem but it was associated with the demonstration of Arpanet conducted >> in 1974 or 1975 from Sao Paulo, Brazil. >> >> >> >> >> On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:06?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> On 4/30/2026 4:55 PM, vinton cerf wrote: >>>> To add to Dave's story >>> >>> Since MCI Mail wound up being relevant to Internet history, when Vint >>> used MMDF to interconnect with Internet mail, I'll add to his addition. >>> >>> MCI Mail was built using a collection of vendors for different parts of >>> the system. (HP had the remote laster printers.) >>> >>> Six months before the scheduled public demo was the first meeting, with >>> all the vendors in the same room. >>> >>> Vint got up to greet everyone and set the stage. He said we did not >>> have much time but we were going to meet the September deadline. Then >>> he said that if anything stopped us -- not that it would, but if it did >>> -- it would be a connector. >>> >>> As I recall, that middle-of-the-night-before-the-demo problem that Vint >>> described turned out to be a connector. >>> >>> d/ >>> >>> -- >>> Dave Crocker >>> >>> dhc at dcrocker.net >>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >>> +1.408.329.0791 >>> >>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >>> Northern California Coastal Region >>> Information & Planning Coordinator >>> American Red Cross >>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jack at 3kitty.org Fri May 1 13:58:12 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 13:58:12 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> References: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> Message-ID: <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> Yes!? Once a User gets something working at all, performance is the next issue. I remember using a tool called a "waterfall diagram" to analyze performance isues as the ARPANET evolved into the DDN through the late 1980s.? All it required was a pencil and paper, and knowledge or tools to determine how an application worked.? Many old systems were being brought online to DDN, and many of them worked but took forever to do users' commands. The diagrams were very useful in analyzing performance issues on networks, especially as RPC (Remote Procedure Call) mechanisms started to appear.? ?It was easy to spread an application across a network, with clients and servers interacting in the same way they had inside a single machine. Very few seemed to understand that calls to a library routine inside one computer could happen much faster than calls that had to traverse a network.? ?So design of an application made a big difference in performance over a network.? The waterfall diagram is still used today to analyze performance issues involving websites. When I got to Oracle as "Internet Architect" in 1990 there were few others, especially in customers' IT, that knew much about networks. It was also the era when "Global LANs" were being aggressively promoted, which further hid the unavoidable effects of physical geography.? The speed of light (or electrons) stayed the same.? ?I ended up giving lots of talks internally and to customers about the impacts of networking on their application designs, and how to use the waterfall diagram to figure out what was going on. But I can't recall where I learned about the idea of waterfall diagrams.? Does anyone remember the origin of "waterfall diagrams" or how they were used in areas before networking? /Jack Haverty On 5/1/26 12:28, Steve Crocker wrote: > Indeed! I learned the hard way to check performance issues as well as correctness when lashing separate services together. Interactions that look like they'll happen in microseconds sometimes take millions of microseconds, ie seconds, with very unpleasant consequences. > > Steve > > Sent from my iPhone > >> On May 1, 2026, at 3:24?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> >> ?Connectors are everywhere. Even in software. We call them APIs, or protocols, depending on how many computers are involved. But they are essentially also "connectors". Corrosion happens too, but in a different way from metal sliding on metal in plugs and sockets. >> >> Wherever there is a software connector, chances are that the things on either side were built by different people. Specs are often incomplete or imprecise and different people interpret them differently. Corrosion happens when new software is released and behaves differently when using an existing API or protocol. Connectors, of all types, are causes of many computer and network problems. >> >> When TCP2 was evolving into TCP4, we added a bunch of tools to help in diagnosing network problems. One example was the various "source routing" mechanisms, which would be especially helpful when The Internet was experiencing some kind of problem in the routing mechanisms. Many of these were subsequently discarded as being unnecessary, which was true, but only in the situation where the network was working perfectly. >> >> Modularity is considered a good thing, but implies a need for connectors. When people actually experience troubleshooting and operational problems they find the problems with all types of connectors. I think too few software or protocol designers ever actually get experience in operations, so they never learn the issues associated with connectors. >> >> I've wondered what effect "connectors" have on the users' and ISPs' experience in The Internet and how it's changed over time. >> >> For example, I suspect most ISPs pay some attention to their own system's handling of IP datagrams, perhaps collecting data through SNMP or other mechanisms, and fixing problems as they notice them. >> >> But does anybody watch how their computers behave? TCP puts much of the error-control mechanisms in the users' devices, where it operates to compensate for lost datagrams and other failures of the underlying datagram service. >> >> When I was involved in operating pieces of The Internet, it was common to see problems in TCP behavior, such as excessive and persistent unnecessary retransmissions. In effect, the "connector" of TCP between two computers was "corroded" and causing failures, which the human user often wouldn't even notice. >> >> SNMP had definitions useful for monitoring TCP behavior, and some TCP implementations actually provided them. We found them to be a valuable tool for diagnosing network problems. They were also valuable for detecting problems, by enabling comparisons of past "good" behavior versus measured behavior now. >> >> TCP is very good at hiding problems from both the human users and the operators tasked with keeping the datagrams flowing. >> >> In today's Internet, does anyone monitor TCP behavior? A TCP connection may involve paths through several ISPs, and their "connectors". How are users' problems diagnosed? How has that part of network management changed over time? >> >> Fortunately, our cat hasn't figured out how to use software "connectors" to get a human's attention. He does know how to do so by chewing through an Ethernet cable. He does also attack the software connectors, so far unsuccessfully. Walking on a keyboard, even with paws, may eventually do something really nasty. >> >> /Jack Haverty >> >>> On 5/1/26 00:29, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: >>> Dave, >>> I think it was more than that - a real software problem requiring >>> recompilation and reloading of the HP print system. I did have a connector >>> problem but it was associated with the demonstration of Arpanet conducted >>> in 1974 or 1975 from Sao Paulo, Brazil. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:06?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> On 4/30/2026 4:55 PM, vinton cerf wrote: >>>>> To add to Dave's story >>>> Since MCI Mail wound up being relevant to Internet history, when Vint >>>> used MMDF to interconnect with Internet mail, I'll add to his addition. >>>> >>>> MCI Mail was built using a collection of vendors for different parts of >>>> the system. (HP had the remote laster printers.) >>>> >>>> Six months before the scheduled public demo was the first meeting, with >>>> all the vendors in the same room. >>>> >>>> Vint got up to greet everyone and set the stage. He said we did not >>>> have much time but we were going to meet the September deadline. Then >>>> he said that if anything stopped us -- not that it would, but if it did >>>> -- it would be a connector. >>>> >>>> As I recall, that middle-of-the-night-before-the-demo problem that Vint >>>> described turned out to be a connector. >>>> >>>> d/ >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Dave Crocker >>>> >>>> dhc at dcrocker.net >>>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >>>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >>>> +1.408.329.0791 >>>> >>>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >>>> Northern California Coastal Region >>>> Information & Planning Coordinator >>>> American Red Cross >>>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 1 14:33:05 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 09:33:05 +1200 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <6c864dfa-00e5-4a50-bf0f-4988747b7d87@dcrocker.net> <8144A24F-6071-41B5-8A23-D48754421D38@comcast.net> <1AFA8864-DDE4-45B8-A00C-6E4F5A866955@tony.li> <35DAD7A4-49F9-43F7-8538-B2936C5DE0E0@tony.li> Message-ID: <153923d3-e9b4-46e0-b95d-9feab4c4bab3@gmail.com> On 02-May-26 07:23, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > I've wondered what effect "connectors" have on the users' and ISPs' > experience in The Internet and how it's changed over time. Well, a very crucial set of software connectors is the socket API, which is pretty much universal and derived from a single source (the Windows version is a bit different but not very). One of the most important connectors is getaddrinfo() which as far as I am concerned has a major pin missing that wrecks most attempts to solve the multihoming problem. Details are probably out of scope, but it's an accident of history for sure. https://github.com/becarpenter/getapr/blob/main/README.md Brian From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com Fri May 1 15:33:08 2026 From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 22:33:08 +0000 Subject: [ih] Terminator - for real. Message-ID: Go watch last week's NCIS: Sydney. It presents an all to plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a terminator killing machine - just another over ambitious government contractor. Be scared. Be very scared. And start thinking countermeasures. Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Get Outlook for Android Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Get Outlook for Android From joly at punkcast.com Fri May 1 16:02:58 2026 From: joly at punkcast.com (Joly MacFie) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 19:02:58 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <153923d3-e9b4-46e0-b95d-9feab4c4bab3@gmail.com> References: <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <6c864dfa-00e5-4a50-bf0f-4988747b7d87@dcrocker.net> <8144A24F-6071-41B5-8A23-D48754421D38@comcast.net> <1AFA8864-DDE4-45B8-A00C-6E4F5A866955@tony.li> <35DAD7A4-49F9-43F7-8538-B2936C5DE0E0@tony.li> <153923d3-e9b4-46e0-b95d-9feab4c4bab3@gmail.com> Message-ID: Since this thread is now up to 48 messages and I am having trouble keeping up, I had ChatCPT do a summary: *[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view ? Internet-history mailing list discussion (April 28?30, 2026)* Participants Karl Auerbach; John Day; Vint Cerf; Hesham ElBakoury; Miles Fidelman; Steve Crocker; Andrew Sullivan; Dave Crocker; Jack Haverty; Bob Purvy; Brian E. Carpenter Moderator Mailing list discussion (Internet-history at ISOC) Context and Framing This extensive mailing list exchange begins with Karl Auerbach?s observation that the Internet is undergoing a ?revolution in perspective,? and develops into a layered discussion combining technical history, governance models, and future concerns about fragmentation, centralization, and user understanding. Karl Auerbach ? The Internet as Applications, Not Infrastructure Karl Auerbach argues that the dominant mental model of the Internet has shifted: - Early practitioners focused on *packet transport, protocols, and end-to-end connectivity* - Modern users see the Internet as a *set of interoperating applications* (messaging, social media, video, maps) This abstraction shift means: - The underlying network has become an *invisible utility* - Users are largely indifferent to core technologies like routing, DNS, or transport protocols He connects this shift to a broader structural concern: - The original vision of a *single, seamless global network* is being eroded by - National and regional policies - Security and control mechanisms - Cultural and political fragmentation This creates conditions for *localized or alternative networking models*, potentially diverging from the traditional Internet architecture. John Day ? Infrastructure Still Matters and Education Gaps John Day supports Auerbach?s analysis but stresses that infrastructure remains decisive: - Even if users ignore it, *network design shapes application behavior* - Trends like CDNs and edge computing reinforce *regionalization at the infrastructure layer* He raises a key long-term issue: - How should new generations be taught? - As operators of existing systems - Or as thinkers who understand *design tradeoffs and past mistakes* This highlights a risk that institutional memory is fading as abstraction increases. Vint Cerf ? Internet Literacy and the ?Driver?s License? Vint Cerf reframes the discussion around user knowledge: - Proposes the idea of an *?Internet Driver?s License?* - Asks what the *average user should understand* before navigating the digital ecosystem The exchange distinguishes between: - Everyday users - Infrastructure engineers - Researchers and developers It underscores the growing *gap between system complexity and user comprehension*. Miles Fidelman ? Internet vs Web Misconception Miles Fidelman notes a persistent conceptual confusion: - The Internet is often conflated with the Web - In reality, the Internet supports multiple functions: - Email - Voice and messaging - Video conferencing - Commerce and services He suggests that operators and engineers may have failed to adequately *communicate the breadth and importance of underlying network services*. Andrew Sullivan ? Governance, Centralization, and Alternative Histories Andrew Sullivan expands the discussion into governance and history: - Revisits the contrast between *Internet (TCP/IP)* and *OSI models* - Highlights arguments that OSI?s more inclusive governance was *slower and less effective* He raises broader questions: - Could today?s Internet have emerged in a different *political or economic environment*? - Would alternative architectures have been more resistant to *centralization and consolidation*? He also links current issues to the *rise of the Web*, which he suggests has inherently *centralizing tendencies* compared to the distributed Internet architecture. Steve Crocker ? ARPANET Origins and Open Model Steve Crocker provides historical grounding: - ARPANET development was funded by *ARPA/DARPA*, but - The *primary users were the researchers themselves* Key characteristics of the early model: - Open sharing of results - No strong intellectual property constraints - A culture of *collaboration and experimentation* He emphasizes that openness was not a later decision ? it was *built into the system from the beginning*, enabling widespread adoption. Dave Crocker ? IETF vs OSI: Process and Outcomes Dave Crocker analyzes differences between standards processes: - *IETF model*: - Rough consensus - Open participation - Iterative development with running code - Fast, pragmatic progress - *OSI/ISO model*: - Formal representation of stakeholders - Consensus via structured deliberation - Slower, more bureaucratic processes He characterizes the distinction as: - Internet approach: *intersection of workable ideas* - OSI approach: *union of all stakeholder requirements* This difference significantly affected *speed, scalability, and adoption*. Jack Haverty ? Licklider?s Vision and Human-Centric Computing Jack Haverty brings in deeper historical context via J.C.R. Licklider: - Licklider envisioned *?man-computer symbiosis?* - The Internet evolved as a tool to support *human communication and collaboration* He notes that: - Today?s user perception aligns more with Licklider?s vision than with protocol-level thinking - The Internet?s success stems from meeting broad *human and organizational needs*, including military and corporate C3I functions This reinforces the idea that the Internet was always about *human activity*, not just technical infrastructure. Ongoing Debate ? Standards, Power, and Technical Choices Later exchanges become more pointed, especially involving John Day and others: - Debate over whether IETF decisions were: - Technically optimal - Politically influenced - Or overly conservative Examples discussed include: - TCP/IP vs alternatives - SNMP vs HEMS - IPv6 design choices Responses from contributors like Brian Carpenter and Dave Crocker emphasize: - Decisions were largely driven by *rough consensus and practical deployment experience* - External political pressure existed but was not dominant The exchange highlights enduring tensions between: - Elegance vs deployability - Theory vs practice - Central direction vs community consensus Key Themes Emerging Across the thread, several major themes recur: - *Abstraction shift*: Users relate to applications, not infrastructure - *Fragmentation risk*: Political, technical, and economic forces may splinter the Internet - *Governance tradeoffs*: Speed vs inclusiveness in standards development - *Centralization concerns*: Especially linked to the Web and platform dominance - *Historical openness*: A key factor in the Internet?s success - *Education gap*: Growing disconnect between users and underlying systems Overall, the discussion reflects a community grappling with how a system originally built as an open, experimental, and global network is evolving into a *complex, contested, and partially fragmented digital ecosystem*. -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- - From dhc at dcrocker.net Fri May 1 16:12:43 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 23:12:43 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> References: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> Message-ID: On 5/1/2026 1:58 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > Does anyone remember the origin fwiw... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From touch at strayalpha.com Fri May 1 16:34:21 2026 From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 16:34:21 -0700 Subject: [ih] =?utf-8?q?Terminator_-_for_real=2E=E2=80=94-_off_topic?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <878A5A30-3031-4407-9708-E026D5789FB0@strayalpha.com> > On May 1, 2026, at 3:33?PM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote: > > ?Go watch last week's ? Please stay on topic for this list. Joe / list owner From touch at strayalpha.com Fri May 1 16:39:10 2026 From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 16:39:10 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <34FE7578-5BB7-4A5D-940A-6C7EFB196044@strayalpha.com> > On May 1, 2026, at 4:03?PM, Joly MacFie via Internet-history wrote: > > Since this thread is now up to 48 messages and I am having trouble keeping > up, I had ChatCPT do a summary: Please do not post generated content to this list. This list is for people (not machines) to discuss Internet history. If such tools want to chat, they can create their own list. Joe / list owner From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 1 16:49:11 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 11:49:11 +1200 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> Message-ID: There's certainly been very little explicit usage of waterfall models in the IETF, even though it's clear that some people are aware of them and aware of the problem of accumulated performance delays. For example, I found this in a 2021 discussion of metrics for delay: "For instance, a waterfall diagram shows how the loading of objects within a web page depends on other objects in other connections." The best reference I found was in one of my own messages shortly after the March 2006 IETF meeting in Dallas: "Thanks and congratulations are due to the NOC crew for relocating the NOC equipment to get away from the waterfalls from the light fixtures, with only a few minutes's interruption to DHCP service." Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 02-May-26 11:12, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > On 5/1/2026 1:58 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> Does anyone remember the origin > > fwiw... > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model > > d/ > From jack at 3kitty.org Fri May 1 16:51:28 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 16:51:28 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> Message-ID: No, I was referring to a "waterfall diagram" rather than the "waterfall model" of software development. The diagram showed the interactions as a computer program ran and interacted with others over some kind of network.? It looks a bit like a PERT chart but isn't one. An application that used to run locally (in one computer or perhaps on a LAN) involved interactions that took microseconds.? When that same application operated over a wide area network, such as The Internet, the same interactions would take much longer. The waterfall diagram showed all the interactions with a vertically oriented timeline.? ?Interactions that were organized to happen serially were fine in a local environment, but took much longer over remote links. To create such a diagram in the early days, you would use TCPDUMP (today probably wireshark) to capture the interactions happening over your LAN.? ?Then you would pore over them to extract all of the interactions - much like the old days poring over listings of "core dumps" to figure out why your program crashed. Then you would draw all the interactions with vertical lines for each computer involved, and near-horizontal lines to show the interactions between computers.? There could be more than two computers involved. From the TCPDUMP data, you could add time information to each interaction, and then draw the interaction lines appropriately. Nearly horizontal lines indicated very rapid interactions.? Heavily slanted lines indicated long times involved.? ?With such a diagram it was much easier to see where the performance bottlenecks were. Sometimes it indicated an overloaded server.? ?But it could also indicate an application not designed for a network environment, with lots of serial interactions that took a long time over a network. We used such diagrams for diagnosing performance issues back in the 1980s, and in the 1990s to diagnose client/server performance.? They were also very useful after the web appeared.? Debugbear and others offer a diagramming tool for use in today's web applications - see https://www.debugbear.com/docs/waterfall Below is some AI's (sorry, can't tell whose) explanation of a waterfall diagram used to diagnose web performance.? ?But they are also useful in any application using a network. /Jack Haverty ----------------------------------------------------------------- A networking waterfall diagram is a*2D visual representation of the sequence of network events*happening over a timeline during a webpage load, showing when each resource (HTML, CSS, JS, images) starts and stops loading. Key Components of the Diagram Each bar in the chart represents a specific network request and is color-coded to break down the total load time into distinct phases: * *Blocking/Queue Time*: Time spent waiting in the browser?s queue for an available connection or to prioritize other resources. * *DNS Lookup*: The time taken to resolve the domain name into an IP address. * *Connection Time*: The duration to establish a TCP connection (three-way handshake) and SSL/TLS handshake for secure connections. * *Sending/Request Time*: The time to send the request headers to the server. * *Waiting (TTFB)*: Time to First Byte, representing the wait for the server to process the request and begin sending the response. * *Receiving/Download Time*: The duration to transfer the resource data from the server to the client. Interpretation and Optimization * *Sequential vs. Parallel*: The diagram reveals if requests are loading sequentially (one after another, creating a "waterfall" effect) or in parallel.*HTTP/2*protocols allow multiple resources to load simultaneously over a single connection, flattening the waterfall and improving performance. * *Identifying Bottlenecks*: Long bars indicate slow resources, while large gaps between the start of one request and the start of the next (blocked time) indicate connection limits or render-blocking scripts. * *Optimization Goal*: The primary objective is to*reduce the number of steps*(sequential dependencies) and minimize the time spent in blocking, DNS, and connection phases, rather than just reducing file sizes. On 5/1/26 16:12, Dave Crocker wrote: > On 5/1/2026 1:58 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> Does anyone remember the origin > > fwiw... > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From dal at riseup.net Fri May 1 17:25:51 2026 From: dal at riseup.net (Douglas Lucas) Date: Sat, 02 May 2026 00:25:51 +0000 Subject: [ih] =?utf-8?q?Terminator_-_for_real=2E=E2=80=94-_off_topic?= In-Reply-To: <878A5A30-3031-4407-9708-E026D5789FB0@strayalpha.com> References: <878A5A30-3031-4407-9708-E026D5789FB0@strayalpha.com> Message-ID: Would it be more on topic if, rather "start thinking countermeasures", we looked at countermeasures already (now and in the history of the internet) ongoing? On 2026-05-02 01:34, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote: >> On May 1, 2026, at 3:33?PM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote: >> >> ?Go watch last week's ? > > Please stay on topic for this list. > > Joe / list owner From bpurvy at gmail.com Fri May 1 18:19:13 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 18:19:13 -0700 Subject: [ih] =?utf-8?q?Terminator_-_for_real=2E=E2=80=94-_off_topic?= In-Reply-To: References: <878A5A30-3031-4407-9708-E026D5789FB0@strayalpha.com> Message-ID: This is just a reminder that if you use Gmail, at least,(can't speak for other clients) and you're sick of a thread, you can just type 'm' for 'mute' and all the subsequent messages will be archived automatically. On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 5:26?PM Douglas Lucas via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Would it be more on topic if, rather "start thinking countermeasures", > we looked at countermeasures already (now and in the history of the > internet) ongoing? > > On 2026-05-02 01:34, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote: > >> On May 1, 2026, at 3:33?PM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> > >> ?Go watch last week's ? > > > > Please stay on topic for this list. > > > > Joe / list owner > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From nigel at channelisles.net Sat May 2 00:12:07 2026 From: nigel at channelisles.net (Nigel Roberts) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 08:12:07 +0100 Subject: [ih] Terminator - for real. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I mentioned this sort of thing was coming soon in my commencement speech to the University of Essex in 2022. As always, I underestimated by an order of magnitude how short the time would be ... On 5/1/26 23:33, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote: > Go watch last week's NCIS: Sydney. > > It presents an all to plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a terminator killing machine - just another over ambitious government contractor. > > Be scared. Be very scared. And start thinking countermeasures. > > Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. > Get Outlook for Android > > > Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. > Get Outlook for Android -- Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat May 2 04:11:28 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 07:11:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] Terminator - for real. Message-ID: <20260502111128.9EA1618C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Miles Fidelman > an all to[o] plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a > terminator killing machine ... Be scared. Be very scared. I know I'm not supposed to reply to this post on-list (apologies, Joe), but my reply does have an Internet connection. - which is that the Internet is _part_ of the next stage of evolution (actually, of a process more basic than evolution, because 'where did evolution come from' - but let's use 'evolution' as a short-hand for the whole thing, for now), and I think it's an important point which I haven't heard elsewhere. I've long felt that nature/evolution has _always_ been on a path of creating improving information storage/distribution systems. One of the earliest was DNA. (Speaking of which, "The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life", by Quammen, is a really good book that covers how that happened [among other things], as best it is now understood.) The next step after that was animals complex enough to be able to teach their young; i.e. an information transmission technique outside of DNA. Humans then invented language (which I've been reading up on recently, about how languages of the Indo-European family have out-competed other languags - so that now, almost all the languages which were extant in Europe in the Bronze Age have been replaced with Indo-European languages - except Basque). This was followed by writing (an interesting stage - it seems to have been independently re-invented - like the eye - 3, or maybe 4 times), then the printed book (fast, cheap, error-free iformation replication), and then radio/telgraph - all increasingly efficient information storage/distribution systems. Then Babbage invented computers, and shortly after he did that, we (humans) started hooking them together, so they could exchange information . . . and here we are. The interesting question, of course. is what will happen next. Some stages out-competed earlier stages - like DNA out-competing the 'RNA world', for a variety of reasons, in part because it was a more robust, error-free information system (but see cancer). But others have been retained (up until now, at least). IPv4 being a crappy design isn't a problem - the vertebrate eye is a shockingly bad design (the basic architecture means that the first couple of layers of the information processing hardware have to be transparent), but evolution made it work. The Internet seems to be making IPv4 work. Like the RNA world, we have likely created what is likely to be our strongest competitor. (This was predicted long ago - e.g. the Butlerian Jihad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jihad of 'Dune', as well as "Darwin among the Machines", by Samuel Butler, from 1863, linked there.) The Internet has had a role to play in the rise of the thinking machines: in addition to enabling communication among AI researchers, many LLM's have been 'trained' with information retrieved across the Internet (to the point where there are now legal battles over the use of databases retrieved across the Internet for training LLM's). As "Neuromancer" predicts, they'll likely use it to communicate with each other. I could expand on many of these points, but that would be even more off-topic, so I won't. (Feel free to forward this post anywhere.) Yes, I know I'm insane; I cheerfully admitted that many decades ago! :-) Noel From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com Sat May 2 05:22:45 2026 From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 12:22:45 +0000 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <78A29E46-FD01-441E-A699-989674B9A968@shinkuro.com> <10d0f5fb-8ee4-4ebd-847b-089ea5b983bd@3kitty.org> Message-ID: I have a slightly different recollection of "waterfall diagrams" - more like GANTT chart - showing the sequencing of operations in a complex project - the "waterfall from" requirements analysis, to design, to development, to testing, to deployment, to maintenance - wash, rinse, repeat. Still a very useful model for complex systems development. Often derailed by overly bureaucratic procedures & documents - particularly for government programs (C.f. SEMP & DODAF). "Agile" (move fast & break things with no aforethought) is the Antithesis. Continuous Integration & DevOps are intermediate approaches that work pretty well - if informed by some reasonable up-front systems architecture. Miles A couple of images for reference. [What is Waterfall Project Management? | Nifty Blog] [Waterfall Model Example and Template | TeamGantt] ________________________________ From: Internet-history on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history Sent: Friday, May 1, 2026 7:51 PM To: Dave Crocker Cc: internet-history at elists.isoc.org Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) No, I was referring to a "waterfall diagram" rather than the "waterfall model" of software development. The diagram showed the interactions as a computer program ran and interacted with others over some kind of network. It looks a bit like a PERT chart but isn't one. An application that used to run locally (in one computer or perhaps on a LAN) involved interactions that took microseconds. When that same application operated over a wide area network, such as The Internet, the same interactions would take much longer. The waterfall diagram showed all the interactions with a vertically oriented timeline. Interactions that were organized to happen serially were fine in a local environment, but took much longer over remote links. To create such a diagram in the early days, you would use TCPDUMP (today probably wireshark) to capture the interactions happening over your LAN. Then you would pore over them to extract all of the interactions - much like the old days poring over listings of "core dumps" to figure out why your program crashed. Then you would draw all the interactions with vertical lines for each computer involved, and near-horizontal lines to show the interactions between computers. There could be more than two computers involved. From the TCPDUMP data, you could add time information to each interaction, and then draw the interaction lines appropriately. Nearly horizontal lines indicated very rapid interactions. Heavily slanted lines indicated long times involved. With such a diagram it was much easier to see where the performance bottlenecks were. Sometimes it indicated an overloaded server. But it could also indicate an application not designed for a network environment, with lots of serial interactions that took a long time over a network. We used such diagrams for diagnosing performance issues back in the 1980s, and in the 1990s to diagnose client/server performance. They were also very useful after the web appeared. Debugbear and others offer a diagramming tool for use in today's web applications - see https://www.debugbear.com/docs/waterfall Below is some AI's (sorry, can't tell whose) explanation of a waterfall diagram used to diagnose web performance. But they are also useful in any application using a network. /Jack Haverty ----------------------------------------------------------------- A networking waterfall diagram is a*2D visual representation of the sequence of network events*happening over a timeline during a webpage load, showing when each resource (HTML, CSS, JS, images) starts and stops loading. Key Components of the Diagram Each bar in the chart represents a specific network request and is color-coded to break down the total load time into distinct phases: * *Blocking/Queue Time*: Time spent waiting in the browser?s queue for an available connection or to prioritize other resources. * *DNS Lookup*: The time taken to resolve the domain name into an IP address. * *Connection Time*: The duration to establish a TCP connection (three-way handshake) and SSL/TLS handshake for secure connections. * *Sending/Request Time*: The time to send the request headers to the server. * *Waiting (TTFB)*: Time to First Byte, representing the wait for the server to process the request and begin sending the response. * *Receiving/Download Time*: The duration to transfer the resource data from the server to the client. Interpretation and Optimization * *Sequential vs. Parallel*: The diagram reveals if requests are loading sequentially (one after another, creating a "waterfall" effect) or in parallel.*HTTP/2*protocols allow multiple resources to load simultaneously over a single connection, flattening the waterfall and improving performance. * *Identifying Bottlenecks*: Long bars indicate slow resources, while large gaps between the start of one request and the start of the next (blocked time) indicate connection limits or render-blocking scripts. * *Optimization Goal*: The primary objective is to*reduce the number of steps*(sequential dependencies) and minimize the time spent in blocking, DNS, and connection phases, rather than just reducing file sizes. On 5/1/26 16:12, Dave Crocker wrote: > On 5/1/2026 1:58 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> Does anyone remember the origin > > fwiw... > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From geoff at iconia.com Sat May 2 09:32:47 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 09:32:47 -0700 Subject: [ih] Terminator - for real. In-Reply-To: <20260502111128.9EA1618C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260502111128.9EA1618C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:11?AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > From: Miles Fidelman > > > an all to[o] plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a > > terminator killing machine ... Be scared. Be very scared. > > I know I'm not supposed to reply to this post on-list (apologies, Joe), but > my reply does have an Internet connection. > [...] > The Internet has had a role to play in the rise of the thinking machines: > in > addition to enabling communication among AI researchers, many LLM's have > been > 'trained' with information retrieved across the Internet (to the point > where > there are now legal battles over the use of databases retrieved across the > Internet for training LLM's). As "Neuromancer" predicts, they'll likely use > it to communicate with each other. > yours truly would summarily posit that it's exactly the opposite in that the rise of the thinking machines had a role to play in the rise of The Internet: in "Colossus: The Forbin Project" 1970 movie which is based on the 1966 science-fiction novel "Colossus" by Dennis Feltham Jones about an advanced American defense system, named Colossus, becoming sentient. After being handed full control, Colossus' draconian logic expands on its original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world and end all warfare for the good of humankind, despite its creators' orders to stop. "... Colossus' first action is a message warning: "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM" and giving its coordinates. CIA Director Grauber is asked why the CIA did not know this, but Grauber responds that they had seen indications of a large Soviet defense project but did not know what it was. Forbin is asked how Colossus deduced the other system's existence, to which Forbin answers, "Colossus may be built better than we thought." Shortly thereafter, the Soviets announce that their "Guardian" system is operational. Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, hoping to determine the Soviet machine's capability. The Soviets also agree to the experiment. Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using elementary mathematics (2?1=2), to everyone's amusement. However, this amusement turns to shock and amazement as the two systems' communications quickly evolve into complex mathematics far beyond human comprehension and speed, whereupon Colossus and Guardian become synchronized using a communication protocol that no human can interpret..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ g -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From steve at shinkuro.com Sat May 2 07:19:24 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 10:19:24 -0400 Subject: [ih] Terminator - for real. In-Reply-To: References: <20260502111128.9EA1618C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language The Lincos "dictionary " is intended to be transmitted first before any additional messages. It teaches natural numbers by a series of repeated pulses, separated by pauses. It then teaches >, <, =, +, -, by examples such as *. . . . . > . . .* (an extended pause is shown around > in this example so as to suggest to an alien that > is a new separate symbol; otherwise, an alien might think that the whole pattern is a new symbol of unknown meaning). In introducing =, unary notation is shown for numbers: *.* = 1, *. .* = 2, and so on. This progresses to multiplication, division, variables, and constants, then propositional logic , set theory , and first-order logic . The dictionary tries to introduce questions by leaving mathematical expressions unsolved (e.g., ? x x + 101 = 11). On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 12:33?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:11?AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > From: Miles Fidelman > > > > > an all to[o] plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a > > > terminator killing machine ... Be scared. Be very scared. > > > > I know I'm not supposed to reply to this post on-list (apologies, Joe), > but > > my reply does have an Internet connection. > > > [...] > > > The Internet has had a role to play in the rise of the thinking machines: > > in > > addition to enabling communication among AI researchers, many LLM's have > > been > > 'trained' with information retrieved across the Internet (to the point > > where > > there are now legal battles over the use of databases retrieved across > the > > Internet for training LLM's). As "Neuromancer" predicts, they'll likely > use > > it to communicate with each other. > > > > yours truly would summarily posit that it's exactly the opposite in that > the rise of the thinking machines had a role to play in the rise of The > Internet: in "Colossus: The Forbin Project" 1970 movie which is based on > the 1966 science-fiction novel "Colossus" by Dennis Feltham Jones about an > advanced American defense system, named Colossus, becoming sentient. After > being handed full control, Colossus' draconian logic expands on its > original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world > and end all warfare for the good of humankind, despite its creators' orders > to stop. > > "... Colossus' first action is a message warning: "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM" > and giving its coordinates. CIA Director Grauber is asked why the CIA did > not know this, but Grauber responds that they had seen indications of a > large Soviet defense project but did not know what it was. Forbin is asked > how Colossus deduced the other system's existence, to which Forbin answers, > "Colossus may be built better than we thought." Shortly thereafter, the > Soviets announce that their "Guardian" system is operational. > > Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, > hoping to determine the Soviet machine's capability. The Soviets also agree > to the experiment. Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using > elementary mathematics (2?1=2), to everyone's amusement. However, this > amusement turns to shock and amazement as the two systems' communications > quickly evolve into complex mathematics far beyond human comprehension and > speed, whereupon Colossus and Guardian become synchronized using a > communication protocol that no human can interpret..." > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project > > https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ > > g > > -- > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com > living as The Truth is True > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From bpurvy at gmail.com Sat May 2 15:26:15 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 15:26:15 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 Message-ID: Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" Thanks, Bob From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 2 15:42:01 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 15:42:01 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > > Thanks, > > Bob > Some questions: Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? --gregbo From bpurvy at gmail.com Sat May 2 15:48:07 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 15:48:07 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> Message-ID: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner wrote: > On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > > > > Thanks, > > > > Bob > > > > Some questions: > > Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? > > What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? > > --gregbo > > From pugs78 at gmail.com Sat May 2 16:05:18 2026 From: pugs78 at gmail.com (Tom Lyon) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 16:05:18 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Sun announced 10Mb Ethernet product on 4/15/83; SunOS 1.0, based on 4.2BSD Beta, formally shipped in November of 1983. There were also some sizeable 3Mb Ethernet sites before that. So, lots of TCP over Ethernet, but who knows how many were actually on the Arpanet? BTW, I recall there was plenty of TCP over 10Mb Ethernet even before the ARP protocol came out. On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:26?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > > Thanks, > > Bob > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From bpurvy at gmail.com Sat May 2 16:12:46 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 16:12:46 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "Sun announced 10Mb Ethernet product on 4/15/83; SunOS 1.0, based on 4.2BSD Beta, formally shipped in November of 1983. There were also some sizeable 3Mb Ethernet sites before that. *So, lots of TCP over Ethernet,* " does that follow? was Sun running TCP then? On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:05?PM Tom Lyon wrote: > Sun announced 10Mb Ethernet product on 4/15/83; SunOS 1.0, based on > 4.2BSD Beta, formally shipped in November of 1983. There were also some > sizeable 3Mb Ethernet sites before that. > So, lots of TCP over Ethernet, but who knows how many were actually on the > Arpanet? > BTW, I recall there was plenty of TCP over 10Mb Ethernet even before the > ARP protocol came out. > > On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:26?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the >> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >> >> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them >> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >> >> Thanks, >> >> Bob >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 2 16:18:13 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 16:18:13 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> Message-ID: <09AB3766-EEBD-4BFF-8BEA-91DFF0A7DB7D@icloud.com> On May 2, 2026, at 3:48?PM, Bob Purvy wrote: > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt For comparison purposes, you might be interested in the ?Who talks TCP?? surveys taken by David Smallberg during the December 1982 to February 1983 time period, during which the NCP to TCP/IP flag day took place. RFC 847 is a summary of those surveys. Unfortunately, they don?t mention Ethernet specifically. --gregbo From pugs78 at gmail.com Sat May 2 16:27:40 2026 From: pugs78 at gmail.com (Tom Lyon) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 16:27:40 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: forgot to copy list ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Tom Lyon Date: Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:27?PM Subject: Re: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 To: Bob Purvy Oh, yes. TCP/IP/Ethernet were always the core supported protocols. On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:12?PM Bob Purvy wrote: > "Sun announced 10Mb Ethernet product on 4/15/83; SunOS 1.0, based on > 4.2BSD Beta, formally shipped in November of 1983. There were also some > sizeable 3Mb Ethernet sites before that. > *So, lots of TCP over Ethernet,* " > > does that follow? was Sun running TCP then? > > On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:05?PM Tom Lyon wrote: > >> Sun announced 10Mb Ethernet product on 4/15/83; SunOS 1.0, based on >> 4.2BSD Beta, formally shipped in November of 1983. There were also some >> sizeable 3Mb Ethernet sites before that. >> So, lots of TCP over Ethernet, but who knows how many were actually on >> the Arpanet? >> BTW, I recall there was plenty of TCP over 10Mb Ethernet even before the >> ARP protocol came out. >> >> On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:26?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the >>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>> >>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them >>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Bob >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> From karl at iwl.com Sat May 2 17:34:05 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 17:34:05 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Your question is perhaps more complex. In 1984 MIT (John Romkey, Dave Bridgham - students of Saltzer and Clark) published PC/IP, a TCP stack for PC-DOS machines using the 3COM 3C501 Ethernet card. (We also saw, perhaps slightly later in time, TCP for the Macintosh by the folks who went on to create Intercon, and for the PC Beame and Whiteside in Canada, WRQ also in Canada [who I think were the first to push the Winsock API].) PC/IP was a simple TCP intended mostly for use with telnet sessions with a human typing - which is why that implementation ignored window values sent by the remote host (the assumption being that there would always be an adequate receive window for data flowing at human typing speeds.)? And that 3C501 was one dog of an ethernet card - a single buffer that couldn't be turned around from send to receive very quickly, so it often missed responses from quick hosts. https://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/pcip-1986.pdf PC/IP was rather popular.? The 3COM ethernet cards were a limitation, so PC/IP was updated to use Romkey's Packet Driver API to ethernet cards,? ?I think I wrote the first packet driver - for the ULANA procurement for the TRW Ethernet card that we created to meet ULANA's COTS [Commercial Off The Shelf] requirement].??Russ Nelson (Crynr) produced a mountain of packet driver implementations for a wide variety of Ethernet cards, most notably the rather popular Novell NE2000 cards. PC/IP was turned into a rather more solid TCP suite, PC/TCP, by FTP Software. All of this suggests that there may have been a lot more TCP going on among university folks with PCs and Macs, and among Silicon Valley folk than would be accounted for by a census of officially "attached" hosts. It was during this period that we learned that if one had an Ethernet with PC's that one should avoid putting a Sun workstation on the same coax - we always suspected that the Suns were playing a bit loose (or more perhaps properly "fast and loose") with the Ethernet collision-sense/back-off timings so that they would win contention fights with machines, mostly PCs.? Add a busy Sun to a working Ethernet with PC's and the PC's would effectively go offline. Life on Ethernet got so much better when Synoptics came out with twisted pair ethernet (which later evolved into the standard 10-base-T.? Synoptics, and even more, David Systems saved the Interop net in the 1988-1990 period more than once.) ? ? ? ? --karl-- On 5/2/26 3:26 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > > Thanks, > > Bob From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 2 18:02:08 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 18:02:08 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <322357C5-DD10-4DA1-A6AC-2AA7A65E0832@icloud.com> It occurred to me that some of this information might be inferred from UUCP maps. Some UUCP Mapping Project entries contained the operating system the machine ran. Those sites could have run TCP/IP networks internally that were not (yet) connected to the Internet. The UUCP Mapping Project started in 1984. There are mapping entries in mod.map that go back to 1985. net.news.map goes back to 1982, but those were USENET map entries. --gregbo From craig at tereschau.net Sat May 2 18:28:20 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 19:28:20 -0600 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 4:26?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > I joined BBN in fall 1983 and a few months later was given a SUN workstation (needed it for the project I was on) and attached to an Ethernet (10Mbps coax - net 128.89) that ran on the 4th or 5th (or both?) floors of 10 Moulton St. We had, as I recall, a few dozen machines of various types, all running TCP/IP on that Ethernet. (My first project involved writing a device driver for an 80-mbps token ring network so we could experiment with TCP/IP on that). So, short answer, TCP on Ethernet was routine in fall 1983, and there were other wonderful LANs too. Craig -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From johnl at iecc.com Sat May 2 18:56:39 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 2 May 2026 21:56:39 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <322357C5-DD10-4DA1-A6AC-2AA7A65E0832@icloud.com> References: <322357C5-DD10-4DA1-A6AC-2AA7A65E0832@icloud.com> Message-ID: <20260503015639.8C4801078F311@ary.qy> It appears that Greg Skinner via Internet-history said: >It occurred to me that some of this information might be inferred from UUCP maps. Some UUCP Mapping Project entries contained the operating >system the machine ran. Those sites could have run TCP/IP networks internally that were not (yet) connected to the Internet. Probably not. My site ima was in those 1982 maps and while there were sites that could gateway mail to the Arpanet, I don't remember anyone mentioning a disconnected TCP network. R's, JOhn From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sat May 2 19:24:31 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 14:24:31 +1200 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> Message-ID: <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols if I remember correctly." https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt > > > On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner wrote: > >> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the >>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>> >>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them >>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Bob >>> >> >> Some questions: >> >> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? >> >> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? >> >> --gregbo >> >> From jack at 3kitty.org Sat May 2 20:03:43 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 20:03:43 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> Message-ID: If "reached via TCP" means over the Internet, in the early 1980s the only wide-area connectivity was through the ARPANET, or perhaps SATNET to Europe. LANs were appearing, but the key event might be when the first Gateway appeared, connecting the ARPANET to some Ethernet LAN.? That would make the TCPs on that LAN "reachable via TCP".? ?I suspect that TCP implementations on workstations first started by communicating just across their LAN. I don't recall when the first Ethernet gateway appeared, or who did it.? May have been MIT, or Berkeley, or even UCL?? Or perhaps one of Dave Mills' Fuzzballs.? I don't recall that BBN did it. Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did it and where? /Jack Haverty On 5/2/26 19:24, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: > > "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when > an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to > support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from > MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols if I > remember correctly." > > https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files > > although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 > (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a > few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP > usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus > our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't > recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > ?? Brian Carpenter > > On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: >> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt >> >> >> On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner >> wrote: >> >>> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>> >>>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, >>>> at the >>>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>>> >>>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of >>>> them >>>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> >>>> Bob >>>> >>> >>> Some questions: >>> >>> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? >>> >>> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? >>> >>> --gregbo >>> >>> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sat May 2 21:06:02 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 04:06:02 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1294762852.5531802.1777781162136@mail.yahoo.com> I started working for SRI ( in Don Nielson's group)? at the end of September/beginning of October 1983.? Very soon I got a Sun 100 in my office using Ethernet.? I don't think we had more than 9 as they were named for the planets. My host name was Venus. I don't remember having any other computer at SRI before that one showed up. barbara On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 07:24:44 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols i I remember correctly." https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. Regards/Ng? mihi ? ? Brian Carpenter On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt > > > On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner wrote: > >> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the >>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>> >>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them >>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Bob >>> >> >> Some questions: >> >> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? >> >> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? >> >> --gregbo From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sat May 2 21:36:58 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 16:36:58 +1200 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> Message-ID: <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > it and where? I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. See https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 03-May-26 15:03, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > If "reached via TCP" means over the Internet, in the early 1980s the > only wide-area connectivity was through the ARPANET, or perhaps SATNET > to Europe. > > LANs were appearing, but the key event might be when the first Gateway > appeared, connecting the ARPANET to some Ethernet LAN.? That would make > the TCPs on that LAN "reachable via TCP".? ?I suspect that TCP > implementations on workstations first started by communicating just > across their LAN. > > I don't recall when the first Ethernet gateway appeared, or who did it. > May have been MIT, or Berkeley, or even UCL?? Or perhaps one of Dave > Mills' Fuzzballs.? I don't recall that BBN did it. > > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > it and where? > > /Jack Haverty > > On 5/2/26 19:24, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: >> >> "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when >> an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to >> support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from >> MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols if I >> remember correctly." >> >> https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files >> >> although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 >> (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a >> few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP >> usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus >> our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't >> recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> ?? Brian Carpenter >> >> On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: >>> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt >>> >>> >>> On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner >>> wrote: >>> >>>> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, >>>>> at the >>>>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>>>> >>>>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of >>>>> them >>>>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>>>> >>>>> Thanks, >>>>> >>>>> Bob >>>>> >>>> >>>> Some questions: >>>> >>>> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? >>>> >>>> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? >>>> >>>> --gregbo >>>> >>>> > > From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sat May 2 23:02:27 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 06:02:27 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> Message-ID: <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> ?I don't think i have a good grasp of Bridge Communications and what they had and when. Link below is an interview with Judy Estrin. https://web.archive.org/web/20060428054108/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/013.html barbara On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 09:37:11 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > it and where? I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. See https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. Regards/Ng? mihi ? ? Brian Carpenter On 03-May-26 15:03, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > If "reached via TCP" means over the Internet, in the early 1980s the > only wide-area connectivity was through the ARPANET, or perhaps SATNET > to Europe. > > LANs were appearing, but the key event might be when the first Gateway > appeared, connecting the ARPANET to some Ethernet LAN.? That would make > the TCPs on that LAN "reachable via TCP".? ?I suspect that TCP > implementations on workstations first started by communicating just > across their LAN. > > I don't recall when the first Ethernet gateway appeared, or who did it. > May have been MIT, or Berkeley, or even UCL?? Or perhaps one of Dave > Mills' Fuzzballs.? I don't recall that BBN did it. > > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > it and where? > > /Jack Haverty > > On 5/2/26 19:24, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: >> >> "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when >> an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to >> support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from >> MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols if I >> remember correctly." >> >> https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files >> >> although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 >> (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a >> few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP >> usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus >> our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't >> recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >>? ?? Brian Carpenter >> >> On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: >>> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt >>> >>> >>> On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner >>> wrote: >>> >>>> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, >>>>> at the >>>>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. >>>>> >>>>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of >>>>> them >>>>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" >>>>> >>>>> Thanks, >>>>> >>>>> Bob >>>>> >>>> >>>> Some questions: >>>> >>>> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? >>>> >>>> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? >>>> >>>> --gregbo From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 2 23:47:58 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 2 May 2026 23:47:58 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> Message-ID: On May 2, 2026, at 8:03?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > If "reached via TCP" means over the Internet, in the early 1980s the only wide-area connectivity was through the ARPANET, or perhaps SATNET to Europe. > > LANs were appearing, but the key event might be when the first Gateway appeared, connecting the ARPANET to some Ethernet LAN. That would make the TCPs on that LAN "reachable via TCP". I suspect that TCP implementations on workstations first started by communicating just across their LAN. > > I don't recall when the first Ethernet gateway appeared, or who did it. May have been MIT, or Berkeley, or even UCL? Or perhaps one of Dave Mills' Fuzzballs. I don't recall that BBN did it. > > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did it and where? > > /Jack Haverty > Not sure if this was the first, but this could be one of the earliest ones. In the Network World 27 March 2006 interview of Bill Yeager, he states that he started work in 1981 on IP over 3Mb Ethernet for the router linking Stanford?s EE department, CS department, and medical center. [1] (For those who are new to this list, how this router became part of Cisco has been discussed before. Check the archives for more info.) --gregbo [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141115160333/https://www.networkworld.com/article/2309917/lan-wan/lan-wan-router-man.html From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sun May 3 00:46:39 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 00:46:39 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On May 2, 2026, at 11:02?PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: > > I don't think i have a good grasp of Bridge Communications and what they had and when. > Link below is an interview with Judy Estrin. > https://web.archive.org/web/20060428054108/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/013.html > barbara > On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 09:37:11 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > >> Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did >> it and where? > > I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, > in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. > > See https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ > Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > The Memoranda of the Project MAC/LCS Computer Systems Research Group authored by or coauthored with Jerome H. Saltzer page contains many reports detailing various aspects of that project, including network topologies and protocols that ran on those networks. [1] Network Implementation Note #25 goes into a fair amount of detail, including a map. [2] Local Network Note #32 also includes a map. [3] Noel and Michael Greenwald can probably give more info. --gregbo [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/memos.html#lnn [2] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/nin/csr-nin-025.pdf [3] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-032.pdf From ocl at gih.com Sun May 3 00:55:10 2026 From: ocl at gih.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Olivier_MJ_Cr=C3=A9pin-Leblond?=) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 08:55:10 +0100 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Prior to DNS I gather you'd be looking for a hosts.txt table? What I love about the Internet is that there always seems to be someone, somewhere, who has saved something for whatever reason... or is publishing it free of charge.* Check out the host files listed here: https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/ I am sure there are other sources available too. Kindest regards, Olivier On 02/05/2026 23:26, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > > Thanks, > > Bob From craig at tereschau.net Sun May 3 05:35:34 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 06:35:34 -0600 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The first Internet router is generally believed to be the one created by Virginia Travers and Mike Brescia (they were recognized with the IEEE Internet award for it about 20 years ago -- I remember a lot of research went into confirming their's was, as best one could tell, the first). I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). Craig On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 1:46?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 2, 2026, at 11:02?PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > I don't think i have a good grasp of Bridge Communications and what > they had and when. > > Link below is an interview with Judy Estrin. > > > https://web.archive.org/web/20060428054108/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/013.html > > barbara > > On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 09:37:11 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via > Internet-history wrote: > > > >> Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > >> it and where? > > > > I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, > > in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. > > > > See https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ > > Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > > Brian Carpenter > > > > The Memoranda of the Project MAC/LCS Computer Systems Research Group > authored by or coauthored with Jerome H. Saltzer page contains many reports > detailing various aspects of that project, including network topologies and > protocols that ran on those networks. [1] Network Implementation Note #25 > goes into a fair amount of detail, including a map. [2] Local Network Note > #32 also includes a map. [3] Noel and Michael Greenwald can probably give > more info. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/memos.html#lnn > [2] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/nin/csr-nin-025.pdf > [3] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-032.pdf > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From vgcerf at gmail.com Sun May 3 06:12:25 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 09:12:25 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Correct re: router On Sun, May 3, 2026, 08:35 Craig Partridge via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > The first Internet router is generally believed to be the one created by > Virginia Travers and Mike Brescia (they were recognized with the IEEE > Internet award for it about 20 years ago -- I remember a lot of research > went into confirming their's was, as best one could tell, the first). > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). > > Craig > > On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 1:46?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > On May 2, 2026, at 11:02?PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > > I don't think i have a good grasp of Bridge Communications and what > > they had and when. > > > Link below is an interview with Judy Estrin. > > > > > > https://web.archive.org/web/20060428054108/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/013.html > > > barbara > > > On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 09:37:11 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via > > Internet-history wrote: > > > > > >> Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who > did > > >> it and where? > > > > > > I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, > > > in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. > > > > > > See > https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ > > > Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. > > > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > > > Brian Carpenter > > > > > > > The Memoranda of the Project MAC/LCS Computer Systems Research Group > > authored by or coauthored with Jerome H. Saltzer page contains many > reports > > detailing various aspects of that project, including network topologies > and > > protocols that ran on those networks. [1] Network Implementation Note #25 > > goes into a fair amount of detail, including a map. [2] Local Network > Note > > #32 also includes a map. [3] Noel and Michael Greenwald can probably give > > more info. > > > > --gregbo > > > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/memos.html#lnn > > [2] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/nin/csr-nin-025.pdf > > [3] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-032.pdf > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From cabo at tzi.org Sun May 3 06:25:19 2026 From: cabo at tzi.org (Carsten Bormann) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 15:25:19 +0200 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote: > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. 1976/1977! Gr??e, Carsten From bpurvy at gmail.com Sun May 3 07:31:46 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 07:31:46 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I was at 3Com when they bought Bridge. Our HR people went over and tried to impose 3Com's cubicle culture on them, and they did not care for it *at all*. Many of them quit. Bill Krause made a big show of saying he was going to be Mr. Outside (dealing with the public) and Carrico would be Mr. Inside (actually running the show). That didn't last at all. Others, like Eric Benhamou, stuck around, and he eventually became CEO, leading to Bridge people saying "the whale ate the shark, but the shark ate the whale from inside." I later worked for another Bridge person, Jim Robertson. As for how their routers compared to Cisco's: other people can opine on that. On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 11:02?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I don't think i have a good grasp of Bridge Communications and what they > had and when. > Link below is an interview with Judy Estrin. > > https://web.archive.org/web/20060428054108/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/013.html > barbara > On Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 09:37:11 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via > Internet-history wrote: > > > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > > it and where? > > I think Noel should answer that. The answer might be "Noel, at MIT, > in 1984" but I don't know the date for sure. > > See https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.18/Proteon/ > Of course, Proteon was anti-Ethernet for commercial reasons. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 03-May-26 15:03, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > If "reached via TCP" means over the Internet, in the early 1980s the > > only wide-area connectivity was through the ARPANET, or perhaps SATNET > > to Europe. > > > > LANs were appearing, but the key event might be when the first Gateway > > appeared, connecting the ARPANET to some Ethernet LAN. That would make > > the TCPs on that LAN "reachable via TCP". I suspect that TCP > > implementations on workstations first started by communicating just > > across their LAN. > > > > I don't recall when the first Ethernet gateway appeared, or who did it. > > May have been MIT, or Berkeley, or even UCL? Or perhaps one of Dave > > Mills' Fuzzballs. I don't recall that BBN did it. > > > > Anyone remember when the first Ethernet IP gateway appeared, or who did > > it and where? > > > > /Jack Haverty > > > > On 5/2/26 19:24, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > >> Ben Segal, my former colleague who was CERN's TCP/IP pioneer, wrote: > >> > >> "Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when > >> an initial stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to > >> support a demonstration of the very advanced Symbolics machine from > >> MIT,which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS and TCP/IP protocols if I > >> remember correctly." > >> > >> https://cds.cern.ch/record/2855572/files > >> > >> although I don't think there was very much use until well into 1984 > >> (using pirated IPv4 space). My group had to renumber a lot of hosts a > >> few years later in order to join the Internet, by which time TCP/IP > >> usage on-site was substantial. This was over (yellow) Ethernet, plus > >> our home-made bridges via the 2 Mbps CERNET site-wide network. I don't > >> recall exactly when we started installing "thin" Ethernet. > >> > >> Regards/Ng? mihi > >> Brian Carpenter > >> > >> On 03-May-26 10:48, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > >>> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc894.txt > >>> > >>> > >>> On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 3:42?PM Greg Skinner > >>> wrote: > >>> > >>>> On May 2, 2026, at 3:26?PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>>>> > >>>>> Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, > >>>>> at the > >>>>> end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > >>>>> > >>>>> Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of > >>>>> them > >>>>> actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > >>>>> > >>>>> Thanks, > >>>>> > >>>>> Bob > >>>>> > >>>> > >>>> Some questions: > >>>> > >>>> Do you mean RFC 894 or perhaps RFC 895? > >>>> > >>>> What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? > >>>> > >>>> --gregbo > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From vint at google.com Sun May 3 07:40:29 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 10:40:29 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> Message-ID: I don't think it needed ethernet - it was connecting PRNET to Arpanet and SATNET and likely used BBN 1822 interfaces on the IMP sides. Less clear to me what the interface looked like on the packet radio side - maybe a bit serial link? v On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 9:25?AM Carsten Bormann via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two > > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). > > https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ > > ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. > 1976/1977! > > Gr??e, Carsten > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- 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 From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sun May 3 09:47:20 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 16:47:20 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Fw: TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <882330218.5638136.1777826736171@mail.yahoo.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> <882330218.5638136.1777826736171@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1387948210.5626807.1777826840061@mail.yahoo.com> Forgot to reply to the list. ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Barbara Denny To: Vint Cerf Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:45:36 AM PDTSubject: Re: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 I think for the 1976 demo the gateway was still? in the packet radio station and only supported ARPAnet and PRnet. I think PRUs (Packet Radio Units) originally had an 1822 interface. By the time of the LPR I think the interface was HDLC but that change might have happened earlier. I think the 1977 demo used a separate box for the gateway and may have been ported to MOS by then. The packet radio station used ELF for the operating system. I am waiting to hear if the MIT gateway had an ethernet interface.? Quite some time ago on this mailing list, Noel mentioned he found my request for a gateway. I am begining to wonder if that is why i asked for one.? ?I think i had to specify exactly what interfaces i wanted.? barbara On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 07:40:52 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: I don't think it needed ethernet - it was connecting PRNET to Arpanet and SATNET and likely used BBN 1822 interfaces on the IMP sides. Less clear to me what the interface looked like on the packet radio side - maybe a bit serial link? v On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 9:25?AM Carsten Bormann via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two? > > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). > > https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ > > ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. > 1976/1977! > > Gr??e, Carsten > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- 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 From vgcerf at gmail.com Sun May 3 09:58:53 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 12:58:53 -0400 Subject: [ih] Fw: TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <1387948210.5626807.1777826840061@mail.yahoo.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> <882330218.5638136.1777826736171@mail.yahoo.com> <1387948210.5626807.1777826840061@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: from gemini: The first internet gateway (router), developed by Ginny Strazisar at BBN in 1976/1977, was a *PDP-11/40* that used the *BBN 1822* interface on both sides. The Packet Radio Side Just like the ARPANET connection, the Packet Radio Network (PRNET) side used a *bit-serial (Distant Host) BBN 1822 interface*. The Packet Radio Units (PRUs), manufactured by *Collins Radio* (Rockwell), were specifically designed to emulate an ARPANET IMP's host interface. This allowed existing hardware and drivers to be repurposed with minimal physical modification. Key Technical Details - *Physical Hardware:* In the PDP-11/40 gateway, the connection was typically handled by *ACC (Advanced Computer Communications)* interface cards, specifically the *ACC LH-DH/11* (Local Host-Distant Host) UNIBUS controller. - *The Interface Logic:* Even though the physical layer was the same 1822 bit-serial interface used for the ARPANET, the *logical protocol* was different. Instead of the standard Host-to-IMP protocol (used to talk to ARPANET IMPs), the gateway used the *Channel Access Protocol (CAP)* to communicate with the PRU. - *Speed:* The 1822 interface on the PRNET side supported the radio network's data rates, which were either *100 kbps* or *400 kbps* depending on the specific PRU model and configuration. Why use 1822 for both? The use of the 1822 interface for the PRNET was a strategic choice by DARPA. Since the ARPANET already had a well-defined, reliable host-to-network interface, the developers of the PRU simply adopted the same physical and electrical standards. This ensured that the BBN-developed gateway software could use similar low-level drivers to talk to both a fixed landline network (ARPANET) and a mobile radio-based network (PRNET). Was there a particular reason you were looking into the hardware layer of the PRNET gateway?are you researching the early development of TCP/IP or the hardware of the PDP-11? On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 12:47?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Forgot to reply to the list. > ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Barbara Denny To: > Vint Cerf Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:45:36 AM > PDTSubject: Re: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 > I think for the 1976 demo the gateway was still in the packet radio > station and only supported ARPAnet and PRnet. I think PRUs (Packet Radio > Units) originally had an 1822 interface. By the time of the LPR I think the > interface was HDLC but that change might have happened earlier. > I think the 1977 demo used a separate box for the gateway and may have > been ported to MOS by then. The packet radio station used ELF for the > operating system. > I am waiting to hear if the MIT gateway had an ethernet interface. Quite > some time ago on this mailing list, Noel mentioned he found my request for > a gateway. I am begining to wonder if that is why i asked for one. I > think i had to specify exactly what interfaces i wanted. > barbara > On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 07:40:52 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via > Internet-history wrote: > > I don't think it needed ethernet - it was connecting PRNET to Arpanet and > SATNET and likely used BBN 1822 interfaces on the IMP sides. Less clear to > me what the interface looked like on the packet radio side - maybe a bit > serial link? > > v > > > On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 9:25?AM Carsten Bormann via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two > > > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). > > > > https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ > > > > ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. > > 1976/1977! > > > > Gr??e, Carsten > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > 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 > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sun May 3 10:18:01 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 10:18:01 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <0088048C-B63C-4803-9D51-49429E978E7A@comcast.net> References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <20260418195229.4DAFD10402467@ary.qy> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <78711BB6-0A7C-4629-B3EF-55EE7FF12C01@comcast.net> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <0088048C-B63C-4803-9D51-49429E978E7A@comcast.net> Message-ID: <8B5C19D0-6359-4D94-AA58-C9211C9B0E40@icloud.com> On Apr 29, 2026, at 2:52?AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > But there is another issue here: What do we teach those who are learning about that all of this? Do we just teach them how it works (which I consider vocational)? Or do we try to teach them what we learned? What not to do? How to do it better? IOW, do we teach them to do better or to repeat the same mistakes? > This is a dilemma throughout many types of education, not just computer networking. Vocational education teaches how to do the jobs of today. What you?re describing teaches how to do the jobs of tomorrow. But there are people who need to know how to do both. So the challenge is how to balance both. --gregbo From winowicki at yahoo.com Sun May 3 10:29:28 2026 From: winowicki at yahoo.com (Bill Nowicki) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 17:29:28 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Fw: TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> <882330218.5638136.1777826736171@mail.yahoo.com> <1387948210.5626807.1777826840061@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1228174362.5594552.1777829368640@mail.yahoo.com> Maybe the original question was about how many were 1822 to IMPs vs. Ethernet in 1984? At Stanford, we had something like two using 1822 in the CS department (KL-10 known as SU-AI and DecSystem-20 SCORE) plus another couple in the medical center, where Bill Yeager was doing his own multi-protocol router. We ran TCP over Ethernet on probably a couple dozen Sun workstations, using the V-System, and BSD on several more Vax machines. MIT and CMU had similar environments, with only a couple machines using 1822 and the majority by then using TCP. The legacy networks were PUP at Xerox PARC and Stanford, ChaosNet at MIT, and at least at Stanford they faded away with new growth in TCP. The 3 megabit Ethernet (actually something like 2.97 to align with USA cable TV standards) was only used for Altos, the laser printer, and a batch of Unibus boards made by Xerox for PDP-11s and Vaxes. PUP (and I think ChaosNet?) did not require ARP, but ARP was implemented and deployed by the time the RFC was published; it is very simple. The use of repeaters and flooding bridges was only short-lived since their disadvantages were so obvious. Now as for any non-"research", any customer of Sun Microsystems (and the company network itself, the largest customer!) had their own TCP/IP network. However, most of these (such as Sun's) did not route IP packets to the wider Internet. There were a series of what would now be called firewall hosts, starting with Tom Lyon's SunLink product. So we had exactly one that could route to the outside Internet, and a thousand or so that routed only internally. An interesting historical question to me was: what year were the majority of TCP/IP hosts in the world not directly routable on the main research Internet? My guess would be soon after, in the mid eighties at least. Bill On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:59:14 AM PDT, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: from gemini: The first internet gateway (router), developed by Ginny Strazisar at BBN in 1976/1977, was a *PDP-11/40* that used the *BBN 1822* interface on both sides. The Packet Radio Side Just like the ARPANET connection, the Packet Radio Network (PRNET) side used a *bit-serial (Distant Host) BBN 1822 interface*. The Packet Radio Units (PRUs), manufactured by *Collins Radio* (Rockwell), were specifically designed to emulate an ARPANET IMP's host interface. This allowed existing hardware and drivers to be repurposed with minimal physical modification. Key Technical Details ? - ? *Physical Hardware:* In the PDP-11/40 gateway, the connection was ? typically handled by *ACC (Advanced Computer Communications)* interface ? cards, specifically the *ACC LH-DH/11* (Local Host-Distant Host) UNIBUS ? controller. ? - ? *The Interface Logic:* Even though the physical layer was the same 1822 ? bit-serial interface used for the ARPANET, the *logical protocol* was ? different. Instead of the standard Host-to-IMP protocol (used to talk to ? ARPANET IMPs), the gateway used the *Channel Access Protocol (CAP)* to ? communicate with the PRU. ? - ? *Speed:* The 1822 interface on the PRNET side supported the radio ? network's data rates, which were either *100 kbps* or *400 kbps* ? depending on the specific PRU model and configuration. Why use 1822 for both? The use of the 1822 interface for the PRNET was a strategic choice by DARPA. Since the ARPANET already had a well-defined, reliable host-to-network interface, the developers of the PRU simply adopted the same physical and electrical standards. This ensured that the BBN-developed gateway software could use similar low-level drivers to talk to both a fixed landline network (ARPANET) and a mobile radio-based network (PRNET). Was there a particular reason you were looking into the hardware layer of the PRNET gateway?are you researching the early development of TCP/IP or the hardware of the PDP-11? On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 12:47?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >? Forgot to reply to the list. >? ? ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Barbara Denny To: > Vint Cerf Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:45:36 AM > PDTSubject: Re: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 >? I think for the 1976 demo the gateway was still? in the packet radio > station and only supported ARPAnet and PRnet. I think PRUs (Packet Radio > Units) originally had an 1822 interface. By the time of the LPR I think the > interface was HDLC but that change might have happened earlier. > I think the 1977 demo used a separate box for the gateway and may have > been ported to MOS by then. The packet radio station used ELF for the > operating system. > I am waiting to hear if the MIT gateway had an ethernet interface.? Quite > some time ago on this mailing list, Noel mentioned he found my request for > a gateway. I am begining to wonder if that is why i asked for one.? I > think i had to specify exactly what interfaces i wanted. > barbara >? ? On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 07:40:52 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via > Internet-history wrote: > >? I don't think it needed ethernet - it was connecting PRNET to Arpanet and > SATNET and likely used BBN 1822 interfaces on the IMP sides. Less clear to > me what the interface looked like on the packet radio side - maybe a bit > serial link? > > v > > > On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 9:25?AM Carsten Bormann via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > > I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two > > > ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). > > > > https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ > > > > ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. > > 1976/1977! > > > > Gr??e, Carsten > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > 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 > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From clemc at ccc.com Sun May 3 12:20:16 2026 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 15:20:16 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: below On Sat, May 2, 2026 at 6:26?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Grok's estimate is that about 900 hosts could be reached via TCP, at the > end of 1984. RFC 984 for TCP over Ethernet was in April of that year. > > Were these *entirely* university and research machines? Were any of them > actually running TCP on Ethernet? Does anyone know" > Most certainly. While many computer users did not become aware of IP/TCP running Ethernet until after the August 1983 release of 4.2BSD Vax UNIX, other physical networking standards and protocol stacks were available by the end of 1980; Ethernet and IP/TCP had already been established. And some of those stacks ran on systems other than VAXs, much less UNIX. I'll try to point out some key events that happened well before 1984 or RFC 984. In late August of 1979, a "Standards Project Authorization Request" (PAR) was submitted by Maris Graube of Tektronix and Bob Stuart (Nat Semi - I think, but memory is a little hazy here) to the IEEE Computer Society proposing a standard for "Local Network for Computer Interconnection". By mid March 1980, the IEEE Standards Board had approved "Standards Project No. 802, with Graube as the chair. (I'm going to skip some history/politics, but the *first draft of the IEEE version of Ethernet, 802.3, was published in 1983* (and was finalized in 1985). In the meantime, the original Xerox/DEC/Intel (DIX) "Bluebook" definition of Ethernet running on what we now call 10base5 (*a.k.a.,* DIX Ethernet) was published on *30 September 1980.* This was what really got it started. IEEE "standard" Ethernet would not become ubiquitous until much later, but a lot of systems ran DIX-based systems long before the 1985 802.3 publication date. Nine months before that, RFC 760 DOD Standard Internet Protocol and RFC 761 DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol were both published in *January 1980* (and in September 1981, updated and replaced by RFC 791 and 793, respectively. By early 1981, LANs running on top of DIX Ethernet and using an IP stack were already being created. I personally led the effort that started running IP/TCP at Tektronix in very early 1981 on a few private LANs (and the Chair of IEEE 802, while not part of CSR in TekLabs, Maris was certainly aware of what we were doing, as his office was on the same floor, in the same building). Another point, Bob Metcalfe, Bruce Borden, Howard Charney, and Greg Shaw presented their UNET IP/TCP stack for *UNIX V7 in November of 1980* [see https://www.bitsavers.org/communications/3Com/3Com_UNET_Nov80.pdf]. (FWIW: In an envelope, I believe I still have somewhere in my basement archives, is the mailing envelope dated December 32, 1980, which shipped a 600 ft 9-track tape to me at Tektronix as the first customer ship of the same). In Tek Labs, we used 3COM's original DIX-compliant 3C100 series Unibus Ethernet interface and transceiver. The 3Com hardware and their UNET software were installed on Tek Labs 11/70 (which also had an NSC Hyperchannel interface). This IP/TCP stack connected to a VMS system over Ethernet and to a NOS-based CDC Cyber machine over Hyperchannel. In the beginning, all were in the same machine room. ? Meanwhile, back at BBN, Rob Gurwitz is working on the original BBN IP/TCP implementation for 4.1BSD Vaxen. The November 1981 release of RFC801 includes a message dated 18-Nov 1981 from Rob that says: "Aside from ARPANET 1822 and the ACC LH/DH-11 driver, experimental drivers have also been developed for ETHERNET" (which were the 3COM 3C100 and Interlan NI1010). FWIW: placed like CMU, Stanford, and MIT, which all had Altos, were running 3M Ethernet, so a driver for the Unibus 3MB-based board quickly appeared (again, fuzzy memory, but I think MIT first wrote that). Note that it would take another year for ARP to appear from MIT as RFC826, as we used static host tables that mapped hostnames, IP addresses, and MAC addresses. Masscomp shipped its first smart Ethernet controller that ran an embedded IP/TCP stack in early 1983. As Tom Lyon points out, Sun shipped its first Sun OS 1.0 with a full IP/TCP by November of 1983. Silicon Graphics would have been around the same time. Going back to your original question, my experience running an IP/TCP stack on DIX-based Ethernet was extremely well established by mid-1983 at many sites. How many of those sites were also Arpanet sites? That is a much smaller number because participation was limited/controlled. Clem ? Tek history: Steve Glaser wrote the Hyperchannel support for the UNIX side. The CDC IP stack and the Hyperchannel support were written primarily by Stan Smith. Steve, Stan, and I were the original authors of the IP stack for VMS. The CDC stack user code was primarily FORTRAN, with the OS working in assembler. VMS was primarily Bliss with some assembler. I should point out that the VMS driver for 3C100 VMS was written in assembler by Greg Shaw at 3COM, with a bit of help/rewrite from Steve and me, which we fed back to them. I later gave Howard Wakler at CMU CS Dept a copy of the entire VMS stack (where I had graduated the previous year). A highly modified and enhanced version of that stack can still be found: - https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v40/cmuip/ (src) - https://www.openvmshobby.com/vax-vms/carnegie-mellon-tcpip-vax/ ( details). I do not know what happened to the CDC NOS stack. From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 3 12:21:23 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 15:21:23 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <8B5C19D0-6359-4D94-AA58-C9211C9B0E40@icloud.com> References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <20260418195229.4DAFD10402467@ary.qy> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <78711BB6-0A7C-4629-B3EF-55EE7FF12C01@comcast.net> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <0088048C-B63C-4803-9D51-49429E978E7A@comcast.net> <8B5C19D0-6359-4D94-AA58-C9211C9B0E40@icloud.com> Message-ID: <863958BF-ABB5-45BF-9365-D25CEEAAFB20@comcast.net> To do both of what? John > On May 3, 2026, at 13:18, Greg Skinner wrote: > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 2:52?AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> >> But there is another issue here: What do we teach those who are learning about that all of this? Do we just teach them how it works (which I consider vocational)? Or do we try to teach them what we learned? What not to do? How to do it better? IOW, do we teach them to do better or to repeat the same mistakes? >> > > This is a dilemma throughout many types of education, not just computer networking. Vocational education teaches how to do the jobs of today. What you?re describing teaches how to do the jobs of tomorrow. But there are people who need to know how to do both. So the challenge is how to balance both. > > --gregbo > From jack at 3kitty.org Sun May 3 15:08:38 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 15:08:38 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fw: TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <1228174362.5594552.1777829368640@mail.yahoo.com> References: <509868D7-D581-4E6C-983C-86D64588251E@icloud.com> <50e361e4-37c1-4851-95f4-55ee0fcbce53@gmail.com> <0053b2d1-4b5d-4721-aa73-4ba94be3092f@gmail.com> <105644069.5554270.1777788147805@mail.yahoo.com> <1AD53BD3-5308-46C9-8FF5-671932D66C94@tzi.org> <882330218.5638136.1777826736171@mail.yahoo.com> <1387948210.5626807.1777826840061@mail.yahoo.com> <1228174362.5594552.1777829368640@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <95a149db-a1ee-41f2-982d-cbe990a067ea@3kitty.org> What I remember...: - Ginny Strazisar developed the first gateway code, running on a PDP-11.? It was used to interconnect the ARPANET and SATNET, as well as in various tests and demos of Packet Radio (PRNETs).? Virginia Travers is the same person; Ginny changed her name when she married, as was the tradition in those days. - The Internet was a research project, while most everyday "user" traffic in the late 1970s was being handled just by the ARPANET. ?However, some sites had begun to rely on the SATNET connection between the US and Europe, especially Peter Kirstein's group at University College London (UCL) and John Law's group at Radar Signals Research Establishment (RSRE).? ?Their work depended on Internet connectivity well before the ARPANET was forced to use TCP after the "cutover" in January 1983.? ?In effect, the European users were the first users requiring the Internet to be operational in order to get their work done.? ?This was often a topic of discussion at the Internet meetings, e.g., the one in 1980 hosted by John Laws at RSRE. - To begin a transition of the Internet "core" to an operational status, sometime in 1981 Vint asked me if I'd be willing to take over the "gateway work", which was being done at BBN but in a separate Division.? The Division I worked for had already run the ARPANET for a decade and developed tools and processes for running it as an operational "utility".? ARPA had also transitioned responsibility for ARPANET to DCA (Defense Communications Agency), which was responsible for operations rather than research.? In addition, SATNET operations had been transitioned to the same NOC (Network Operations Center) that ran the ARPANET on a 24x7 basis. So the Internet operations could follow a similar path from research to operations. - The "gateway project" transition required contractual changes, which took a while.? The BBN QTR (Quarterly Technical Report) of late 1981 documents the event and motivation.? ?It's available at DTIC - see https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/ADA108783/ where the relevant section starts on page 47 of the PDF.? ?Many other similar QTRs document the early history of the Internet, from BBN and other contractors. - at BBN, in preparation for taking responsibility for making the gateways operational, we had assembled a team of Bob Hinden, Mike Brescia, and Alan Sheltzer.? ?Bob Bressler had been responsible as the PI (Principal Investigator) on the contracts for ARPA work, and he made me the PI instead.? ?That had the immediate effect that I now had to collect all the information and create subsequent QTRs, and I learned the hard way that a late QTR meant that the government didn't send a check to BBN to pay the bill. - Making gateways operational required a bunch of steps.? The original code was written in BCPL, which was fine for research but somewhat slow and inefficient running in the limits of the PDP-11s we had.? So the code was rewritten in PDP-11 assembly language. - There were also a lot of tools that had been proven useful in operating the ARPANET, which we had to translate into the Internet architecture.? Mechanisms such as ARPANET "Traps" became aspects of SNMP for example.? A new printer appeared in the NOC, capturing reports of activity in the "core gateways", similar to the reports that had been coming from IMPs throughout the ARPANET. - Bob Hinden had recently completed implementing TCP for the "TIP" to become a "TAC" -- the terminal concentrator used extensively in ARPANET.? I had implemented the first TCP for Unix, also running on an 11/40 where the limitations of the hardware were a challenge. However, that PDP-11/40 used a DEC IMP11A as its 1822 interface rather than Roland Bryan's ACC hardware,? Mike Brescia and Alan Sheltzer were experienced engineers to complete the project team. - There was at least a hint of the effects of Licklider's vision that I posted about recently.? Bressler, Brescia, and I had all worked together in Lick's group at MIT before migrating to BBN. Other memorable network names were also in Lick's group in the 1970s, e.g., Abhay Bhushan (see early FTP RFCs) and Bob Metcalfe (yes, the one who invented Ethernet).? Plus lots of students passed through doing various projects, spending enough time to possibly become infected by Lick. - But I'm still not sure who first plugged an Ethernet into a router connected to some long-haul network, and became part of the neonatal Internet.? ?By 1983, every host that had been on the ARPANET had implemented TCP, and workstations were becoming popular, so it likely happened before January 1983. /Jack Haverty On 5/3/26 10:29, Bill Nowicki via Internet-history wrote: > Maybe the original question was about how many were 1822 to IMPs vs. Ethernet in 1984? At Stanford, we had something like two using 1822 in the CS department (KL-10 known as SU-AI and DecSystem-20 SCORE) plus another couple in the medical center, where Bill Yeager was doing his own multi-protocol router. We ran TCP over Ethernet on probably a couple dozen Sun workstations, using the V-System, and BSD on several more Vax machines. MIT and CMU had similar environments, with only a couple machines using 1822 and the majority by then using TCP. The legacy networks were PUP at Xerox PARC and Stanford, ChaosNet at MIT, and at least at Stanford they faded away with new growth in TCP. The 3 megabit Ethernet (actually something like 2.97 to align with USA cable TV standards) was only used for Altos, the laser printer, and a batch of Unibus boards made by Xerox for PDP-11s and Vaxes. > PUP (and I think ChaosNet?) did not require ARP, but ARP was implemented and deployed by the time the RFC was published; it is very simple. The use of repeaters and flooding bridges was only short-lived since their disadvantages were so obvious. > Now as for any non-"research", any customer of Sun Microsystems (and the company network itself, the largest customer!) had their own TCP/IP network. However, most of these (such as Sun's) did not route IP packets to the wider Internet. There were a series of what would now be called firewall hosts, starting with Tom Lyon's SunLink product. So we had exactly one that could route to the outside Internet, and a thousand or so that routed only internally. An interesting historical question to me was: what year were the majority of TCP/IP hosts in the world not directly routable on the main research Internet? My guess would be soon after, in the mid eighties at least. > Bill > On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:59:14 AM PDT, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > from gemini: > > The first internet gateway (router), developed by Ginny Strazisar at BBN in > 1976/1977, was a *PDP-11/40* that used the *BBN 1822* interface on both > sides. > The Packet Radio Side > > Just like the ARPANET connection, the Packet Radio Network (PRNET) side > used a *bit-serial (Distant Host) BBN 1822 interface*. > > The Packet Radio Units (PRUs), manufactured by *Collins Radio* (Rockwell), > were specifically designed to emulate an ARPANET IMP's host interface. This > allowed existing hardware and drivers to be repurposed with minimal > physical modification. > Key Technical Details > > ? - > > ? *Physical Hardware:* In the PDP-11/40 gateway, the connection was > ? typically handled by *ACC (Advanced Computer Communications)* interface > ? cards, specifically the *ACC LH-DH/11* (Local Host-Distant Host) UNIBUS > ? controller. > ? - > > ? *The Interface Logic:* Even though the physical layer was the same 1822 > ? bit-serial interface used for the ARPANET, the *logical protocol* was > ? different. Instead of the standard Host-to-IMP protocol (used to talk to > ? ARPANET IMPs), the gateway used the *Channel Access Protocol (CAP)* to > ? communicate with the PRU. > ? - > > ? *Speed:* The 1822 interface on the PRNET side supported the radio > ? network's data rates, which were either *100 kbps* or *400 kbps* > ? depending on the specific PRU model and configuration. > > Why use 1822 for both? > > The use of the 1822 interface for the PRNET was a strategic choice by > DARPA. Since the ARPANET already had a well-defined, reliable > host-to-network interface, the developers of the PRU simply adopted the > same physical and electrical standards. This ensured that the BBN-developed > gateway software could use similar low-level drivers to talk to both a > fixed landline network (ARPANET) and a mobile radio-based network (PRNET). > > Was there a particular reason you were looking into the hardware layer of > the PRNET gateway?are you researching the early development of TCP/IP or > the hardware of the PDP-11? > > On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 12:47?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> ? Forgot to reply to the list. >> ? ? ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Barbara Denny To: >> Vint Cerf Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 09:45:36 AM >> PDTSubject: Re: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 >> ? I think for the 1976 demo the gateway was still? in the packet radio >> station and only supported ARPAnet and PRnet. I think PRUs (Packet Radio >> Units) originally had an 1822 interface. By the time of the LPR I think the >> interface was HDLC but that change might have happened earlier. >> I think the 1977 demo used a separate box for the gateway and may have >> been ported to MOS by then. The packet radio station used ELF for the >> operating system. >> I am waiting to hear if the MIT gateway had an ethernet interface.? Quite >> some time ago on this mailing list, Noel mentioned he found my request for >> a gateway. I am begining to wonder if that is why i asked for one.? I >> think i had to specify exactly what interfaces i wanted. >> barbara >> ? ? On Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 07:40:52 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via >> Internet-history wrote: >> >> ? I don't think it needed ethernet - it was connecting PRNET to Arpanet and >> SATNET and likely used BBN 1822 interfaces on the IMP sides. Less clear to >> me what the interface looked like on the packet radio side - maybe a bit >> serial link? >> >> v >> >> >> On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 9:25?AM Carsten Bormann via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> On 2026-05-03, at 14:35, Craig Partridge via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>> I don't recall if it supported Ethernet or simply connected two >>>> ARPANET-technology networks (of which there were a few at the time). >>> https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/virginia-travers/ >>> >>> ?talks about ?radio and satellite?. >>> 1976/1977! >>> >>> Gr??e, Carsten >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> -- >> 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 >> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sun May 3 17:23:02 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 20:23:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 Message-ID: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Greg Skinner > What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? Even more important, there are two very different 'Ethernets': The 'Experimental' 3MB Ethernet, and the 10MB DIX Ethernet. The former considerably preceded the latter. Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the 3MB Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) Most of Stanford's internal LANs were 3MB Ethernet for quite some time. (They had their own inter-LAN routers, but I got roped into providing a 'gateway' (router) to connect Stanford's internal internet to the ARPANET. I have found an early version of the config files for it, and it only had a 3MB Ethernet interface for quite some time; a 10MB Ethernet was added somewhat later - 11/29/1983, to be exact.) I don't know much about what went on at CMU. MIT only used the 3MB Ethernet for the Altos and the Dover; we had lots of our own LANs. Dave Clark and I got into a contest: he was going to write a TCP for the Alto, and I was going to produce a router to connect the Ethernet to the internet in Tech Sq. I have a piece of paper, presented at a celebration where Karen Sollins declared the outcome to be a tie, which is dated 13 March, 1980. (We must have asked PARC for an Ethernet type for IP packets; I see PUP was 01000, and IPv4 was 01001.) Noel From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 3 15:23:52 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 18:23:52 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: >From 1981-85 I was director of the Computer Science Research Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation. We connected the lab to the Arpanet using a port on the Space Division IMP located across the street at the AIR Force's Space Division headquarters. A pipe underneath the street allowed us to run a cable from their location to ours. I don't recall which interface we used; I assume it was a Distant Host interface?more than 50 feet but not requiring a modem. Once our lab was on the Arpanet, discussions commenced about how to extend that access to other parts of Aerospace. We settled on a "ring with tails" architecture. We installed a Proteon ring connecting the various buildings. The physical pathways were pipes that all led to the main computer center building, A3, so the "ring" looked more like a star, but it was topologically a ring. We connected a PDP-11/23 to the ring in each building and ran a 3MB Ethernet cable from it down the raceway in the ceiling of the long corridor at the center of each building. It was thus possible to connect any computer on the main campus to this network and gain access to the Arpanet. This low-cost design could be replaced in a few years when better technology becomes available without concern. We had difficulty choosing our network name. "Aerospace" was the natural name, but in those days, it was common practice to have a much shorter alternative name. In formal settings, Aerospace made a point of referring to itself as The Aerospace Corporation to distnguish itself from the myriad of other aerospace companies, e.g. Ford Aerospace. We considered using the initials TAC, but that would have caused confusion with the Terminal Access Concentrators (TACs) that replaced the TIPs. The Aerospace logo is a slanted capital A inside of a circle, and we briefly considered using "@" as the short name. Since that was the quote character on the TIPs and TACs, a user trying to connect to Aerospace would have had to type two at signs, "C @@" and would seen three because of the echoing. And no one else had names with special characters. We discarded the idea after a few moments of amusement. Lacking a better idea, we settled on the single letter A, which was suitably entered into the host table. CMU promptly stopped working. Their machines were named CMU-A, CMU-B, etc., and they used the single letters internally. Their A machine was the gateway between the Arpanet and their internal network. Very quickly, our short name was removed from the host table, single letter hostnames were prohibited, and we used "aero" thereafter. Steve On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 8:23?PM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > From: Greg Skinner > > > What type of Ethernet (single cable, bridged LAN)? > > Even more important, there are two very different 'Ethernets': The > 'Experimental' 3MB Ethernet, and the 10MB DIX Ethernet. The former > considerably preceded the latter. > > > Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably > 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the > 3MB > Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says > when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in > 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) > > Most of Stanford's internal LANs were 3MB Ethernet for quite some time. > (They > had their own inter-LAN routers, but I got roped into providing a 'gateway' > (router) to connect Stanford's internal internet to the ARPANET. I have > found > an early version of the config files for it, and it only had a 3MB Ethernet > interface for quite some time; a 10MB Ethernet was added somewhat later - > 11/29/1983, to be exact.) I don't know much about what went on at CMU. > > MIT only used the 3MB Ethernet for the Altos and the Dover; we had lots of > our own LANs. Dave Clark and I got into a contest: he was going to write a > TCP for the Alto, and I was going to produce a router to connect the > Ethernet > to the internet in Tech Sq. I have a piece of paper, presented at a > celebration where Karen Sollins declared the outcome to be a tie, which is > dated 13 March, 1980. (We must have asked PARC for an Ethernet type for IP > packets; I see PUP was 01000, and IPv4 was 01001.) > > Noel > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From dhc at dcrocker.net Sun May 3 18:33:33 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 01:33:33 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <3e9bf1d4-dd56-461a-9fda-c61b345a76f7@dcrocker.net> On 5/3/2026 3:23 PM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > We had difficulty choosing our network name. And, indeed, The Goldilocks Principle applies to UX-related naming issues, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_principle d/ ps. For MCI Mail, a user's 'address' was their name, canonicalized to remove obvious prefixes and suffixes.? So we could remove PhD but decided not to remove MA in case Yo Yo Ma wanted to use our system. -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From ats at offog.org Mon May 4 07:36:22 2026 From: ats at offog.org (Adam Sampson) Date: Mon, 04 May 2026 15:36:22 +0100 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa via Internet-history's message of "Sun, 3 May 2026 20:23:02 -0400 (EDT)") References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Noel Chiappa via Internet-history writes: > Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably > 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the 3MB > Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says > when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in > 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) It looks like late 1979 for SAIL. From Les Earnest's files: > SYSTEM MEETING 7 March 1979 > ... > Xerox: Xerox is offering the Computer Science Department a Dover > (high speed, high resolution XGP-like printer), an Ethernet, > and some number of Altos - LES. > SYSTEM MEETING 11 July 1979 > ... > Dover: Should arrive Sept.-Oct. Comes with 16-18 Altos & file server. > SYSTEM MEETING 6 September 1979 > ... > Dover: Due Oct. https://www.saildart.org/SYSTEM.MTG[D,LES]52 (There are quite a few other references to the Dover, Altos and Ethernet under LES, so it's probably worth a grep through there...) -- Adam Sampson From winowicki at yahoo.com Mon May 4 14:51:00 2026 From: winowicki at yahoo.com (Bill Nowicki) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 21:51:00 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <1032771031.6027981.1777931460995@mail.yahoo.com> Yes indeed, I arrived at Stanford in September 1979, and the Computer Science department was just starting to move into Margaret Jacks Hall, named for the heir to "Monterey Jack" cheese, in newly renovated corner of the original quad. Up until then, the CS Department did not have a computer. If you wanted to research systems, you still had to do a dissertation in theory, AI, or numerical analysis. SAIL also moved down from the hill into the basement of Jacks hall. My office was on the fourth floor, where the Altos went. There was some planning done before then perhaps, maybe as early as 1978, especially arm twisting from Xerox to let us have them (even though PARC land was leased from the university). One justification was that Altos were already being replaced the "D" machines like the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, and the Dandelion, more reasonable cost with newer technology. All the Xerox gear including the file server (literally an Alto with disks) and the laser printer (one second per page, amazing performance!), also controlled by an Alto, used the 2.97 megabit per second experimental Ethernet exclusively. The original Sun Multibus card that Andy Bechtolscheim designed was also the experimental Ethernet, as well as the BSD Vaxes and the LSI-11 gateway running Noel Chiappa's code obtained by Jeff Mogul. By 1984, however, all the Sun Microsystems products used the standard DEC Intel Xerox (DIX) Ethernet using ARP. Bill On Monday, May 4, 2026 at 07:36:35 AM PDT, Adam Sampson via Internet-history wrote: Noel Chiappa via Internet-history writes: > Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably > 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the 3MB > Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says > when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in > 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) It looks like late 1979 for SAIL. From Les Earnest's files: > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 7 March 1979 > ... > Xerox:??? Xerox is offering the Computer Science Department a Dover > ??? ??? (high speed, high resolution XGP-like printer), an Ethernet, > ??? ??? and some number of Altos - LES. > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 11 July 1979 > ... > Dover:??? Should arrive Sept.-Oct.? Comes with 16-18 Altos & file server. > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 6 September 1979 > ... > Dover:??? Due Oct. https://www.saildart.org/SYSTEM.MTG[D,LES]52 (There are quite a few other references to the Dover, Altos and Ethernet under LES, so it's probably worth a grep through there...) -- Adam Sampson ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From byeager at fastmail.fm Mon May 4 15:02:53 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 15:02:53 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing Message-ID: <7C7C9258-F2C3-4122-9F70-C9AE7342C1F1@fastmail.fm> A little bit more about what occurred at Stanford re TCP/IP, and other protocols. Details of my work can be found at: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/300000119/search/people:yeager-william-bill-person-author/ The initial implementation of the multiple protocol router I wrote was on a diskless, PDP-11/05. In 1980 it routed PUP, for Xerox PARC D-machines, altos, TENEX on Dec system 10s, printers, etc. The same code also supported an EtherTIP for LAN dial-in connectivity. In 1981 I acquired an IP protocol document via my director from SRI/NIC. For the fun of it I added ICMP/echo between my routers and EtherTIPs. They already had PUP echo. I think the Vaxs running BSD Unix and TCP/IP arrived in the 1982-83 time frame. The CSD installed these OSs for us. By that time my routers ran on Andy Bechcolsheim?s Motorola MC68000 mother board and supported both 3mbps and 10mpbs ethernets using 3COM?s 10mbps interfaces and Andy?s 3mbps interfaces. And the IP suite (ARP, RARP were required on 10mbps ether nets), Xerox PARC XNS (10mbps nets), and PUP and were used by the Stanford University LAN. When the Internet came on line in 1983 Geoff Mogul acquired a ButterFly gatewy from BBN which he named Golden. This gave the routers connectivity across the to the Internet from Stanford?s LAN. When the Texas Instruments explorers arrived circa 1984, I added MIT?s chaosnet routing. Bill is correct that Chaosnet did not require ARP because the host/net fields in the packets were one byte each on 3mbps networks and the encapsuation of the packets was one byte dest host, and one byte source host. The routers boot time configuration had each interfaces source net address for directly connected networks. When the explorers moved to 10mbps networks, they did not support ARP, and the routers kept translation tables for each local net that had these systems. The details are in the paper. The routers supported a number of other features and the list is very long. A cute one was to respond to Xerox D-machines on 3 and 10mpbs breath-of-life requests. The response was the code for their boot block that allowed them to boot their OS from servers not on their local net. In any case, all of the details are in the 53 page paper above, and as Bill knows, he is mentioned therein for his contributions to the Stanford LAN. The above is all from memory of course. The paper was published by the Computer History Museum in July, 2025 and was a two year effort. I still have the sources on my desktop and excerpts from the code are in the paper. To this end I?ll close with an interesting anecdote: When the CHM was ready to publish when, the senior curator, Dag Spicer wondered about the Stanford copyrights that I included in the paper as well as the code excerpts. To clarify this, I queried the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing. They were not sure and so created a case and a case worker, Mike Spaid. On checking he found that Cisco was given a lifetime copyright by OTL in 2000. We discussed this for a couple of weeks because the software was written under NIH grants which insisted on public access for non-commercial use. Otherwise, OTL must grant a license for commercial use. Thus cisco based their router software on mine when they licensed it in 1987. The upshot was that the director of OTL granted copyright to the CHM for the paper with the requirement that each code excerpt have the following in the references: ? 2025 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Bill ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 4 15:18:26 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 15:18:26 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <1032771031.6027981.1777931460995@mail.yahoo.com> References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <1032771031.6027981.1777931460995@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: " the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, " Not to mention, noisy as hell. You almost couldn't have one in your office. Or so I've heard. On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 2:51?PM Bill Nowicki via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > Yes indeed, I arrived at Stanford in September 1979, and the Computer > Science department was just starting to move into Margaret Jacks Hall, > named for the heir to "Monterey Jack" cheese, in newly renovated corner of > the original quad. Up until then, the CS Department did not have a > computer. If you wanted to research systems, you still had to do a > dissertation in theory, AI, or numerical analysis. SAIL also moved down > from the hill into the basement of Jacks hall. My office was on the fourth > floor, where the Altos went. There was some planning done before then > perhaps, maybe as early as 1978, especially arm twisting from Xerox to let > us have them (even though PARC land was leased from the university). One > justification was that Altos were already being replaced the "D" machines > like the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, and the Dandelion, > more reasonable cost with newer technology. All the Xerox gear including > the file server (literally an Alto with disks) and the laser printer (one > second per page, amazing performance!), also controlled by an Alto, used > the 2.97 megabit per second experimental Ethernet exclusively. The original > Sun Multibus card that Andy Bechtolscheim designed was also the > experimental Ethernet, as well as the BSD Vaxes and the LSI-11 gateway > running Noel Chiappa's code obtained by Jeff Mogul. > By 1984, however, all the Sun Microsystems products used the standard DEC > Intel Xerox (DIX) Ethernet using ARP. > Bill On Monday, May 4, 2026 at 07:36:35 AM PDT, Adam Sampson via > Internet-history wrote: > > Noel Chiappa via Internet-history > writes: > > > Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably > > 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only > the 3MB > > Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says > > when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in > > 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) > > It looks like late 1979 for SAIL. From Les Earnest's files: > > > SYSTEM MEETING 7 March 1979 > > ... > > Xerox: Xerox is offering the Computer Science Department a Dover > > (high speed, high resolution XGP-like printer), an Ethernet, > > and some number of Altos - LES. > > > SYSTEM MEETING 11 July 1979 > > ... > > Dover: Should arrive Sept.-Oct. Comes with 16-18 Altos & file server. > > > SYSTEM MEETING 6 September 1979 > > ... > > Dover: Due Oct. > > https://www.saildart.org/SYSTEM.MTG[D,LES]52 > (There are quite a few other references to the Dover, Altos and Ethernet > under LES, so it's probably worth a grep through there...) > > -- > Adam Sampson > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From byeager at fastmail.fm Mon May 4 16:17:27 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 16:17:27 -0700 Subject: [ih] An OTL story publised last year Message-ID: <95C08CED-C716-4A49-91C8-013D45379835@fastmail.fm> After granting the copyright permission for the Computer History Museum router paper they published, the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing had one of its writers publish the following story. He interviewed several of us who were involved. The OTL wanted to make the origins of the Cisco router software known to about 33,000 individuals among whom were current and past faculty and staff members and graduates. The following is the link to this story: https://otl.stanford.edu/news/inside-invention-stanford-router-inspired-cisco Bill ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From winowicki at yahoo.com Mon May 4 16:42:28 2026 From: winowicki at yahoo.com (Bill Nowicki) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 23:42:28 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: <20260504002302.2439018C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <1032771031.6027981.1777931460995@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1096068473.6063422.1777938148920@mail.yahoo.com> Oh yes, the Dorados used emitter-coupled logic, which ran so hot that cooling made its use as a "personal" computer quite comical: Xerox put them into a computer room behind a sound-proof door. The Dandelion was supposed to be the commercial variant, which was marketed briefly as a Lisp Machine running D-Lisp. At Stanford the Lisp machines from the Boston-area company (Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc. as I recall) were similarly so noisy they were kept in a computer room too, keeping company with the BSD Vaxes that our group used as a V-System file and email servers. An interesting anecdote was that the de-facto computer room was actually supposed to be the concert hall for the computer music group, so it had great acoustic insulation. Attached was a small closet-sized office that was intended to house the computers for the music, even better insulated. The staff person John Seamons (later joining Robert Poor from SAIL at LucasFilms) was clever enough to reverse the use: the closet was his nice quiet office. Anyone who knows John would recognize it suited him nicely. Perhaps getting a bit off the topic.... Bill N On Monday, May 4, 2026 at 03:18:37 PM PDT, Bob Purvy wrote: "?the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, " Not to mention, noisy as hell. You almost couldn't have one in your office. Or so I've heard. On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 2:51?PM Bill Nowicki via Internet-history wrote: ? Yes indeed, I arrived at Stanford in September 1979, and the Computer Science department was just starting to move into Margaret Jacks Hall, named for the heir to "Monterey Jack" cheese, in newly renovated corner of the original quad. Up until then, the CS Department did not have a computer. If you wanted to research systems, you still had to do a dissertation in theory, AI, or numerical analysis. SAIL also moved down from the hill into the basement of Jacks hall. My office was on the fourth floor, where the Altos went. There was some planning done before then perhaps, maybe as early as 1978, especially arm twisting from Xerox to let us have them (even though PARC land was leased from the university). One justification was that Altos were already being replaced the "D" machines like the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, and the Dandelion, more reasonable cost with newer technology. All the Xerox gear including the file server (literally an Alto with disks) and the laser printer (one second per page, amazing performance!), also controlled by an Alto, used the 2.97 megabit per second experimental Ethernet exclusively. The original Sun Multibus card that Andy Bechtolscheim designed was also the experimental Ethernet, as well as the BSD Vaxes and the LSI-11 gateway running Noel Chiappa's code obtained by Jeff Mogul. By 1984, however, all the Sun Microsystems products used the standard DEC Intel Xerox (DIX) Ethernet using ARP. Bill? ? On Monday, May 4, 2026 at 07:36:35 AM PDT, Adam Sampson via Internet-history wrote:? ?Noel Chiappa via Internet-history writes: > Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably > 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the 3MB > Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says > when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in > 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.) It looks like late 1979 for SAIL. From Les Earnest's files: > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 7 March 1979 > ... > Xerox:??? Xerox is offering the Computer Science Department a Dover > ??? ??? (high speed, high resolution XGP-like printer), an Ethernet, > ??? ??? and some number of Altos - LES. > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 11 July 1979 > ... > Dover:??? Should arrive Sept.-Oct.? Comes with 16-18 Altos & file server. > SYSTEM MEETING??? ??? ??? ??? ??? 6 September 1979 > ... > Dover:??? Due Oct. https://www.saildart.org/SYSTEM.MTG[D,LES]52 (There are quite a few other references to the Dover, Altos and Ethernet under LES, so it's probably worth a grep through there...) -- Adam Sampson ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From vint at google.com Mon May 4 17:18:39 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 20:18:39 -0400 Subject: [ih] IPv8... In-Reply-To: <5e431eaa-bbff-44e0-94b8-44d59ad2aabe@gmail.com> References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <5e431eaa-bbff-44e0-94b8-44d59ad2aabe@gmail.com> Message-ID: Padlipsky was a unique character. Incidentally, IPv8 suggests eliminating a sort of vegetable/tomato mix..... v On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 7:52?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Being compared to Padlipsky is a considerable honour that I don't deserve. > Sadly, I never met him. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 18-Apr-26 10:50, Bill Ricker wrote: > > > > > > On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 5:30?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via > Internet-history internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote: > > > > *_The community should avoid wasting time on such proposals_*." > > > > was most enjoyably Padlipsky-esque in the way his 1982 {{RFC874}} > Critique > > of X.25 was > > > > "*Conclusion* > > > > *_**X.25 is not a good thing_*." > > > > > > Speaking as The Literary Estate of MAP, I concur with Geoff that Brian's > above new anti-v8 dicta is delightful and fits MAP's sense > 'technico-aesthetic criticism'. > > > > (I rather like V8 myself, but being cheap, I usually just buy the > store's-own generic tomato juice.) > > > > At least my new fibre-to-home router has IPv6, finally ! > > > > // Bill in Boston > > // The Literary & Spiritus Estate of MAP > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- 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 From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 4 18:00:43 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 13:00:43 +1200 Subject: [ih] IPv8... In-Reply-To: References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <5e431eaa-bbff-44e0-94b8-44d59ad2aabe@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4f89698b-08c5-4a54-a183-cddce4c47d9e@gmail.com> On 05-May-26 12:18, Vint Cerf wrote: > Padlipsky was a unique character. Incidentally, IPv8 suggests eliminating a sort of vegetable/tomato mix..... Although I'm a Brit (a.k.a. a Pom, where I live), I know enough about American popular culture to think that's very, very funny. It does remind me of a famous T-shirt. Brian > > v > > > On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 7:52?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history > wrote: > > Being compared to Padlipsky is a considerable honour that I don't deserve. Sadly, I never met him. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > ? ? Brian Carpenter > > On 18-Apr-26 10:50, Bill Ricker wrote: > > > > > > On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 5:30?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history >> wrote: > > > >? ? ?*_The community should avoid wasting time on such proposals_*." > > > >? ? ?was most enjoyably Padlipsky-esque in the way his 1982 {{RFC874}} Critique > >? ? ?of X.25 was > > > >? ? ?"*Conclusion* > > > >? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? *_**X.25 is not a good thing_*." > > > > > > Speaking as The Literary Estate of MAP, I concur with Geoff that Brian's above new anti-v8 dicta is delightful and fits MAP's sense 'technico-aesthetic criticism'. > > > > (I rather like V8 myself, but being cheap, I usually just buy the store's-own generic tomato juice.) > > > > At least my new fibre-to-home router has IPv6, finally ! > > > >? ?// Bill in Boston > > // The Literary & Spiritus Estate of MAP > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > -- > 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 > > > From dhc at dcrocker.net Mon May 4 18:02:45 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 01:02:45 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] IPv8... In-Reply-To: References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <5e431eaa-bbff-44e0-94b8-44d59ad2aabe@gmail.com> Message-ID: <2809f8ff-e077-4f1f-90a4-34f4bdca467a@dcrocker.net> On 5/4/2026 5:18 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > Incidentally, IPv8 suggests eliminating a > sort of vegetable/tomato mix..... Oh? I thought it entirely apt, since the next transition for IP is especially likely to need more juice. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Mon May 4 23:52:35 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 23:52:35 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <20260503015639.8C4801078F311@ary.qy> References: <322357C5-DD10-4DA1-A6AC-2AA7A65E0832@icloud.com> <20260503015639.8C4801078F311@ary.qy> Message-ID: <066B77F6-E347-4521-92F0-F0F849BE6DEB@icloud.com> On May 2, 2026, at 6:56?PM, John Levine wrote: > > It appears that Greg Skinner via Internet-history said: >> It occurred to me that some of this information might be inferred from UUCP maps. Some UUCP Mapping Project entries contained the operating >> system the machine ran. Those sites could have run TCP/IP networks internally that were not (yet) connected to the Internet. > > Probably not. My site ima was in those 1982 maps and while there were sites that could gateway mail to the Arpanet, I don't > remember anyone mentioning a disconnected TCP network. > > R's, > JOhn Perhaps. I remember starting to read the unix-wizards list in 1982 and seeing a lot of questions about Ethernet and TCP/IP. People wanting help with getting drivers working, ARP, and so forth. Not all of them were on the ?connected? Internet; some were either using mail relays or Usenet to post their questions. Others had accounts on machines on the ?connected? Internet, but were referring to systems that weren?t. Anyway, it was just a thought. Perhaps Bob Purvy could give some more details about his inquiry. Is it just idle curiosity, or part of a formal study? For what it's worth, it?s possible to submit keyword queries for net.unix-wizards posts from that time period in Google Groups, to get an idea of what I?m referring to. Some examples: https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix-wizards/search?q=ethernet https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix-wizards/search?q=tcp --gregbo From vgcerf at gmail.com Tue May 5 02:02:58 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 05:02:58 -0400 Subject: [ih] IPv8... In-Reply-To: <2809f8ff-e077-4f1f-90a4-34f4bdca467a@dcrocker.net> References: <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <5e431eaa-bbff-44e0-94b8-44d59ad2aabe@gmail.com> <2809f8ff-e077-4f1f-90a4-34f4bdca467a@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: of course if you pee red, that's indicative of a pretty serious condition.... v On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 9:03?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 5/4/2026 5:18 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > Incidentally, IPv8 suggests eliminating a > > sort of vegetable/tomato mix..... > > > Oh? I thought it entirely apt, since the next transition for IP is > especially likely to need more juice. > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue May 5 03:34:52 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 06:34:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 Message-ID: <20260505103452.24CE518C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Bill Nowicki > PUP (and I think ChaosNet?) did not require ARP I originally skimmed past this message, but on seeing it again, it has some confusions in it that I ought to correct, so there's no error in the record. First, I personally have no experience at all with PUP running over 10MB Ethernet; I'd never even heard of it being done. Obviously, if it were done, it would have needed something with the functionality of ARP, to turn PUP addresses into 48-bit addresses (for wrapping packets with, for transmission). I looked to see if there was such a thing, and found this: When a PUP level one packet is transported by an Ethernet, or an NS level one packet is sent on Experimental Ethernet, the level one host number cannot be used as the level zero address, but rather some means must be provided to determine the correct level zero address. Xerox solved this problem by specifying another level-one protocol called {it translation} to allow hosts on an Experimental Ethernet to announce their NS host numbers, or hosts on an Ethernet to announce their PUP host numbers. Thus, both the Ethernet and Experimental Ethernet Level Zero Protocols totally support both families of higher level protocols. https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/erinyes/lispmanual/EtherOverview.im!2 So, something like ARP, but not ARP. Second, the CHAOS protocol (something different from Chaosnet hardware - the MIT AI Lab guys unwisely used the same name for both) definitely did use ARP, because ARP was created in part to allow the CHAOS protocol to run on 10MB Ethernets (same issue - where does one get the 48 bits from, given the 16-bit addresses in CHAOS protocol). DCP and I had CHAOS protocol _and_ IP in mind as clients for ARP when we designed it. DCP was a CHAOS guy; he was part of the MIT AI Lab crowd, and they wanted nothing to do with TCP/IP at the time when ARP was done - November, 1982. He wound up writing the RFC, not me, is all (I'm not positive why; I was probably too busy, or something like that). One can tell I had a lot to do with the design, because of the generality - an attempt to make sure it had the maximal lifetime - at which I think it succeeded. Noel From stewart at serissa.com Tue May 5 06:35:32 2026 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 09:35:32 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Various additions enclosed. Regarding the Xerox PARC and Systems Development Division (SDD) machines, the sequence was Alto I, Alto II, Dorado, Dolphin, and Dandelion. The Alto was about 500 KIPS of BCPL instructions, IIRC. The ECL Dorado was about 4 MIPS of BCPL or Mesa instructions, and sufficiently large and hot that they were kept in the computer room. The Dolphin was originally intended as a very good printer controller, and as such was optimized for memory bandwidth rather than processing. It was office-capable, but not as fast as Dorado and kind of too expensive for broad use. The Dandelion was a low cost design originally by Lampson (I think?) and finished by Bob Garner and others at SDD. It turned into the 8010 Star machine. Regarding early Ethernet, Bob Garner has collected a lot of history about this, https://ethernetalliance.org/voices-of-ethernet/ might be a good place to start. I think the microcode support for hardware in the Alto gave people a false impression of how easy it would be to build Ethernet controllers. If I remember correctly, the Unibus Ethernet was a full hex card. The first 3COM board was made to fit in a multibus form factor, but only by making it half duplex (I think). Incidently, Xerox in El Segundo built a single-chip 3 MB Ethernet around 1982, although it would only run at half speed. At PARC we used it for the Etherphone project, with an Alto gateway using a 3 Mb board with a half-speed crystal. For Packet Radio, the PRNet was mostly IP. Xerox used it as a transit network for encapsulated PUPs. This was a good test for fragmentation, but not very enlightening for internetworking. In fact I think the encapsulation was inside the PRNet Channel Access Protocol rather than inside IP - just to save a few bytes of the tiny MTS. -Lsrry From craig at tereschau.net Tue May 5 07:03:33 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 08:03:33 -0600 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 7:35?AM Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I think the microcode support for hardware in the Alto gave people a false > impression of how easy it would be to build Ethernet controllers. If I > remember correctly, the Unibus Ethernet was a full hex card. The first > 3COM board was made to fit in a multibus form factor, but only by making it > half duplex (I think). Incidently, Xerox in El Segundo built a single-chip > 3 MB Ethernet around 1982, although it would only run at half speed. At > PARC we used it for the Etherphone project, with an Alto gateway using a 3 > Mb board with a half-speed crystal. > Building good, full-speed Ethernet cards/chipsets remained a problem until the end of the 1980s. (Not helped by a perception due to bad theory papers that Ethernet capacity was capped at a fraction of its nominal bandwidth). I remember a talk by Van Jacobson, I think in 1988, and I believe as an aside in his SIGCOMM '88 talk and referencing Dave Boggs' earlier presentation in the same session on Ethernet capacity (where he demolished the poor theory papers). Van benchmarked various 10Mb Ethernet interfaces and showed them lacking. Speaking of evolutions -- there was a huge jump in the availability of affordable systems during the 1980s. Remember the early SUN workstations were a custom CPU board using a Motorola 680x0 processor connected to a stock multibus, later VMEbus, and third-party interface cards. There were lots of copycats. By the late 1980s, most Computer Science departments on CSNET had internal Ethernets delivering email to individual desktops (so their link to the outside world was CSNET, or UUCP, or both over dialup lines, but internally they were running TCP/IP). When NSFNET appeared, switching to full Internet connectivity was relatively easy. CSNET already used domain names so the primary problems were (1) renumbering (ugh, but doable) and (2) campus politics (was CS or campus IT in charge of the link, etc. [NSF's requirement that connectivity be offered throughout campus simplified that fight quite a bit]). Craig -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From j at shoch.com Tue May 5 09:22:30 2026 From: j at shoch.com (John Shoch) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 09:22:30 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 77, Issue 55 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Regarding packet switching work at AT&T vs AT&T Bell Labs, Sandy Fraser, Spider net, et. al -- some background, and an anecdote: Background It's probably true that the parts of AT&T focused on telephony and long-distance data had little appreciation for the potential of packet switching and the internet. But Bell Labs had a long history of work on alternative local data communications at the edge of the network, especially via local rings and loops for data communication: "Newhall Loop" by Newhall, Farmer, and others; token passing ring. Papers starting in 1969. "Pierce loop" by Pierce, empty slot technique. Papers starting 1971. "Spider Network" ring with control via a central switch. Papers starting 1974. Tony actually wrote a nice note with some of the background: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1015676.1015677 Many more references are listed here: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/SSL-79-5_An_Annotated_Bibliography_on_Local_Computer_Networks_Oct79.pdf In 1979 I wrote an assessment of the Spider network: "One of the major examples of a loop is the Spider network built at Bell Laboratories [Hayes, 1973, 1974; Fraser, 1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1975]. The system used a unidirectional ring utilizing T1 technology (1.544 Mbps), controlled from a minicomputer serving as a "central switch." Frames contain a total o f 386 bits, including 336 usable bits plus an additional 50 bits required for T1 framing and clock recovery. Connections to the loop at a host are made through a Terminal Interface Unit (TIU) equipped with a microprocessor known as the "Fly." " I was pretty critical of the design, esp. compared to the Ethernet: separate ring control box required at each station, small block sizes, central control via a complex ring controller, virtual circuits needed to be established through the controller to another host, reliability issues, etc. etc. And it was not conceived as part of a broader internet environment. But I also had to acknowledge: "Spider has been quite distinguished, however, in providing service to a real set of users. By 1975 it had been used to interconnect numerous machines in the Bell Labs environment, including single user minicomputers, laboratory instrumentation machines, and time-sharing facilities. Services available through the network have included access to a shared network file system and a printing server." As Len K. said, "Kudos to Sandy." An anecdote Several years later I was working at Xerox corporate HQ. Our CEO had crossed paths with the AT&T CEO and they came up with the suggestion, "Why don't we have some people meet and see if we can work on something together." So I was dispatched to Bell Labs in NJ for a series of presentations on various projects underway within the lab. There was continuing work on alternatives for local data communication -- but different groups came through with different projects, and they were often critical of the other projects within the Labs! I came back to our CEO and reported, "It was so nice to see another large corporation that is *more* screwed up than we are!" John Shoch > Message: 1 > Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:16:57 -0500 > From: Andrew Odlyzko > To: Internet-history > Subject: [ih] a few comments about Tier 1 networks, Frame Relay, Sandy > Fraser, etc. > Message-ID: > Pg8d8AKirBR4vgyTmYDFgM6oECwzHdv3hL_A__-A at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > Jumping into this interesting discussion with a few minor comments: > > Vint asked about Sandy Fraser's data networks. My recollection > is that Spidernet (or possibly just Spider) was created by Sandy, > but it was a local area network, and that it preceded Datakit, which > was for long distance links. I don't know whether Spidernet was > ever commercialized, but it was used inside Bell Labs Research. > (I joined Bell Labs in 1975, and was located physically and > organizationally close to Sandy's group, but was not familiar with > their work, just heard some comments here and there in those early days.) > From karl at iwl.com Tue May 5 09:30:24 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 09:30:24 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1fc82ceb-1a54-422f-b1bc-2674a57000f0@iwl.com> Those early Ethernet cards for PC's were sometimes quite troublesome.? And that AUI connector (and slide lock), oy! The 3COM 3C501 (used by many of us who were using John Romkey/Dave Bridgham's PC/IP) were very much half duplex and could not turn around from send to receive fast enough to avoid missing responses from a fast peer. When we built the TRW2000 Ethernet card for the ULANA bid we used Intel's Ethernet controller - 82256? - apparently had a flaw in the mask that caused the chip to get really, really hot (which I discovered much to my finger's unhappiness.)? That chipset was a real pain to write code for. My own first use of Ethernet was in 1980, when I was with Interactive Systems, at a trade show in Houston.? I think we used gear from Ungermann-Bass for terminal attachment.? Someone did not like the yellow color of the cable, so we ended up painting it. (I also ended up getting married.) We used yellow hose ethernet for the not-quite Interop show net in 1987 and for the first Interop show net in 1988.? When we met twisted pair Ethernet we went for it in an instant.? I suspect that there are pieces of our yellow hose still in the cable trays in the parking lots of the San Jose convention center. One of the biggest and most useful improvements to Ethernet came when Lantronix came out with an AUI media adaptor with indicator LEDs.? Those indicators were invaluable. I'm blanking right now on the name of the person who came up with that awful AUI slide lock - he has since apologized to the universe. ? ? ? ? --karl-- From clemc at ccc.com Tue May 5 09:31:22 2026 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 12:31:22 -0400 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: below On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 10:03?AM Craig Partridge via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 7:35?AM Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >If I remember correctly, the Unibus Ethernet was a full hex card. > You remember correctly. > >3COM board was made to fit in a multibus form factor, but only by making > it half duplex (I think). DIX (and earlier 3M) is ? duplex by design. Even if the transmitter and receiver sections of the board operate independently, it only gives the programmer the illusion that Ethernet is a full-duplex device. In fact, only one packet may exist on the coaxial cable at a tIme. >Van benchmarked various 10Mb Ethernet interfaces and showed them lacking. > Right. Sadly, I remember that, and the effects caused much pain to the system vendors. The other thing he showed was the "gap" on the wire when different boards switched modes, and few could either deliver or receive back-to-back packets. My memory is that until AMD released its AM7990 "Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet" (LANCE) chip, it was a huge problem. > Speaking of evolutions -- there was a huge jump in the availability of > affordable systems during the 1980s. Remember the early SUN workstations > were a custom CPU board using a Motorola 680x0 processor connected to a > stock multibus, later VMEbus, and third-party interface cards. IIRC, the three original players (at least in the Multibus space) were 3Com's 3C400, InterLAN NI1010, and Execlan's EXOS 101 and 102. Both 3Com and InterLAN created a common "Ethernet controller" board and then interfaced that to the specific bus [Unibus or Multibus]. Both designs had issues in production systems. The 3C100 scheme was a dual-ported memory, which was expensive for the host (particuarly if you were running UNIX or anything multitasking). And my memory is that it was a big sinner WRT to back-to-back packets too. I've always attributed their design to their Alto experience, which was single-user. InterLAN's NI2010 for the Unibus was the winner. At UCB, it became the default controller for most of the vaxen. But they really screwup the multibus interface. Its flaw was that it would interrupt the hosts and then go into a childlike "who me" state. Multibus was extremely short on Interrupt vectors, so the different OS's from Apollo's Domain, Masscomp's RTU, or Sun's SunOS all had a PDP-10-like interrupt skip chain so interrupts could be shared. Having the board not tell you that he just interrupted you for something basically did not work well. Execlan took a different tack than their competitors. Their original 101/102 series had an onboard 8088. They stuffed the IP/TCP stack into it, so the host did not need it. As a Real-Time system, this was extremely attractive to us at Masscomp because most of the work was done on the coprocessor, and we could ignore it when high-priority (real-time) operations were running on the host. The flaw was that the 68000 was faster than the 8088, and our network performance was limited by how quickly the 8088 could run the protocol stack. The other stumbling block was multi-homed hosts, since "IP" part of things was running on two different coprocessors. It was a clever but unattractive hack that made it all work [credit Perry Flinn]. In 1984, they replaced the processor with an 80186, which was not only much faster but also supported Intel-style DMA on their side of the bus. They called it their 200 series. Of course, time had moved on, and we were now using 68020s in the host, and we still had an issue where the network controller was the bottleneck . Eventually, using it as a smart controller with the stack on board was offered as an option; we had a traditional BSD stack inside of RTU, and many customers chose to use it as a very basic controller with lots of buffering, which, IIRC, is how it was often sold for Sun hardware. > There were > lots of copycats. By the late 1980s, most Computer Science departments on > CSNET had internal Ethernets delivering email to individual desktops (so > their link to the outside world was CSNET, or UUCP, or both over dialup > lines, but internally they were running TCP/IP). When NSFNET appeared, > switching to full Internet connectivity was relatively easy. CSNET already > used domain names so the primary problems were (1) renumbering (ugh, but > doable) and (2) campus politics (was CS or campus IT in charge of the link, > etc. [NSF's requirement that connectivity be offered throughout campus > simplified that fight quite a bit]). > > Craig > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From vgcerf at gmail.com Tue May 5 09:56:35 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 12:56:35 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 77, Issue 55 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hilarious: I came back to our CEO and reported, "It was so nice to see another large corporation that is *more* screwed up than we are!" I met with Bell Labs and Bell Core from time to time - never made much progress with them on TCP/IP - same with IBM (Ellen Hancock was viscerally opposed to anything but SNA). v On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 12:22?PM John Shoch via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Regarding packet switching work at AT&T vs AT&T Bell Labs, Sandy Fraser, > Spider net, et. al -- some background, and an anecdote: > > Background > > It's probably true that the parts of AT&T focused on telephony and > long-distance data had little appreciation for the potential of packet > switching and the internet. > But Bell Labs had a long history of work on alternative local data > communications at the edge of the network, especially via local rings and > loops for data communication: > "Newhall Loop" by Newhall, Farmer, and others; token passing ring. Papers > starting in 1969. > "Pierce loop" by Pierce, empty slot technique. Papers starting 1971. > "Spider Network" ring with control via a central switch. Papers starting > 1974. > > Tony actually wrote a nice note with some of the background: > https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1015676.1015677 > Many more references are listed here: > > > https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/SSL-79-5_An_Annotated_Bibliography_on_Local_Computer_Networks_Oct79.pdf > > In 1979 I wrote an assessment of the Spider network: > "One of the major examples of a loop is the Spider network built at Bell > Laboratories [Hayes, > 1973, 1974; Fraser, 1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1975]. The system used a > unidirectional ring > utilizing T1 technology (1.544 Mbps), controlled from a minicomputer > serving as a "central > switch." Frames contain a total o f 386 bits, including 336 usable bits > plus an additional 50 bits > required for T1 framing and clock recovery. Connections to the loop at a > host are made > through a Terminal Interface Unit (TIU) equipped with a microprocessor > known as the "Fly." " > > I was pretty critical of the design, esp. compared to the Ethernet: > separate ring control box required at each station, small block sizes, > central control via a complex ring controller, virtual circuits needed to > be established through the controller to another host, reliability issues, > etc. etc. And it was not conceived as part of a broader internet > environment. > > But I also had to acknowledge: > "Spider has been quite distinguished, however, in providing service to a > real set of users. By > 1975 it had been used to interconnect numerous machines in the Bell Labs > environment, > including single user minicomputers, laboratory instrumentation machines, > and time-sharing > facilities. Services available through the network have included access to > a shared network file > system and a printing server." > > As Len K. said, "Kudos to Sandy." > > An anecdote > > Several years later I was working at Xerox corporate HQ. Our CEO had > crossed paths with the AT&T CEO and they came up with the suggestion, "Why > don't we have some people meet and see if we can work on something > together." So I was dispatched to Bell Labs in NJ for a series of > presentations on various projects underway within the lab. There was > continuing work on alternatives for local data communication -- but > different groups came through with different projects, and they were often > critical of the other projects within the Labs! > I came back to our CEO and reported, "It was so nice to see another large > corporation that is *more* screwed up than we are!" > > John Shoch > > > > Message: 1 > > Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:16:57 -0500 > > From: Andrew Odlyzko > > To: Internet-history > > Subject: [ih] a few comments about Tier 1 networks, Frame Relay, Sandy > > Fraser, etc. > > Message-ID: > > > Pg8d8AKirBR4vgyTmYDFgM6oECwzHdv3hL_A__-A at mail.gmail.com> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > > > Jumping into this interesting discussion with a few minor comments: > > > > Vint asked about Sandy Fraser's data networks. My recollection > > is that Spidernet (or possibly just Spider) was created by Sandy, > > but it was a local area network, and that it preceded Datakit, which > > was for long distance links. I don't know whether Spidernet was > > ever commercialized, but it was used inside Bell Labs Research. > > (I joined Bell Labs in 1975, and was located physically and > > organizationally close to Sandy's group, but was not familiar with > > their work, just heard some comments here and there in those early days.) > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jack at 3kitty.org Tue May 5 10:03:29 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 10:03:29 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 77, Issue 55 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0cefc8dc-8304-42cc-932e-59bebe206f34@3kitty.org> Somtime in the 1980s, I had an experience similar to John's anecdote at Bell Labs.? It made me start wondering about how "office politics" affected technology development. I never did much work in the OSI world, but I remember that somehow I ended up in a meeting, probably somewhere in Europe, where there was an intense technical debate about some protocol or algorithm involved in OSI.? I can't remember any details.? There were several camps, each arguing for their approach and highlighting problems in the other approaches.? ?But I could see real progress and it seemed that a Consensus was imminent. Then the Chair of the meeting interrupted the discussion and said that it was now 2PM and therefore time to move to the next agenda item on the schedule.? So the impending Consensus disappeared, with the discussion to be scheduled on the agenda for the next meeting, several months away. That experience never happened in any meeting of Internet projects that I remember attending.? Discussions, debates, and arguments would continue, sometimes long into the night, until either a Consensus was reached by the people still remaining, or proponents of some approach would go off and write the code to implement their vision.? ?In either case, progress happened and ideas proceeded to live testing. Perhaps "office politics" and associated issues of bureaucracy played a role in TCP's defeat of OSI and all the proprietary networking technologies.? ?The Internet project may have been "less screwed up" than everyone else. /Jack Haverty On 5/5/26 09:22, John Shoch via Internet-history wrote: > Regarding packet switching work at AT&T vs AT&T Bell Labs, Sandy Fraser, > Spider net, et. al -- some background, and an anecdote: > > Background > > It's probably true that the parts of AT&T focused on telephony and > long-distance data had little appreciation for the potential of packet > switching and the internet. > But Bell Labs had a long history of work on alternative local data > communications at the edge of the network, especially via local rings and > loops for data communication: > "Newhall Loop" by Newhall, Farmer, and others; token passing ring. Papers > starting in 1969. > "Pierce loop" by Pierce, empty slot technique. Papers starting 1971. > "Spider Network" ring with control via a central switch. Papers starting > 1974. > > Tony actually wrote a nice note with some of the background: > https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1015676.1015677 > Many more references are listed here: > > https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/SSL-79-5_An_Annotated_Bibliography_on_Local_Computer_Networks_Oct79.pdf > > In 1979 I wrote an assessment of the Spider network: > "One of the major examples of a loop is the Spider network built at Bell > Laboratories [Hayes, > 1973, 1974; Fraser, 1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1975]. The system used a > unidirectional ring > utilizing T1 technology (1.544 Mbps), controlled from a minicomputer > serving as a "central > switch." Frames contain a total o f 386 bits, including 336 usable bits > plus an additional 50 bits > required for T1 framing and clock recovery. Connections to the loop at a > host are made > through a Terminal Interface Unit (TIU) equipped with a microprocessor > known as the "Fly." " > > I was pretty critical of the design, esp. compared to the Ethernet: > separate ring control box required at each station, small block sizes, > central control via a complex ring controller, virtual circuits needed to > be established through the controller to another host, reliability issues, > etc. etc. And it was not conceived as part of a broader internet > environment. > > But I also had to acknowledge: > "Spider has been quite distinguished, however, in providing service to a > real set of users. By > 1975 it had been used to interconnect numerous machines in the Bell Labs > environment, > including single user minicomputers, laboratory instrumentation machines, > and time-sharing > facilities. Services available through the network have included access to > a shared network file > system and a printing server." > > As Len K. said, "Kudos to Sandy." > > An anecdote > > Several years later I was working at Xerox corporate HQ. Our CEO had > crossed paths with the AT&T CEO and they came up with the suggestion, "Why > don't we have some people meet and see if we can work on something > together." So I was dispatched to Bell Labs in NJ for a series of > presentations on various projects underway within the lab. There was > continuing work on alternatives for local data communication -- but > different groups came through with different projects, and they were often > critical of the other projects within the Labs! > I came back to our CEO and reported, "It was so nice to see another large > corporation that is *more* screwed up than we are!" > > John Shoch > > >> Message: 1 >> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:16:57 -0500 >> From: Andrew Odlyzko >> To: Internet-history >> Subject: [ih] a few comments about Tier 1 networks, Frame Relay, Sandy >> Fraser, etc. >> Message-ID: >> > Pg8d8AKirBR4vgyTmYDFgM6oECwzHdv3hL_A__-A at mail.gmail.com> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" >> >> Jumping into this interesting discussion with a few minor comments: >> >> Vint asked about Sandy Fraser's data networks. My recollection >> is that Spidernet (or possibly just Spider) was created by Sandy, >> but it was a local area network, and that it preceded Datakit, which >> was for long distance links. I don't know whether Spidernet was >> ever commercialized, but it was used inside Bell Labs Research. >> (I joined Bell Labs in 1975, and was located physically and >> organizationally close to Sandy's group, but was not familiar with >> their work, just heard some comments here and there in those early days.) >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From winowicki at yahoo.com Tue May 5 11:36:52 2026 From: winowicki at yahoo.com (Bill Nowicki) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 18:36:52 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 References: <2046354021.6367660.1778006212556.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <2046354021.6367660.1778006212556@mail.yahoo.com> Thanks for Noel, Larry, etc. to fill in other details of this era. Just one more Dorado anecdote, I promise. As a summer intern at PARC in 1981, I worked on some early packet voice experiments. Larry Stewart mentioned EtherPhone, of which this was the experimental test.?Detractors said that Ethernet was too unreliable to be used for real-time communication. Xerox had me write some simple code (using hardware that I think Larry designed?) to interface an Alto to an analog telephone and we had fine conversations over Ethernet. Then another bit of code to record and play back the audio. The Alto did not quite have the power to do the networking and store it on disk at the same time, so I used a Dorado for the recording.? At the time, someone estimated that given the number of top-level computer scientists and engineers who worked on the Dorado, the small number produced, the enclosure affectionately called the "armored personnel carrier", the cost of running dedicated keyboard-video-mouse lines to each office, the expenses of power consumption and cooling, it worked out to close to $100,000 each.? I told my parent my summer job was to make a $10,000 computer act like a $20 telephone, and a $100,000 computer act like a $100 tape recorder. Back to the original 1984 question, even by then Sun Microsystems was making about a thousand machines per year, doubling every year. At least about a quarter of those were used internally, om the TCP/IP network that was only connect via email relay to the wider Internet. Commercial customers (more than half the business) built similar "Intranets". SGI was doing the same thing a year later, as well as the other wanna-bes. Probably soon after if not in 1984, due especially to the PCs also on such networks, my guess was that the number of these "Intranet" hosts easily outnumbered the Internet routable ones. But I am curious if anyone did an in-depth analysis of this. Bill From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue May 5 12:19:09 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 15:19:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing Message-ID: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> {Another place I need to chime in, so there's no error in the record.} > From: William Yeager > When the Internet came on line in 1983 Geoff Mogul acquired a ButterFly > gatewy from BBN which he named Golden. This gave the routes > connectivity across the to the Internet from Stanford's LAN. 'Golden' was a C Gateway, which I maintained for several years. (I have a sneaking suspicion that a conversation that I had with Len Bosack in the Jacks terminal room, on one visit while doing so, later led to Cisco getting in to the router business, but that's a story, for a different time.) As I mentioned, a dump of the MIT-CSR machine that I have still has the configuration files for early versions of Golden; here's a piece of one: #include "../../in/in.h" #include "../../nets/ether.h" #include "../../nets/arpa.h" #include "../../nets/arconst.h" /* Node name */ char name[] "Golden-Gateway"; /* Actual network configuration table. Note the trailer words in * the ARPANet line; for a hardware botch in the ACC board. * LOSERS: don't frobozz the n_max packet count fields; this * configuration is intended to maximize ARPANet throughput * in a gateway that's not computationally loaded. In particular, * leave the ARPANet maxip larger than the Ethernet!!! * "We like our defaults. If we hadn't liked them, we wouldn't * have made them the defaults, would we." */ I wound up roped into this because Jeff Mogul, who had been an undergrad at MIT on the fringe of our group at MIT-LCS (he did a driver for the V1 ring for the VAX VMS - there was no VAX Unix then - on the 4th floor at Tech Sq) had gone on to grad school at Stanford. Stanford needed a router to conect their internal internet (which was mostly - or maybe all, I was never very familiar with their internet - 3MB Ethernets at that point). Jeff knew that the MIT router project (the 'C Gateway') had code to talk to the ARPANET, so they contacted us for help. > Bill is correct that Chaosnet did not require ARP because the host/net > fields in the packets were one byte each on 3mbps networks and the > encapsuation of the packets was one byte dest host, and one byte source > host. On a 3MB Ethernet, which used 8 bit host numbers, no. (Although I didn't realize CHAOS protocol was ever run over 3MB Ethernet; it's news to me that it was.) CHAOS protocol on 10MB Ethernet did, of course, use ARP. Noel From karl at iwl.com Tue May 5 12:59:00 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 12:59:00 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Sometime in 1980's, probably 1989 - I used a router on a PC platform (MS-DOS I think) by Doug Karl for my home network.? (I don't remember any details about what the external link was - probably something that hooked to ISDN BRI.) https://www.gbnet.net/karlnet/about/history.html ? ? ? ? --karl-- From byeager at fastmail.fm Tue May 5 16:10:39 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 16:10:39 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <86F486F1-B865-4842-8328-632CEC2AE449@fastmail.fm> > On May 5, 2026, at 12:19 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > On a 3MB Ethernet, which used 8 bit host numbers, no. (Although I didn't > realize CHAOS protocol was ever run over 3MB Ethernet; it's news to me that > it was.) CHAOS protocol on 10MB Ethernet did, of course, use ARP. My error. What my router did is route CHAOS packets on 3mbps networks. This was often the shortest or only route to the 10mbps network on which the target systems were hosted. This was easy because the CHAOS network was one byte. This was identical to the PUP network?s network abeit that in the CHAOS packet the byte order was reversed, ie, network, host or low ender. There is a funny story about this at the end of this discussion. We actually had a two twisted pair network between our machine room and the then Welch Road offices where at the majority of TI explorers were hosted on a 10mbps ethernet. We used the Andy Becholscheim 3mbps ethernet interface. We had to modify it to send packets on this twisted pair connection. The modification required replacing the two crystals between each of two FIFOs. We had no idea what the bandwidth would be. This required testing until packets were sent error free. The final bandwidth was 1.52 mpbs. A T1 line. We of course called this the twisted net. Our genious hardware fellow, Nick Veizades made his ?blue box? that converted the ethernet square waves so that so that 0s and 1s would be sent on one of the twisted pairs alternating as appropriate. That way an output twisted pair would be an input twisted pair at the other end. My network OS mananged this beautifully without buffer loss from the 10mbps input side. Funny story: One day a Cisco software phoned me and asked if I would help him debug their CHAOS net router. When Cisco did a rewrite of my software they removed it. I said sure. He stopped by my office and telneted via the Cisco VPN and we edit the source code. Ends up he didn?t know the reverse order of the CHAO packet?s fields. Thus, used net as host, and host as net and well ? simple fix. The thanked me and left. Those were indeed the days. Bill ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From byeager at fastmail.fm Tue May 5 16:26:09 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Tue, 5 May 2026 16:26:09 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: <86F486F1-B865-4842-8328-632CEC2AE449@fastmail.fm> References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <86F486F1-B865-4842-8328-632CEC2AE449@fastmail.fm> Message-ID: Oppas .. CHAOS byte order was host net rather than net host. > On May 5, 2026, at 4:10 PM, william yeager via Internet-history wrote: > > >> On May 5, 2026, at 12:19 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> >> On a 3MB Ethernet, which used 8 bit host numbers, no. (Although I didn't >> realize CHAOS protocol was ever run over 3MB Ethernet; it's news to me that >> it was.) CHAOS protocol on 10MB Ethernet did, of course, use ARP. > > My error. What my router did is route CHAOS packets on 3mbps networks. This was often the shortest or only route to the 10mbps network on which the target systems were hosted. This was easy because the CHAOS network was one byte. This was identical to the PUP network?s network abeit that in the CHAOS packet the byte order was reversed, ie, network, host or low ender. There is a funny story about this at the end of this discussion. > > We actually had a two twisted pair network between our machine room and the then Welch Road offices where at the majority of TI explorers were hosted on a 10mbps ethernet. We used the Andy Becholscheim 3mbps ethernet interface. We had to modify it to send packets on this twisted pair connection. The modification required replacing the two crystals between each of two FIFOs. We had no idea what the bandwidth would be. This required testing until packets were sent error free. The final bandwidth was 1.52 mpbs. A T1 line. We of course called this the twisted net. > > Our genious hardware fellow, Nick Veizades made his ?blue box? that converted the ethernet square waves so that so that 0s and 1s would be sent on one of the twisted pairs alternating as appropriate. That way an output twisted pair would be an input twisted pair at the other end. > > My network OS mananged this beautifully without buffer loss from the 10mbps input side. > > Funny story: One day a Cisco software phoned me and asked if I would help him debug their CHAOS net router. When Cisco did a rewrite of my software they removed it. > > I said sure. He stopped by my office and telneted via the Cisco VPN and we edit the source code. Ends up he didn?t know the reverse order of the CHAO packet?s fields. Thus, used net as host, and host as net and well ? simple fix. The thanked me and left. > > Those were indeed the days. > > Bill > > ?????????? > ????? > > ???? ????????? > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From nigel at channelisles.net Wed May 6 03:32:00 2026 From: nigel at channelisles.net (Nigel Roberts) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 11:32:00 +0100 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records Message-ID: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> When I started paying more attention to such things, just over 30 years ago 1 Jon was still with us. 2. TLD records were held in Network Solutions' common database at the InterNIC and shared objects, such as e.g. person objects like NR251 and host objects. (I remember dealing with somecalled Duane there). I'm trying to fill in the gaps between my memory of that time and the previous 12 years or so. I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated TLDs in a notebook, and perhaps SRI had more organised records when they were the InterNIC. Can anyone throw light on this period, please?? -- Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net From johnl at iecc.com Wed May 6 10:39:49 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 6 May 2026 17:39:49 -0000 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <10tfud5$2ssp$1@gal.iecc.com> According to Karl Auerbach via Internet-history : >Sometime in 1980's, probably 1989 - I used a router on a PC platform >(MS-DOS I think) by Doug Karl for my home network.? (I don't remember >any details about what the external link was - probably something that >hooked to ISDN BRI.) > >https://www.gbnet.net/karlnet/about/history.html In 1990 my first dedicated link was an old PC in my attic running PC-Route with Russ Nelson's packet drivers connecting thin Ethernet in my house to a Wavelan proto-wifi card. I pointed a yagi antenna out the window toward the back window of Steve Dyer's house a block away, where I had an old PS/2 similarly configured attached to his home LAN which was connected to a the local network coop in Cambridge over a 56K DDS line. Considering the level of ducttapeery, it was surprisingly easy to set up and worked well. R's, John -- Regards, John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly From craig at tereschau.net Wed May 6 11:00:13 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 12:00:13 -0600 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: <10tfud5$2ssp$1@gal.iecc.com> References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <10tfud5$2ssp$1@gal.iecc.com> Message-ID: I suspect there are enough wonderful stories of jury-rigging Internet connectivity to fill an engaging book. Two I remember from my early Internet days are: - An early IETF, I think in San Diego, when we still had terminal rooms because most of us had to telnet back to our home machines, Phil Karn had reached out in advance and gotten his own IP address for his laptop (still rare then) on the terminal room network. Phil was sitting next to me in the terminal room when Milo Medin walked. Milo also had his laptop with him but was waiting for an IP address to be arranged. Phil offered to be Milo's router and they figured out how to connect their laptops using a little breakout cable kit. You could see the network being extended across the table top. - At a DARPA PI meeting a few years later at a hotel in greater DC, our DARPA PM Doug Maughan failed to arrange (then still somewhat new) WiFi connectivity. I discovered I was sitting next to an open phone jack in the hotel meeting room and somehow (not sure how) managed to make a dialup IP connection. I also had one of the early Apple laptops that could act as a WiFi hotspot, so I could bring up WiFi. Suddenly there was a hotspot "maughan" in the conference room... Craig On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 11:39?AM John Levine via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > According to Karl Auerbach via Internet-history : > >Sometime in 1980's, probably 1989 - I used a router on a PC platform > >(MS-DOS I think) by Doug Karl for my home network. (I don't remember > >any details about what the external link was - probably something that > >hooked to ISDN BRI.) > > > >https://www.gbnet.net/karlnet/about/history.html > > In 1990 my first dedicated link was an old PC in my attic running PC-Route > with > Russ Nelson's packet drivers connecting thin Ethernet in my house to a > Wavelan > proto-wifi card. I pointed a yagi antenna out the window toward the back > window > of Steve Dyer's house a block away, where I had an old PS/2 similarly > configured > attached to his home LAN which was connected to a the local network coop in > Cambridge over a 56K DDS line. Considering the level of ducttapeery, it > was > surprisingly easy to set up and worked well. > > R's, > John > -- > Regards, > John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for > Dummies", > Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From kevin.bowling at kev009.com Wed May 6 13:45:16 2026 From: kevin.bowling at kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 13:45:16 -0700 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 5:07?PM vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > Does anyone know whether the netnews files are available anywhere? Hi Vint, I am working on a thing http://csiph.com/groups. Search indexing is currently paused but covers up through comp.* History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy. I still need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully replace Google Groups for historical research. Regards, Kevin > thanks > vint > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From karl at iwl.com Wed May 6 17:43:09 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 17:43:09 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <10tfud5$2ssp$1@gal.iecc.com> Message-ID: On 5/6/26 11:00 AM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote: > I suspect there are enough wonderful stories of jury-rigging Internet > connectivity to fill an engaging book. When I was doing my company, Empirical Tools and Toys (officially that last word was "Technologies" but we kinda liked "Toys" better) we dangled off of TGV (Two Guys and a Vax). This was in the 1993 time frame. The TGV network was in a rather nice Victorian house and I was across a residential street in a back room of a union hall.? So we grabbed some thinnet Ethernet coax and draped it through the branches of several trees and across the street - not particularly legal (but not as crazy as when we ran fiber optic lines through a rather active railroad tunnel in Atlanta without telling the railroad company.) We called it a "tree spanning network". And then there was the time on the Interop net when one of our gang, who was running wires through a hotel, waked into a status meeting with a nine inch thick, twelve inch diameter concrete floor core (complete with re-bar in the concrete) that he rolled across the floor.? We were aghast - had we really punched a 12" diameter hole through a concrete floor in the hotel? (The answer was 'no', but we sure were concerned until we got that answer.) Also for the Interop show nets - we often had to run links to hotels in the city - at various times we used microwave and others we used lasers (routed through amateur astronomer telescopes).? We discovered that when we roof mounted these that the wind caused us to loose our aim.? So we rented hotel rooms on upper floors and aimed the gear out the windows.? But then we encountered 'housekeeping" - they would knock our stuff out of alignment. So how does one keep "housekeeping" out?? Those little "do not disturb" signs don't work.? But telling the front desk to inform staff that the room had "unruly" or "contagiously ill" occupants did the trick. For the Interop nets we did lots of ad hoc stuff - I remember dragging cables over the vent hoods in a hotel kitchen.? And we had issues with house/union electricians who thought they understood network wires - they didn't: they would fold coax or cut coax and try to splice it with a soldering iron.? We found two solutions.? First is that we induced a local union electrician who understood this stuff to join our crew - that helped smooth our relations with the unions.? Second is that we said "You know, our fiber optics are not carrying electricity, rather they are pipes for light.? And you are an 'electrical' union.? Should we hand the work to the union plumbers?"? (Although for the shows in NYC, the best cure was to carry a big wad of $20 and $50 bills and peel them off as needed to buy cooperation.) We used a lot of fiber optic cabling - we adopted a 26-strand Kevlar armored cable with (quite expensive) quick connect connectors at either end.? Turns out that we used so many of those connectors that we depleted the US national military stockpile of them. One of our crew moved on to repurpose the fiber optics in old undersea cables to be network links to miles-deep oceanic research sensors. The Interop show nets, despite our months of planning and pre-building in a warehouse, were a land of ad hoc solutions.? We drained the local Fry's Electronics stores to get this or that. And Dave Bridgham and I started to seriously consider buying a C130 to carry our spares.? (I remember that for one of the shows our network - not the vendor stuff, just our core network - filled 43 eighteen wheeler truck/trailers.) We also built some intentionally odd network elements - like using a barbed wire fence to carry twisted pair Ethernet - or building a RAID array out of USB flash drives driven via iSCSI over Wi-Fi.? I built an Ethernet segment that tried to elide the words "no" or "not" from a RTP based VoIP conversation - I never had enough processing horsepower to make that work, but I could inject words into a conversation.? And before I built my "flakeway" devices we used to have very large spools of single-mode fiber that we would use as delay lines to see what kind of effects delay would have. My home network has had some strange configurations - like a dozen or so ISDN BRI's and the telco guys not knowing how many pairs to bring into the house - so now we have something like 50 copper pairs coming into the house. (We don't use any of them today.)? And then there was the time we had both a Cisco 7500 router and an equally huge Wellfleet router in the garage - those things were the size of a small car - and they drew so much power that we had to clamp to the big copper buss bars in the electrical panel.? (At one Interop show one of our routers - a Cisco 12000 - lit the lobby carpet on fire because the house electricians would not believe us when we told them how much power that monster drew.) ? ? ? ? --karl-- From bpurvy at gmail.com Wed May 6 17:55:33 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 17:55:33 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP/IP routing In-Reply-To: References: <20260505191909.E212318C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <10tfud5$2ssp$1@gal.iecc.com> Message-ID: re union labor: at the Star launch at NCC Chicago,1981, the experienced show guys carried a roll of $100 bills for paying off the union guys. Otherwise your power would mysteriously go out. On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 5:43?PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > On 5/6/26 11:00 AM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote: > > I suspect there are enough wonderful stories of jury-rigging Internet > > connectivity to fill an engaging book. > > When I was doing my company, Empirical Tools and Toys (officially that > last word was "Technologies" but we kinda liked "Toys" better) we > dangled off of TGV (Two Guys and a Vax). > > This was in the 1993 time frame. > > The TGV network was in a rather nice Victorian house and I was across a > residential street in a back room of a union hall. So we grabbed some > thinnet Ethernet coax and draped it through the branches of several > trees and across the street - not particularly legal (but not as crazy > as when we ran fiber optic lines through a rather active railroad tunnel > in Atlanta without telling the railroad company.) > > We called it a "tree spanning network". > > And then there was the time on the Interop net when one of our gang, who > was running wires through a hotel, waked into a status meeting with a > nine inch thick, twelve inch diameter concrete floor core (complete with > re-bar in the concrete) that he rolled across the floor. We were aghast > - had we really punched a 12" diameter hole through a concrete floor in > the hotel? > > (The answer was 'no', but we sure were concerned until we got that answer.) > > Also for the Interop show nets - we often had to run links to hotels in > the city - at various times we used microwave and others we used lasers > (routed through amateur astronomer telescopes). We discovered that when > we roof mounted these that the wind caused us to loose our aim. So we > rented hotel rooms on upper floors and aimed the gear out the windows. > But then we encountered 'housekeeping" - they would knock our stuff out > of alignment. > > So how does one keep "housekeeping" out? Those little "do not disturb" > signs don't work. But telling the front desk to inform staff that the > room had "unruly" or "contagiously ill" occupants did the trick. > > For the Interop nets we did lots of ad hoc stuff - I remember dragging > cables over the vent hoods in a hotel kitchen. And we had issues with > house/union electricians who thought they understood network wires - > they didn't: they would fold coax or cut coax and try to splice it with > a soldering iron. We found two solutions. First is that we induced a > local union electrician who understood this stuff to join our crew - > that helped smooth our relations with the unions. Second is that we > said "You know, our fiber optics are not carrying electricity, rather > they are pipes for light. And you are an 'electrical' union. Should we > hand the work to the union plumbers?" (Although for the shows in NYC, > the best cure was to carry a big wad of $20 and $50 bills and peel them > off as needed to buy cooperation.) > > We used a lot of fiber optic cabling - we adopted a 26-strand Kevlar > armored cable with (quite expensive) quick connect connectors at either > end. Turns out that we used so many of those connectors that we > depleted the US national military stockpile of them. > > One of our crew moved on to repurpose the fiber optics in old undersea > cables to be network links to miles-deep oceanic research sensors. > > The Interop show nets, despite our months of planning and pre-building > in a warehouse, were a land of ad hoc solutions. We drained the local > Fry's Electronics stores to get this or that. And Dave Bridgham and I > started to seriously consider buying a C130 to carry our spares. (I > remember that for one of the shows our network - not the vendor stuff, > just our core network - filled 43 eighteen wheeler truck/trailers.) > > We also built some intentionally odd network elements - like using a > barbed wire fence to carry twisted pair Ethernet - or building a RAID > array out of USB flash drives driven via iSCSI over Wi-Fi. I built an > Ethernet segment that tried to elide the words "no" or "not" from a RTP > based VoIP conversation - I never had enough processing horsepower to > make that work, but I could inject words into a conversation. And > before I built my "flakeway" devices we used to have very large spools > of single-mode fiber that we would use as delay lines to see what kind > of effects delay would have. > > My home network has had some strange configurations - like a dozen or so > ISDN BRI's and the telco guys not knowing how many pairs to bring into > the house - so now we have something like 50 copper pairs coming into > the house. (We don't use any of them today.) And then there was the > time we had both a Cisco 7500 router and an equally huge Wellfleet > router in the garage - those things were the size of a small car - and > they drew so much power that we had to clamp to the big copper buss bars > in the electrical panel. (At one Interop show one of our routers - a > Cisco 12000 - lit the lobby carpet on fire because the house > electricians would not believe us when we told them how much power that > monster drew.) > > --karl-- > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From johnl at iecc.com Wed May 6 18:10:27 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 6 May 2026 21:10:27 -0400 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20260507011027.E54391086A876@ary.qy> It appears that Kevin Bowling via Internet-history said: >I am working on a thing http://csiph.com/groups. Search indexing is >currently paused but covers up through comp.* > >History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy. I still >need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully >replace Google Groups for historical research. Netnews providers like Giganews and Easynews generally don't expire anything so they are likely to have 20 years of history. They cost money but not a lot, and they all have a trial period of a month or so. R's, John From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Wed May 6 23:59:23 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Wed, 6 May 2026 23:59:23 -0700 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> Message-ID: On May 6, 2026, at 3:32?AM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > When I started paying more attention to such things, just over 30 years ago > > 1 Jon was still with us. > > 2. TLD records were held in Network Solutions' common database at the InterNIC and shared objects, such as e.g. person objects like NR251 and host objects. (I remember dealing with somecalled Duane there). > > > > I'm trying to fill in the gaps between my memory of that time and the previous 12 years or so. > > I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated TLDs in a notebook, and perhaps SRI had more organised records when they were the InterNIC. > > Can anyone throw light on this period, please?? > > > > -- > Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director > CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD > +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) > +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net > Quite a lot happened during that time period. :) You might try the namedroppers list archive , which goes back to 1983. It has an (IMO) rudimentary search facility. --gregbo From ajs at crankycanuck.ca Thu May 7 01:54:53 2026 From: ajs at crankycanuck.ca (Andrew Sullivan) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 04:54:53 -0400 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> Message-ID: Hi, On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that. The final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the use of the list). So, don't assume that reading that will also catch the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs at crankycanuck.ca From nigel at channelisles.net Thu May 7 02:43:03 2026 From: nigel at channelisles.net (Nigel Roberts) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 10:43:03 +0100 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in what form. And go back further in time, if I can. On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > Hi, > > On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- > history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> > > Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS > working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that.? The > final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very > well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the > use of the list).? So, don't assume that reading that will also catch > the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). > > A > -- Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net From vint at google.com Thu May 7 04:45:05 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 07:45:05 -0400 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: I have not gone back to look in this document but there may be some useful information about the early days of identifier management to be found there: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/creation-administration-unique-identifiers-1967-2017-18nov20-en.pdf v On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 5:43?AM Nigel Roberts via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. > > What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration > records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in > what form. > > And go back further in time, if I can. > > On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi, > > > > On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- > > history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive > marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> > > > > Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS > > working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that. The > > final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very > > well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the > > use of the list). So, don't assume that reading that will also catch > > the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). > > > > A > > > > -- > Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director > CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD > +44 1481 822800 <+44%201481%20822800> (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 > <+44%2020%207100%204319> (direct line) > +44 7973 263842 <+44%207973%20263842> (mobile) > nigel at channelisles.net > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- 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 From kevin.bowling at kev009.com Thu May 7 13:29:30 2026 From: kevin.bowling at kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 13:29:30 -0700 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: <20260507011027.E54391086A876@ary.qy> References: <20260507011027.E54391086A876@ary.qy> Message-ID: On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 6:10?PM John Levine wrote: > > It appears that Kevin Bowling via Internet-history said: > >I am working on a thing http://csiph.com/groups. Search indexing is > >currently paused but covers up through comp.* > > > >History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy. I still > >need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully > >replace Google Groups for historical research. > > Netnews providers like Giganews and Easynews generally don't expire anything > so they are likely to have 20 years of history. Hi John, Yeah I'd done that for some of the comp.* groups in the past and it's the best way to get recent history from 2003 onwards. The problem remains everything before that which is really where text Usenet was a primary service and authority. There is the UTZOO collection but Google had amassed a fairly unique data set. I'm not sure what parameters they have set up, but if I have to crawl it and avoid blockage it could take several years to spider. > They cost money but not a lot, and they all have a trial period of a month or so. > > R's, > John From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Thu May 7 14:28:17 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 09:28:17 +1200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <494b3e89-250a-4b6a-bd73-7fff94b04f1f@gmail.com> > I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated > TLDs in a notebook I have no idea whether it was a physical notebook, but certainly in ~1989 it was still Jon personally who did it. I recall (but have no trace of the email) that Jon politely declined to register 'cern' as a TLD just before CERN connected, and I think he suggested cern.int, but we preferred cern.ch. cern was finally delegated as a TLD in 2014, 25 years after the original request. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 07-May-26 21:43, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. > > What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration > records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in > what form. > > And go back further in time, if I can. > > On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- >> history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive > marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> >> >> Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS >> working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that.? The >> final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very >> well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the >> use of the list).? So, don't assume that reading that will also catch >> the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). >> >> A >> > From vgcerf at gmail.com Thu May 7 14:36:26 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 17:36:26 -0400 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <494b3e89-250a-4b6a-bd73-7fff94b04f1f@gmail.com> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <494b3e89-250a-4b6a-bd73-7fff94b04f1f@gmail.com> Message-ID: There was a physical notebook. I believe it is still in the hands of USC-ISI. vint On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 5:28?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated > > TLDs in a notebook > > I have no idea whether it was a physical notebook, but certainly in ~1989 > it was still Jon personally who did it. I recall (but have no trace > of the email) that Jon politely declined to register 'cern' as a TLD > just before CERN connected, and I think he suggested cern.int, but > we preferred cern.ch. > > cern was finally delegated as a TLD in 2014, 25 years after the original > request. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 07-May-26 21:43, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. > > > > What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration > > records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in > > what form. > > > > And go back further in time, if I can. > > > > On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > >> Hi, > >> > >> On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- > >> history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive >> marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> > >> > >> Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS > >> working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that. The > >> final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very > >> well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the > >> use of the list). So, don't assume that reading that will also catch > >> the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). > >> > >> A > >> > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From mdavids at forfun.net Thu May 7 22:50:11 2026 From: mdavids at forfun.net (Marco Davids (Private)) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 07:50:11 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <494b3e89-250a-4b6a-bd73-7fff94b04f1f@gmail.com> Message-ID: <53b11c6c-04e3-4f50-9f94-658ebaef198c@forfun.net> Oohhh...! As an employee of SIDN, the ccTLD registry for .nl, which is celebrating 40 years of .nl this year (and 30 years of SIDN), I would really love to have a photocopy of the particular page in that notebook where Jon wrote down our delegation! I propose we start looking for it! ;-) -- Marco On Thu, 7 May 2026 17:36:26 -0400 vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > There was a physical notebook. I believe it is still in the hands of > USC-ISI. > > vint > > > On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 5:28?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>> I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated >>> TLDs in a notebook >> >> I have no idea whether it was a physical notebook, but certainly in ~1989 >> it was still Jon personally who did it. I recall (but have no trace >> of the email) that Jon politely declined to register 'cern' as a TLD >> just before CERN connected, and I think he suggested cern.int, but >> we preferred cern.ch. >> >> cern was finally delegated as a TLD in 2014, 25 years after the original >> request. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On 07-May-26 21:43, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: >>> These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. >>> >>> What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration >>> records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in >>> what form. >>> >>> And go back further in time, if I can. >>> >>> On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- >>>> history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive >>> marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> >>>> >>>> Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS >>>> working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that. The >>>> final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very >>>> well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the >>>> use of the list). So, don't assume that reading that will also catch >>>> the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). >>>> >>>> A >>>> >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -- Marco ? From el at lisse.na Thu May 7 23:00:55 2026 From: el at lisse.na (Eberhard W Lisse) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 08:00:55 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <53b11c6c-04e3-4f50-9f94-658ebaef198c@forfun.net> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <494b3e89-250a-4b6a-bd73-7fff94b04f1f@gmail.com> <53b11c6c-04e3-4f50-9f94-658ebaef198c@forfun.net> Message-ID: Marco, I tried to do something like this for .NA a few years back (getting a look at his notes/tape) even on site, ISI did not want to. If you were do manage, please let me know so I can try again, this surely is something to frame. greetings, el -- Eberhard W Lisse Managing Director Namibian Network Information Center (Pty) Ltd. PO Box 7022 Swakopmund 13002 Namibia If this email is signed with GPG, Sect 20 Act No 4 of 2019 may apply On May 8, 2026 at 07:50 +0200, Marco Davids (Private) via Internet-history , wrote: > Oohhh...! > > As an employee of SIDN, the ccTLD registry for .nl, which is celebrating > 40 years of .nl this year (and 30 years of SIDN), I would really love to > have a photocopy of the particular page in that notebook where Jon wrote > down our delegation! > > I propose we start looking for it! ;-) > > -- > Marco > > > On Thu, 7 May 2026 17:36:26 -0400 vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > > > There was a physical notebook. I believe it is still in the hands of > > USC-ISI. > > > > vint > > > > > > On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 5:28?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > >> I've heard tell that Jon originally kept records of to whom he delegated > > > > >> TLDs in a notebook > > > > > > > > > > > > I have no idea whether it was a physical notebook, but certainly in ~1989 > > > > it was still Jon personally who did it. I recall (but have no trace > > > > of the email) that Jon politely declined to register 'cern' as a TLD > > > > just before CERN connected, and I think he suggested cern.int, but > > > > we preferred cern.ch. > > > > > > > > cern was finally delegated as a TLD in 2014, 25 years after the original > > > > request. > > > > > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > > > > Brian Carpenter > > > > > > > > On 07-May-26 21:43, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > > > > > > >> These steers are helpful particularly when knowing what NOT to expect. > > > > >> > > > > >> What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration > > > > >> records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in > > > > >> what form. > > > > >> > > > > >> And go back further in time, if I can. > > > > >> > > > > >> On 5/7/26 09:54, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > > > > > > > > > >>> Hi, > > > > > >>> > > > > > >>> On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 11:59:23PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet- > > > > > >>> history wrot> You might try the namedroppers list archive > > > > >>> marc.info/?l=namedroppers&r=1&w=2> > > > > > >>> > > > > > >>> Also, if you only knew about namedroppers from its association with DNS > > > > > >>> working groups at the IETF, it was not only associated with that. The > > > > > >>> final break happened in, IIRC, 2010, but the association was not very > > > > > >>> well formalized (which partly caused some of the sudden changes to the > > > > > >>> use of the list). So, don't assume that reading that will also catch > > > > > >>> the relevant DNS WGs (in the unlikely event you did expect that). > > > > > >>> > > > > > >>> A > > > > > >>> > > > > > > > > > >> > > > > > > > > -- > > > > Internet-history mailing list > > > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > > > - > > > > Unsubscribe: > > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > > > > > -- > Marco ? > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Thu May 7 23:30:29 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Thu, 7 May 2026 23:30:29 -0700 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: On May 7, 2026, at 4:45?AM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > I have not gone back to look in this document but there may be some useful > information about the early days of identifier management to be found there: > > https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/creation-administration-unique-identifiers-1967-2017-18nov20-en.pdf > > v > I looked a bit more into this and found a couple more items. RFC 1032 includes a questionnaire for TLD applicants to fill out and return via email. I figured the root servers were also involved in this somehow, and found another ICANN document which gives a history of the root server system . The document cites some namedroppers email and IETF meeting proceedings. There are several other people on this list who worked on/with these things, so hopefully they can provide more information. --gregbo From 6.internet at gmail.com Fri May 8 00:48:28 2026 From: 6.internet at gmail.com (Sivasubramanian M) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 13:18:28 +0530 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Netnews after migration appears to have been unattended and on a quick glance I found junk messages. Csiph looks neat, the archives (I saw netscape) goes down several sub-levels. If you need help in figuring out how to backfill everything, may be archives.org could help, if they receive a nice request. Csiph doesn't have to migrate away from Google, perhaps move from Google Groups to a different product in the cloud SUCH AS the Compute Engine; In the process of building up CSIPH, the exercise could include, apart from list archives, any other form of exchanges, early web pages related to Internet history in an organized way. Sivasubramanian Muthusamy sender On Thu, 7 May, 2026, 02:15 Kevin Bowling via Internet-history, < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 5:07?PM vinton cerf via Internet-history > wrote: > > > > Does anyone know whether the netnews files are available anywhere? > > Hi Vint, > > I am working on a thing http://csiph.com/groups. Search indexing is > currently paused but covers up through comp.* > > History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy. I still > need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully > replace Google Groups for historical research. > > Regards, > Kevin > > > thanks > > vint > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From eric.gade at gmail.com Fri May 8 05:16:58 2026 From: eric.gade at gmail.com (Eric Gade) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 08:16:58 -0400 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: Hello all, hello Nigel! I'm not clear on exactly which time period you are interested in (just NSI 1990-1997, or earlier too?) but I do have one lead that might make sense. Back in 2010 Jake Feinler donated her materials to the Computer History Museum, and there is quite a lot of documentation in there. You can find an overall finding guide online here . While several of the subcollections might be applicable (The SRI NIC and Special NIC Collections will be the most important), I also recommend the Feinler email collection in addition to everything else. I had the amazing luck to read through these when they were first being ingested at CHM in the summer of 2010 (with Jake Feinler present!). They are basically accordion paper printouts of a lot of her emails during her time at the NIC and I don't think they are available digitally. That said, this is mostly going to be the SRI/DDN era of the NIC, and I don't recall coming across much material after 1990. If you are able to physically make it to CHM and spend a couple of days in the archives I highly recommend it. -- Eric From cos at aaaaa.org Fri May 8 06:23:28 2026 From: cos at aaaaa.org (Ofer Inbar) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 09:23:28 -0400 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: <20260507011027.E54391086A876@ary.qy> References: <20260507011027.E54391086A876@ary.qy> Message-ID: <20260508132328.GZ2543@miplet.aaaaa.org> On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 09:10:27PM -0400, John Levine via Internet-history wrote: > >History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy. I still > >need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully > >replace Google Groups for historical research. > > Netnews providers like Giganews and Easynews generally don't expire anything > so they are likely to have 20 years of history. Just noticed a coincidence in that 20 year number: Reddit has mostly taken over the niche on the net that was Usenet's before the transition to the web. And Reddit started just about 20 years ago. It actually launched in late 2005 but didn't have comments until the end of 2005, so 2006 was the year it really started to be used for discussions rather than just sharing links. (Of course, for Usenet, the years we most care about archives of are the 1900s not the 2000s, so a 20 year archive isn't that exciting IMO) -- Cos From ocl at gih.com Fri May 8 06:53:20 2026 From: ocl at gih.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Olivier_MJ_Cr=C3=A9pin-Leblond?=) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 15:53:20 +0200 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 08/05/2026 09:48, Sivasubramanian M via Internet-history wrote: > If you need help in figuring out how to backfill everything, may be > archives.org could help, if they receive a nice request. FWIW: https://archive.org/details/usenet Kindest regards, Olivier From kim.davies at iana.org Fri May 8 07:28:18 2026 From: kim.davies at iana.org (Kim Davies) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 14:28:18 +0000 Subject: [ih] [Ext] Re: Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <24944558-7A40-4BBF-8B21-8B4206309005@iana.org> Hi, IANA looked through the Computer History Museum collections some years ago and did not find anything responsive to how top-level domains were allocated. We have also been, over a number of years, been pursuing access to Postel's archives at USC to identify if there are additional records on how IANA allocations were made that weren't originally transferred to ICANN when it was established. We have some records, but it is unclear whether there is more available or we've already been provided the entirety of what exists. kim ?On 5/8/26, 05:17, "Internet-history on behalf of Eric Gade via Internet-history" on behalf of internet-history at elists.isoc.org > wrote: Hello all, hello Nigel! I'm not clear on exactly which time period you are interested in (just NSI 1990-1997, or earlier too?) but I do have one lead that might make sense. Back in 2010 Jake Feinler donated her materials to the Computer History Museum, and there is quite a lot of documentation in there. You can find an overall finding guide online here [computerhistory[.]org]>. While several of the subcollections might be applicable (The SRI NIC [computerhistory[.]org]> and Special NIC Collections [computerhistory[.]org]> will be the most important), I also recommend the Feinler email collection [computerhistory[.]org]> in addition to everything else. I had the amazing luck to read through these when they were first being ingested at CHM in the summer of 2010 (with Jake Feinler present!). They are basically accordion paper printouts of a lot of her emails during her time at the NIC and I don't think they are available digitally. That said, this is mostly going to be the SRI/DDN era of the NIC, and I don't recall coming across much material after 1990. If you are able to physically make it to CHM and spend a couple of days in the archives I highly recommend it. -- Eric -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history__;!!PtGJab4!8TtW6azfhJ5vISU9M6GdDVxOeUc32Yt7Hb0hs-Bc42L-dYUbxloIhiPCBDhA8XLwLOWour4qg15stJJLTtFkcmC7kSct2c1PlOI_ksU$ [elists[.]isoc[.]org] - Unsubscribe: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The *20list*20to*20be*20unsubscribed*20from=Internet-history__;JSUlJSU!!PtGJab4!8TtW6azfhJ5vISU9M6GdDVxOeUc32Yt7Hb0hs-Bc42L-dYUbxloIhiPCBDhA8XLwLOWour4qg15stJJLTtFkcmC7kSct2c1PnKyTFzY$ [app[.]smartsheet[.]com] From kevin.bowling at kev009.com Fri May 8 10:24:07 2026 From: kevin.bowling at kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 10:24:07 -0700 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 6:53?AM Olivier MJ Cr?pin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote: > > > > On 08/05/2026 09:48, Sivasubramanian M via Internet-history wrote: > > If you need help in figuring out how to backfill everything, may be > > archives.org could help, if they receive a nice request. > > FWIW: > https://archive.org/details/usenet The quality of this versus just reading from the commercial providers John Levine mentioned doesn't look favorable. So that covers 2003+. But as Ofer states, 2003+ usenet is perhaps less valuable than pre 2000s usenet. I still can't think of a better option than spidering Google to get all that, and it will have to be done somewhat circumspect to avoid getting blocked. Ideally someone could liberate the data from Google but they've not been cooperative in any way lately, their service basically killed the remaining text feeds when they decided not to use their own spam and bot prevention code and let Google Groups fester for two years before finally turning off write access. I'm open to actionable ideas and people with influence on the situation. > Kindest regards, > > Olivier > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From gnu at toad.com Thu May 7 17:41:41 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 17:41:41 -0700 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > What I would particularly like to document is how domain registration records(which included ALL domains at this point) arrived at NSI, and in what form. > And go back further in time, if I can. You can. Here is how toad.com was registered, which was one of the first 100 .com domain names. It was all done by sending structured ascii emails to HOSTMASTER at SRI-NIC.ARPA. It's not a TLD, I'm sorry if that was all that you were interested in. This registration was done by the SRI-NIC (at the former Stanford Research Institute). This was before the tiny minority business Network Solutions won the fixed-price annual contract to manage the DNS. And long before Network Solutions was acquired for peanuts by greedhead beltway bandit SAIC, which immediately started illegally charging every domain user annually (or canceling their domain name if they wouldn't pay). And long before SAIC sold Network Solutions stock to the public during the Internet bubble and then transferred the hundreds of millions in proceeds directly back to SAIC (which has no stockholders other than its own employees). DNS administration has been a racket ever since, after SAIC showed the unscrupulous how to do it. John Return-Path: gnu Return-Path: Received: by hoptoad.uucp (3.2/SMI-3.2) id AA23500; Wed, 5 Aug 87 23:56:34 PDT Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 23:56:34 PDT From: gnu (John Gilmore) Message-Id: <8708060656.AA23500 at hoptoad.uucp> To: uunet!rick Subject: Re: Internet domain name for hoptoad [ NETINFO:DOMAIN-TEMPLATE.TXT ] [ 2/87, DBDOC ] To establish a domain, the following information must be provided to the NIC Domain Registrar (HOSTMASTER at SRI-NIC.ARPA): Note: The key people must have computer mail mailboxes and NIC "Handles", unique NIC database identifiers. If they do not at present, please remedy the situation at once. A NIC Handle may be established by contacting REGISTRAR at SRI-NIC.ARPA. 1) The name of the top level domain to join. COM 2) The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of the administrative head of the organization. This is the contact point for administrative and policy questions about the domain. In the case of a research project, this should be the Principal Investigator. The online mailbox and NIC Handle of this person should also be included. Administrator Organization Nebula Consultants Name John Gilmore Title Mail Address PO Box 170608 San Francisco, CA 94117 Phone Number +1 415 221 6524 Net Mailbox hoptoad!gnu at uunet.uu.net NIC Handle PENDING 3) The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of the domain technical contact. The online mailbox and NIC Handle of the domain technical contact should also be included. This is the contact point for problems with the domain and for updating information about the domain. Also, the domain technical contact may be responsible for hosts in this domain. Organization Nebula Consultants Name John Gilmore Title Mail Address PO Box 170608 San Francisco, CA 94117 Phone Number +1 415 221 6524 Net Mailbox hoptoad!gnu at uunet.uu.net NIC Handle PENDING 4) The name, title, mailing address, phone number, and organization of the zone technical contact. The online mailbox and NIC Handle of the zone technical contact should also be included. This is the contact point for problems with the zone and for updating information about the zone. In many cases the zone technical contact and the domain technical contact will be the same person. Organization Nebula Consultants Name John Gilmore Title Mail Address PO Box 170608 San Francisco, CA 94117 Phone Number +1 415 221 6524 Net Mailbox hoptoad!gnu at uunet.uu.net NIC Handle PENDING 5) The name of the domain (up to 12 characters). This is the name that will be used in tables and lists associating the domain and the domain server addresses. [While technically domain names can be quite long (programmers beware), shorter names are easier for people to cope with.] TOAD 6) A description of the servers that provides the domain service for translating name to address for hosts in this domain, and the date they will be operational. We will be running the BIND software as provided by UC Berkeley. The servers are currently operational. 7) Domains should provide at least two independent servers for the domain. A description of the server machine and its back-up, including: Primary: Sequent Balance 2100 and UNIX uunet.UU.NET 192.12.141.129 on CSS-ETHER Secondary: Sun 3/160 and UNIX seismo.CSS.GOV 192.12.141.25 on CSS-ETHER 8) Planned mapping of names of any other network hosts, other than the server machines, into the new domain's naming space. none 9) Delegation for networks in your domain for inclusion in the IN-ADDR.ZONE files, and the fully qualified domain names for the IN-ADDR server sites for each network. (If the IN-ADDR servers are omitted, the servers specified for the domain will be used as the default when the IN-ADDR.ZONE file is generated.) This domain will not be directly connected to the internet, so the IN-ADDR.ARPA domain is not applicable. 10) An estimate of the number of hosts that will be in the domain. (a) initially = 3 (b) one year = 4 (c) two years = 10 (d) five years = 10 11) A date when you expect the fully qualified domain name to become the official host name in HOSTS.TXT. The host name should never appear in host.txt. MX records to forward mail off the internet will be established. Return-Path: gnu Return-Path: Received: by hoptoad.uucp (3.2/SMI-3.2) id AA09612; Tue, 11 Aug 87 23:03:25 PDT Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 23:03:25 PDT From: gnu (John Gilmore) Message-Id: <8708120603.AA09612 at hoptoad.uucp> To: fischer at sri-nic.arpa Subject: NIC Handle application FULL NAME: John Gilmore U.S. MAIL ADDRESS: PO Box 170608, SF, CA 94117 PHONE: +1 415 931 4667 AUTHORIZING HOST: uunet.uu.net PRIMARY LOGIN NAME: gnu PRIMARY NETWORK MAILBOX: gnu at hop.toad.com (domain assignment pending) MILNET TAC ACCESS? (y/n): y TERMINATION DATE: none HANDLE: none yet Return-Path: FISCHER at SRI-NIC.ARPA Return-Path: Received: by hoptoad.uucp (3.2/SMI-3.2) id AA00518; Fri, 14 Aug 87 15:28:54 PDT Received: by cgl.ucsf.edu (5.54/GSC4.5) id AA03357; Fri, 14 Aug 87 12:51:44 PDT Date: Fri 14 Aug 87 12:58:28-PDT From: Nancy Fischer Subject: Re: NIC Handle application To: hoptoad!gnu Cc: FISCHER at SRI-NIC.ARPA, REGISTRAR at SRI-NIC.ARPA In-Reply-To: <8708120603.AA09612 at hoptoad.uucp> Message-Id: <12326491198.14.FISCHER at SRI-NIC.ARPA> We have registered you and assigned a handle - JG150. Nancy ------- Date: Tue, 18 Aug 87 15:02:57 EDT From: uunet!seismo.CSS.GOV!rick (Rick Adams) To: hoptoad!gnu Subject: [toad.com domain registration at SRI-NIC] the wheels continue to slowly turn... From DEBRA at sri-nic.arpa Tue Aug 18 12:00:57 1987 Received: by beno.CSS.GOV (5.54/5.17) id AA05362; Tue, 18 Aug 87 12:00:54 EDT Received: from SRI-NIC.ARPA by seismo.CSS.GOV (5.54/1.14) id AA03880; Tue, 18 Aug 87 12:00:43 EDT Date: Tue 18 Aug 87 09:00:31-PDT From: HOSTMASTER at sri-nic.arpa Subject: Re: domain registration form Sender: DEBRA at sri-nic.arpa To: rick at seismo.CSS.GOV Cc: HOSTMASTER at sri-nic.arpa Reply-To: HOSTMASTER at sri-nic.arpa In-Reply-To: <8708112029.AA13339 at beno.CSS.GOV> Message-Id: <12327496458.16.DEBRA at SRI-NIC.ARPA> Rick, This is to let you know that we have registered the TOAD.COM domain. It will take a few days before the root servers are updated, but feel free at that time to query it to verify the information. Debra ------- I'll let you know when it really exists. ---rick From LMM at acm.org Fri May 8 19:25:53 2026 From: LMM at acm.org (Larry Masinter) Date: Fri, 8 May 2026 19:25:53 -0700 Subject: [ih] TCP adoption in 1984 In-Reply-To: <20260505103452.24CE518C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260505103452.24CE518C077@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: > I personally have no experience at all with PUP running over 10MB Ethernet; We been experiencing PUP over 10MB Ethernet using https://files.interlisp.org/medley/sources/PUP.pdf using the "Dodo" emulation of 10MB ethernet ( https://github.com/devhawala/dodo) but a better encapsulation would be desirable. I'm hoping to allow reenacting of early 80s networked applications like Loops Truckin (network multiplayer game) and Colab (shared editing environment). One of the first problems we fixed ( https://github.com/Interlisp/medley/pull/327) was the 15-second delay waiting for a response to the "What is my PUP hostnumber?" request to time out when there was no ethernet enabled at all. Larry -- https://LarryMasinter.net https://interlisp.org On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 3:35?AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > From: Bill Nowicki > > > PUP (and I think ChaosNet?) did not require ARP > > I originally skimmed past this message, but on seeing it again, it has some > confusions in it that I ought to correct, so there's no error in the > record. > > > First, I personally have no experience at all with PUP running over 10MB > Ethernet; I'd never even heard of it being done. Obviously, if it were > done, > it would have needed something with the functionality of ARP, to turn PUP > addresses into 48-bit addresses (for wrapping packets with, for > transmission). I looked to see if there was such a thing, and found this: > > When a PUP level one packet is transported by an Ethernet, or an NS level > one packet is sent on Experimental Ethernet, the level one host number > cannot > be used as the level zero address, but rather some means must be provided > to determine the correct level zero address. Xerox solved this problem by > specifying another level-one protocol called {it translation} to allow > hosts on an Experimental Ethernet to announce their NS host numbers, or > hosts on an Ethernet to announce their PUP host numbers. Thus, both the > Ethernet and Experimental Ethernet Level Zero Protocols totally support > both families of higher level protocols. > > > https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/erinyes/lispmanual/EtherOverview.im!2 > > So, something like ARP, but not ARP. > > > Second, the CHAOS protocol (something different from Chaosnet hardware - > the > MIT AI Lab guys unwisely used the same name for both) definitely did use > ARP, > because ARP was created in part to allow the CHAOS protocol to run on 10MB > Ethernets (same issue - where does one get the 48 bits from, given the > 16-bit > addresses in CHAOS protocol). DCP and I had CHAOS protocol _and_ IP in mind > as clients for ARP when we designed it. > > DCP was a CHAOS guy; he was part of the MIT AI Lab crowd, and they wanted > nothing to do with TCP/IP at the time when ARP was done - November, 1982. > He > wound up writing the RFC, not me, is all (I'm not positive why; I was > probably too busy, or something like that). One can tell I had a lot to do > with the design, because of the generality - an attempt to make sure it had > the maximal lifetime - at which I think it succeeded. > > Noel > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jaap at NLnetLabs.nl Sat May 9 03:22:33 2026 From: jaap at NLnetLabs.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis) Date: Sat, 09 May 2026 12:22:33 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> broken wrist, so short reaction the NL TLD was registered by the cwi 40 years ago using same structured email as used for ip-numbers. like toad, names servers where at seismo (and brl). getting tired of the questions we published a howto-get-a-cctld document what a lot of people used. i have no clue how postel did his administration but get a tad tired to hear about this secret notebook. jaap From el at lisse.na Sat May 9 04:27:01 2026 From: el at lisse.na (Eberhard W Lisse) Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 13:27:01 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Message-ID: <4819f5ec-1e06-4f67-8efd-9863c1003c2d@Spark> Jaap, is your howto still around? el -- Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (retired) el at lisse.NA / * | Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell) PO Box 8421 Bachbrecht \ / If this email is signed with GPG/PGP 10007, Namibia ;____/ Sect 20 of Act No. 4 of 2019 may apply On May 9, 2026 at 12:22 +0200, Jaap Akkerhuis via Internet-history , wrote: > broken wrist, so short reaction > the NL TLD was registered by the cwi 40 years ago using same structured email as used for ip-numbers. > like toad, names servers where at seismo (and brl). > getting tired of the questions we published a howto-get-a-cctld document what a lot of people used. > i have no clue how postel did his administration but get a tad tired to hear about this secret notebook. > > jaap > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jaap at NLnetLabs.nl Sat May 9 07:51:39 2026 From: jaap at NLnetLabs.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis) Date: Sat, 09 May 2026 16:51:39 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <4819f5ec-1e06-4f67-8efd-9863c1003c2d@Spark> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> <4819f5ec-1e06-4f67-8efd-9863c1003c2d@Spark> Message-ID: <202605091451.649Epd15091711@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history writes: > Jaap, > > is your howto still around? maybe, gave to dive into archives jaap From kevin.bowling at kev009.com Sat May 9 14:41:18 2026 From: kevin.bowling at kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 14:41:18 -0700 Subject: [ih] net news In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 10:24?AM Kevin Bowling wrote: > > On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 6:53?AM Olivier MJ Cr?pin-Leblond via > Internet-history wrote: > > > > > > > > On 08/05/2026 09:48, Sivasubramanian M via Internet-history wrote: > > > If you need help in figuring out how to backfill everything, may be > > > archives.org could help, if they receive a nice request. > > > > FWIW: > > https://archive.org/details/usenet > > The quality of this versus just reading from the commercial providers > John Levine mentioned doesn't look favorable. So that covers 2003+. > But as Ofer states, 2003+ usenet is perhaps less valuable than pre > 2000s usenet. I still can't think of a better option than spidering > Google to get all that, and it will have to be done somewhat > circumspect to avoid getting blocked. Ideally someone could liberate > the data from Google but they've not been cooperative in any way > lately, their service basically killed the remaining text feeds when > they decided not to use their own spam and bot prevention code and let > Google Groups fester for two years before finally turning off write > access. I'm open to actionable ideas and people with influence on the > situation. One big downer: I haven't looked at this in a number of years and now it looks like Google removed the "Show original message" option (it is visible but disabled) for Usenet posts and probing the endpoints is unsuccessful. Without that, I'd have to synthesize message IDs, fake emails, and lose all the other headers. Not a show stopper but definitely a setback, data lossage, and maybe something I'd want to feed into a second lower quality index. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical seems to be the "best" public archive easily found, I can't find many details about how it was produced, just a thread like this: http://csiph.com/group/comp.sys.apple2/a/yr6DN.471305%24xHn7.445904 at fx14.iad With that and the UTZOO collection I'd have something plausible for historical research but it is a shame Google has locked away the rest. > > Kindest regards, > > > > Olivier > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 9 15:39:19 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 15:39:19 -0700 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Message-ID: On May 9, 2026, at 3:22?AM, Jaap Akkerhuis via Internet-history wrote: > > broken wrist, so short reaction > the NL TLD was registered by the cwi 40 years ago using same structured email as used for ip-numbers. > like toad, names servers where at seismo (and brl). > getting tired of the questions we published a howto-get-a-cctld document what a lot of people used. > i have no clue how postel did his administration but get a tad tired to hear about this secret notebook. > > jaap > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history While you?re looking for that document, I thought some people on the list might be interested in the NL Domain Registry System document, which I found while poking around for more information. [1] Incidentally, I think the ?Duane? Nigel mentioned in his original post is Duane Wessels. [2] I have copied him on my response, in the hopes that he would answer some of Nigel?s questions. [3] --gregbo [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990203064227/http://www.domain-registry.nl/drs-documentation.html [2] https://blog.verisign.com/author/dwessels/ [3] https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2026-May/011874.html From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 9 18:14:19 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 18:14:19 -0700 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Message-ID: On May 9, 2026, at 3:22?AM, Jaap Akkerhuis via Internet-history wrote: > > broken wrist, so short reaction > the NL TLD was registered by the cwi 40 years ago using same structured email as used for ip-numbers. > like toad, names servers where at seismo (and brl). > getting tired of the questions we published a howto-get-a-cctld document what a lot of people used. > i have no clue how postel did his administration but get a tad tired to hear about this secret notebook. > > jaap > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b? > The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history After looking into this a bit more, the ?Duane? Nigel referred to may be Duane Stone. His name came up in some Internet Monthly Reports and namedroppers email. [1] [2] Also, he (or someone else who received email sent to domreg at internic.net ) may have received the request made by Joshua Quittner of Wired to register mcdonalds.com . [3] --gregbo [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/lNtMG3i0GYL-uRCKUKvgy_-kESA/ [2] https://marc.info/?l=namedroppers&m=95837825027198&w=2 [3] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/projects/1997-98/domain-names/problems/grabbing.html From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sun May 10 11:36:31 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 11:36:31 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> Message-ID: <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > > Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to me for a decade or more.) > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP became available via open source due to Linux. --gregbo [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ From bpurvy at gmail.com Sun May 10 12:24:13 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 12:24:13 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: There are a lot of smaller defense companies now who might be benefiting from this. I saw an article about "The Gundo" (a term that surprised me since we never called it that when we worked in El Segundo) on them. So I would bet that knowledge is still flowing in both directions. Maybe not on the scale of the Internet, though. On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 11:36?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to > me for a decade or more.) > > > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP > became available via open source due to Linux. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jack at 3kitty.org Sun May 10 14:02:35 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 14:02:35 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s.? That was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State.? Lots of pushback especially from young folks.? Even the resignation of a POTUS, under threat of removal from office.? Lots of distrust of government.? Lots of anger. Is it so different now? But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s.? The USG did not "give away" the Internet.? The Internet (and previously the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment.? That followed the charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency.? Research produces ideas.? Experiments build prototypes to test theories.? Research produces knowledge.? Freely sharing that knowledge would be beneficial to the "real systems" that followed.? Artifacts, such as protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. The "real system" was expected to be OSI.? Of course that didn't happen.? ?But it was The Plan.? Even the USG had a program called GOSIP (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG.? As long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant objections.? It might even help OSI development.? OSI was the target. Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to both The Internet and the OSI promises.? In the "multiprotocol router" stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and all the others would just fade away.? Most of them had some ambition of global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN".? But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP.? ?Its adoption by the USG established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for electronic mail service.? ?So lots of corporations did just that.? The IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product architecture.? ?A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. So, ... is it so different today? The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media live, on top of The Internet.? I see lots of corporations creating competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the winner and become the infrastructure of the future.? Even electronic mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for others to use.? Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and outside their scope?? ?Perhaps such research organizations exist, other than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard enough.? ? There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. Is that an "attitude of society"? /Jack Haverty It seems to me that today's On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to me for a decade or more.) >> > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP became available via open source due to Linux. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sun May 10 17:09:52 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 17:09:52 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: On May 10, 2026, at 2:02?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of government. Lots of anger. > > Is it so different now? > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) --gregbo From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com Sun May 10 17:10:35 2026 From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 00:10:35 +0000 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: Re. "give away:" 1. Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP went into the public domain. 2. The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) 3. From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened to the public in 1992. Miles ________________________________ From: Internet-history on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of government. Lots of anger. Is it so different now? But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. So, ... is it so different today? The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. Is that an "attitude of society"? /Jack Haverty It seems to me that today's On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to me for a decade or more.) >> > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP became available via open source due to Linux. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > From vint at google.com Sun May 10 17:49:20 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 20:49:20 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened to the public in 1992." Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI. v On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Re. "give away:" > > > 1. > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > went into the public domain. > 2. > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > 3. > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened > to the public in 1992. > > Miles > > > ________________________________ > From: Internet-history on > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > government. Lots of anger. > > Is it so different now? > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > So, ... is it so different today? > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > /Jack Haverty > > > It seems to me that today's > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to > me for a decade or more.) > >> > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > --gregbo > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From dhc at dcrocker.net Sun May 10 18:14:45 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 01:14:45 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> On 5/10/2026 5:49 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > The regional networks were > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > CERFNET were commercial operators... As an outside observer, I feel compelled to ask where The Little Garden fits into the funding model? d/ ps. As an inside participant, I feel compelled to note the the NSFNet funding/transition model was first tested 3 years earlier, with CSNet... d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 10 18:22:34 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 18:22:34 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: I had a little bit of interaction with The Little Garden. I believe it was an independent effort without government funding, but others can speak more authoritatively. Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 9:14?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 5/10/2026 5:49 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > The regional networks were > > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting > over a > > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > > CERFNET were commercial operators... > > > As an outside observer, I feel compelled to ask where The Little Garden > fits into the funding model? > > d/ > > ps. As an inside participant, I feel compelled to note the the NSFNet > funding/transition model was first tested 3 years earlier, with CSNet... > > > d/ > > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 10 19:18:17 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 19:18:17 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: Two points: one small and the other larger. 1. Dave Farber and Dave Crocker would probably like to see CSNET included in this list. 2. Regarding control of intellectual property, I actively participated in the [D]ARPA/IPTO computer science research community from 1965 to 1981: - 1965-66. UCLA Network Computer Linking Experiment. Attempted to connect the three IBM 7094s on the UCLA campus. Designed and built a lightweight time-sharing system for IBM 360/40s, intending for them to serve as front-ends to the 7904s and connect to each other. We read and understood the Multics papers. Project died, primarily due to political issues within UCLA. I was the junior member of the team. - 1966. Worked for Professor Gerry Estrin in the Engineering Dept when he received the remainder of the project funding mentioned above. Estrin focused on measuring computer systems. - 1967 to May 1968. Graduate student in Minsky's AI Lab at MIT. Participated in documenting Richard Greenblatt's MacHack 6 Chess program. Spent some time with Danny Bobrow's AI group at BBN. Gained exposure to two operating systems for the PDP-10: ITS at the AI Lab and Tenex at BBN. And Interlisp at BBN. - May 1968 to May 1971. UCLA. Intended to spend just the summer but decided to transfer back to UCLA. Attended the first IPTO graduate student conference. 30 people from across the IPTO-sponsored sites, including Vint Cerf, Alan Kay, John Warnock, Pat Winston, Bob Balzer and several others who made noteworthy contributions over the next several years. My first exposure to the community and the cohesive effect of funding from DARPA/IPTO. - Summer 1968. Designed and partially built a time-sharing system for the XDS, n?e SDS, Sigma 7 patterned after MIT-AI's ITS. Discovered Lawrence Livermore Labs already had a time-sharing system for the Sigma 7. We asked if we could use it; they readily agreed and cooperated fully. LLL is a Department of Energy Lab and was not funded by DARPA but was, of course funded by the USG. - August 1968. First meeting of representatives from the first four Arpanet sites. Primarily graduate students. The Network Working Group emerged organically, as did the RFCs and eventually the IETF. - July 1971-August 1974. [D[ARPA/IPTO Research Program Manager. Primarily focused on AI, Speech Understanding, and Computer Security, but helped a bit with the Arpanet activities. - Nov 1974-July 1981. Researcher at USC-ISI. Focused primarily on Formal Methods (Program Verification. I share the above so you can assess the following comments. Until about 1973, I never saw any issues regarding the distribution of research results. Of course, very few results also had immediate commercial value, so the question was perhaps moot. However, I have the strong impression that sharing all kinds of results, including software was taken for granted across the community and probably beyond. Toward the end of my time at DARPA, BBN tried to assert control over both the IMP code and the Tenex code. The IMP code was particularly contentious because a BBN employee started a competitive company and requested the code. The contracts supporting these projects had 100% government funding and gave the government "unlimited rights in data." (I quote these words because that was the formal terminology in the contract.). As I learned, those words permit the government to take delivery of the code and do with it whatever it wants, including distributing it to whomever it chooses. However, those words alone do not require the contractor to distribute the code to others. That incident brought the control of intellectual property arising from the research contracts to the surface. Until then, the ethic within the community, as far as I experienced it, was enthusiastic sharing. Indeed it was a form of validation of the work and hence a mark of success. I could see the need for a software repository, but I left before I could initiate action in that direction. In any case, the key point is that until that time, I believe it was natural and standard practice to share software when it was of interest. The only "restriction" was appropriate attribution. When creating the RFCs, we intended the maximum degree of sharing. The initial rules for RFCs were based on speedy distribution without review or control. The idea of charging for documents or requiring group membership was intrinsically antithetical to the ethic of enabling others to benefit from the work. Quite a lot changed after that. Free and open source software became a thing as did a variety of software licenses. When I went to Aerospace in 1981 to set up a computer science research lab, we paid $500 for a Berkeley Unix license. It was a trivial sum. Nonetheless, someone in the Aerospace legal department reviewed the license and felt obligated to negotiate with the University of California Regents. When I finally went to find out what was taking so long, he explained he was only trying to help me. I asked him to stop and we were up and running shortly thereafter. Vint and others can report on how things evolved after from 1974 onward. Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:49?AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened > to the public in 1992." > > Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - > funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to > develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development > initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet > Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI > and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. > ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to > the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect > commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI. > > v > > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Re. "give away:" > > > > > > 1. > > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > > went into the public domain. > > 2. > > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between > > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid > for > > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > > 3. > > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was > opened > > to the public in 1992. > > > > Miles > > > > > > ________________________________ > > From: Internet-history on > > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a > > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > > government. Lots of anger. > > > > Is it so different now? > > > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As > > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was > > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > > > So, ... is it so different today? > > > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > > > /Jack Haverty > > > > > > It seems to me that today's > > > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any > reflections > > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite > all > > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm > asking > > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization > either > > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe > at > > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious > to > > me for a decade or more.) > > >> > > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of > TCP/IP > > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > > > --gregbo > > > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > Vint Cerf > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > McLean, VA 22102 > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > Google, LLC > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > Reston, VA 20190 > +1 650-224-2788 > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com Sun May 10 19:38:45 2026 From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 02:38:45 +0000 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: As I recall there was a legal shift as well, from the days when, if the government paid for it, the IP went into the public domain (it still does for government employees working on government time) ... to contractors retaining IP rights unless the contract said otherwise, while the government gets "government use" rights. And then there are SBIR rights. ________________________________ From: Steve Crocker Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 10:18:34 PM To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org Cc: Miles Fidelman ; Vint Cerf ; Steve Crocker Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) Two points: one small and the other larger. 1. Dave Farber and Dave Crocker would probably like to see CSNET included in this list. 2. Regarding control of intellectual property, I actively participated in the [D]ARPA/IPTO computer science research community from 1965 to 1981: * 1965-66. UCLA Network Computer Linking Experiment. Attempted to connect the three IBM 7094s on the UCLA campus. Designed and built a lightweight time-sharing system for IBM 360/40s, intending for them to serve as front-ends to the 7904s and connect to each other. We read and understood the Multics papers. Project died, primarily due to political issues within UCLA. I was the junior member of the team. * 1966. Worked for Professor Gerry Estrin in the Engineering Dept when he received the remainder of the project funding mentioned above. Estrin focused on measuring computer systems. * 1967 to May 1968. Graduate student in Minsky's AI Lab at MIT. Participated in documenting Richard Greenblatt's MacHack 6 Chess program. Spent some time with Danny Bobrow's AI group at BBN. Gained exposure to two operating systems for the PDP-10: ITS at the AI Lab and Tenex at BBN. And Interlisp at BBN. * May 1968 to May 1971. UCLA. Intended to spend just the summer but decided to transfer back to UCLA. Attended the first IPTO graduate student conference. 30 people from across the IPTO-sponsored sites, including Vint Cerf, Alan Kay, John Warnock, Pat Winston, Bob Balzer and several others who made noteworthy contributions over the next several years. My first exposure to the community and the cohesive effect of funding from DARPA/IPTO. * Summer 1968. Designed and partially built a time-sharing system for the XDS, n?e SDS, Sigma 7 patterned after MIT-AI's ITS. Discovered Lawrence Livermore Labs already had a time-sharing system for the Sigma 7. We asked if we could use it; they readily agreed and cooperated fully. LLL is a Department of Energy Lab and was not funded by DARPA but was, of course funded by the USG. * August 1968. First meeting of representatives from the first four Arpanet sites. Primarily graduate students. The Network Working Group emerged organically, as did the RFCs and eventually the IETF. * July 1971-August 1974. [D[ARPA/IPTO Research Program Manager. Primarily focused on AI, Speech Understanding, and Computer Security, but helped a bit with the Arpanet activities. * Nov 1974-July 1981. Researcher at USC-ISI. Focused primarily on Formal Methods (Program Verification. I share the above so you can assess the following comments. Until about 1973, I never saw any issues regarding the distribution of research results. Of course, very few results also had immediate commercial value, so the question was perhaps moot. However, I have the strong impression that sharing all kinds of results, including software was taken for granted across the community and probably beyond. Toward the end of my time at DARPA, BBN tried to assert control over both the IMP code and the Tenex code. The IMP code was particularly contentious because a BBN employee started a competitive company and requested the code. The contracts supporting these projects had 100% government funding and gave the government "unlimited rights in data." (I quote these words because that was the formal terminology in the contract.). As I learned, those words permit the government to take delivery of the code and do with it whatever it wants, including distributing it to whomever it chooses. However, those words alone do not require the contractor to distribute the code to others. That incident brought the control of intellectual property arising from the research contracts to the surface. Until then, the ethic within the community, as far as I experienced it, was enthusiastic sharing. Indeed it was a form of validation of the work and hence a mark of success. I could see the need for a software repository, but I left before I could initiate action in that direction. In any case, the key point is that until that time, I believe it was natural and standard practice to share software when it was of interest. The only "restriction" was appropriate attribution. When creating the RFCs, we intended the maximum degree of sharing. The initial rules for RFCs were based on speedy distribution without review or control. The idea of charging for documents or requiring group membership was intrinsically antithetical to the ethic of enabling others to benefit from the work. Quite a lot changed after that. Free and open source software became a thing as did a variety of software licenses. When I went to Aerospace in 1981 to set up a computer science research lab, we paid $500 for a Berkeley Unix license. It was a trivial sum. Nonetheless, someone in the Aerospace legal department reviewed the license and felt obligated to negotiate with the University of California Regents. When I finally went to find out what was taking so long, he explained he was only trying to help me. I asked him to stop and we were up and running shortly thereafter. Vint and others can report on how things evolved after from 1974 onward. Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:49?AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history > wrote: "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened to the public in 1992." Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI. v On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Re. "give away:" > > > 1. > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > went into the public domain. > 2. > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > 3. > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened > to the public in 1992. > > Miles > > > ________________________________ > From: Internet-history > on > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > government. Lots of anger. > > Is it so different now? > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > So, ... is it so different today? > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > /Jack Haverty > > > It seems to me that today's > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to > me for a decade or more.) > >> > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > --gregbo > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- Sent by a Verified sender From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com Sun May 10 19:42:30 2026 From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 02:42:30 +0000 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: I seem to recall that researchers were getting line items to pay for leased lines & such - and that ARPA pretty much said "now you're going to spend that on ARPANET connections - and that a primary driver of the net was to save ARPA some coin on telecom bills. Or do I have that wrong? Miles Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Get Outlook for Android ________________________________ From: Vint Cerf Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 8:49:20 PM To: Miles Fidelman Cc: internet-history at elists.isoc.org Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened to the public in 1992." Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI. v On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history > wrote: Re. "give away:" 1. Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP went into the public domain. 2. The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) 3. From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened to the public in 1992. Miles ________________________________ From: Internet-history > on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of government. Lots of anger. Is it so different now? But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. So, ... is it so different today? The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. Is that an "attitude of society"? /Jack Haverty It seems to me that today's On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history > wrote: >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to me for a decade or more.) >> > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP became available via open source due to Linux. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From geoff at iconia.com Sun May 10 19:43:18 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 19:43:18 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: during the time starting in the 70's when BBN tried to assert control over both the IMP code and the Tenex code: we Tenex system janitors characterized BBN's "attitude"/"position" as being one of "Excessive Capitalist Zeal". can't tell ya how many times a request to BBN came back with the reply of "we're not funded to do that/we need funding to do that". when the Tenex funding support ended (IIRC at Tenex 1.34) BBN would not release anything further that they did with Tenex 1.35 -- which yours truly believes was final Tenex version. g On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 7:18?PM Steve Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Two points: one small and the other larger. > > 1. Dave Farber and Dave Crocker would probably like to see CSNET > included in this list. > > 2. Regarding control of intellectual property, I actively > participated in the [D]ARPA/IPTO computer science research community > from > 1965 to 1981: > > - 1965-66. UCLA Network Computer Linking Experiment. Attempted to > connect the three IBM 7094s on the UCLA campus. Designed and built a > lightweight time-sharing system for IBM 360/40s, intending for them > to > serve as front-ends to the 7904s and connect to each other. We read > and > understood the Multics papers. Project died, primarily due to > political > issues within UCLA. I was the junior member of the team. > > - 1966. Worked for Professor Gerry Estrin in the Engineering Dept > when he received the remainder of the project funding mentioned > above. > Estrin focused on measuring computer systems. > > - 1967 to May 1968. Graduate student in Minsky's AI Lab at MIT. > Participated in documenting Richard Greenblatt's MacHack 6 Chess > program. > Spent some time with Danny Bobrow's AI group at BBN. Gained > exposure to > two operating systems for the PDP-10: ITS at the AI Lab and > Tenex at BBN. > And Interlisp at BBN. > > - May 1968 to May 1971. UCLA. Intended to spend just the summer but > decided to transfer back to UCLA. Attended the first IPTO > graduate student > conference. 30 people from across the IPTO-sponsored sites, > including Vint > Cerf, Alan Kay, John Warnock, Pat Winston, Bob Balzer and several > others > who made noteworthy contributions over the next several years. My > first > exposure to the community and the cohesive effect of funding from > DARPA/IPTO. > > - Summer 1968. Designed and partially built a time-sharing system > for the XDS, n?e SDS, Sigma 7 patterned after MIT-AI's ITS. > Discovered > Lawrence Livermore Labs already had a time-sharing system for > the Sigma 7. > We asked if we could use it; they readily agreed and cooperated > fully. LLL > is a Department of Energy Lab and was not funded by DARPA but was, of > course funded by the USG. > > - August 1968. First meeting of representatives from the first four > Arpanet sites. Primarily graduate students. The Network Working > Group > emerged organically, as did the RFCs and eventually the IETF. > > - July 1971-August 1974. [D[ARPA/IPTO Research Program Manager. > Primarily focused on AI, Speech Understanding, and Computer > Security, but > helped a bit with the Arpanet activities. > > - Nov 1974-July 1981. Researcher at USC-ISI. Focused primarily on > Formal Methods (Program Verification. > > I share the above so you can assess the following comments. > > Until about 1973, I never saw any issues regarding the distribution of > research results. Of course, very few results also had immediate > commercial value, so the question was perhaps moot. However, I have the > strong impression that sharing all kinds of results, including software was > taken for granted across the community and probably beyond. > > Toward the end of my time at DARPA, BBN tried to assert control over both > the IMP code and the Tenex code. The IMP code was particularly contentious > because a BBN employee started a competitive company and requested the > code. > > The contracts supporting these projects had 100% government funding and > gave the government "unlimited rights in data." (I quote these words > because that was the formal terminology in the contract.). As I learned, > those words permit the government to take delivery of the code and do with > it whatever it wants, including distributing it to whomever it chooses. > However, those words alone do not require the contractor to distribute the > code to others. > > That incident brought the control of intellectual property arising from the > research contracts to the surface. Until then, the ethic within the > community, as far as I experienced it, was enthusiastic sharing. Indeed it > was a form of validation of the work and hence a mark of success. I could > see the need for a software repository, but I left before I could initiate > action in that direction. In any case, the key point is that until that > time, I believe it was natural and standard practice to share software when > it was of interest. The only "restriction" was appropriate attribution. > When creating the RFCs, we intended the maximum degree of sharing. The > initial rules for RFCs were based on speedy distribution without review or > control. The idea of charging for documents or requiring group membership > was intrinsically antithetical to the ethic of enabling others to benefit > from the work. > > Quite a lot changed after that. Free and open source software became a > thing as did a variety of software licenses. When I went to Aerospace in > 1981 to set up a computer science research lab, we paid $500 for a Berkeley > Unix license. It was a trivial sum. Nonetheless, someone in the Aerospace > legal department reviewed the license and felt obligated to negotiate with > the University of California Regents. When I finally went to find out what > was taking so long, he explained he was only trying to help me. I asked > him to stop and we were up and running shortly thereafter. > > Vint and others can report on how things evolved after from 1974 onward. > > Steve > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:49?AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was > opened > > to the public in 1992." > > > > Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - > > funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs > to > > develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development > > initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet > > Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, > MCI > > and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. > > ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were > > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting > over a > > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > > CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect > to > > the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect > > commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by > CNRI. > > > > v > > > > > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > Re. "give away:" > > > > > > > > > 1. > > > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > > > went into the public domain. > > > 2. > > > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. > Between > > > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid > > for > > > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > > > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > > > 3. > > > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > > > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to > purchase > > > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > > > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was > > opened > > > to the public in 1992. > > > > > > Miles > > > > > > > > > ________________________________ > > > From: Internet-history on > > > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > > > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > > > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > > > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > > > > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > > > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > > > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of > a > > > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > > > government. Lots of anger. > > > > > > Is it so different now? > > > > > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > > > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > > > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > > > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > > > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > > > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > > > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > > > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > > > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > > > > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > > > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > > > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. > As > > > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > > > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > > > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > > > > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > > > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > > > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > > > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > > > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > > > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > > > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > > > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which > was > > > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > > > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > > > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > > > > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > > > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > > > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > > > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > > > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > > > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > > > > > So, ... is it so different today? > > > > > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > > > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > > > > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > > > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > > > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > > > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > > > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > > > > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > > > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > > > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > > > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > > > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > > > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > > > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > > > > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > > > > > /Jack Haverty > > > > > > > > > It seems to me that today's > > > > > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > > > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those > who > > > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any > > reflections > > > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > > > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy > that > > > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite > > all > > > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather > than > > > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is > another > > > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm > > asking > > > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > > > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such > that > > > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > > > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization > > either > > > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum > short-term > > > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. > (And, > > > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe > > at > > > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious > > to > > > me for a decade or more.) > > > >> > > > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of > > TCP/IP > > > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > > > > > --gregbo > > > > > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Internet-history mailing list > > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > > - > > > Unsubscribe: > > > > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > > > > > -- > > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > > Vint Cerf > > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > > McLean, VA 22102 > > > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > > Google, LLC > > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > > Reston, VA 20190 > > +1 650-224-2788 > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > Sent by a Verified > > sender > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From dhc at dcrocker.net Sun May 10 19:45:09 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 02:45:09 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: <9099be31-fbbe-4d4a-8b6f-4b3cf5705df6@dcrocker.net> On 5/10/2026 7:18 PM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > Free and open source software became a > thing as did a variety of software licenses. While IBM and others charged an enormous amount for use of software, within the Arpanet/Internet community software developed by that community was typically freely shared. There are many example of this happening and major benefit because of it. I'll cite two. One was Vittal's MSG program -- the first email program to include the reply function.? My subjective sense was that email use quickly increased exponentially, since that command permitted much easier conduct of an extended email discussion. The other was the mail system we built at Rand (MS ) and the ensuing developments because it and some of its descendants were freely shared. The impact email work done at The Rand Corporation in the mid-1970?s And the chart only captures significant software development arcs.? So, for example, it does not include the significant MCI Mail gateway example. Some of these were commercial ventures, starting with the free software, doing enhancements, and building a business based on it. The most amusing example, for me, was the UK ISODE product. While I was running Engineering at The Wollongong Group, in Palo Alto, we wanted to add an X.400 offering to our inventory.? (For reference, taking a text-based Arpanet/Internet email transport product and making it support X.400 is, IMO, an impressive accomplishment.? And, just to inject this, I'll note that I think Microsoft is the only one to succeed at the reverse sequence.) We landed on ISODE's version.? After we got a copy and cycled up a team to support of the product, one of the engineers came into my office and asked whether I also worked for ISODE.? Color me entirely confused.? I asked why they were asking.? They said my name was all over lots of the routines. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From carl at media.org Sun May 10 20:53:44 2026 From: carl at media.org (Carl Malamud) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 09:23:44 +0530 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI Message-ID: Hi - I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. With best regards, Carl From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 10 21:31:32 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:31:32 +1200 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: ... > > I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 10 23:07:30 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:07:30 +0800 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> References: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> Message-ID: When the Security Area was created, I volunteered and was accepted as the Area Director. IIRC, I suggested making Security Considerations a required section in standards documents. It was not limited to crypto issues. Steve Sent from my iPhone > On May 11, 2026, at 12:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > > ?On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > ... >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From karl at iwl.com Sun May 10 23:58:34 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 23:58:34 -0700 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: About the Little Garden ... I am sure that John G. will have many more details .. From the point of view of my company (Epilogue Technology) and John Romkey (part of the company) we were getting rather tired of bumping into barriers when we began to extend our connectivity beyond Usenet to encompass the nascent Internet, especially in the San Francisco peninsula area. John Romkey was our lead on this and one day he and I (and I think Dave Bridgham) gathered with John G. and others at the Little Garden Chinese Restaurant in Palo Alto to figure out what to do.? I was essentially an observer. I'm not sure who funded what - Epilogue might have contributed some $$, but if we did it probably was not a lot.? I think all of the money came out of our own pockets, mostly Gilmore's.? My company didn't really have offices - many of us wee working out of our homes - and Romkey already had a garage filled with Telebit modems and machines running usenet stuff - I I don't remember the details except that it was a lot of machines and wires and clearly something that grew ad hoc rather than from a plan.? I do remember the Pacific Bell telco people being amazed at how many phone circuits were going into one house. Romkey's place was up on the hill in Belmont, my place was down at the bottom of the hill, so all of our company networking went via Romkey's garage.? (I also got some net access courtesy John Rushby and his Foonley Four machine at SRI [Rushby and I had worked together on security stuff at SDC and at RSRE in Great Malvern in the UK.]) I was never very clear about how we were wired to the Little Garden or for how long. Romkey got Postel to assign "aslyum.sf.ca.us" as a domain name for his garage in Belmont, California.? Eventually John moved it all back to Boston - but still keeping the asylum.sf.ca.us domain name - and thus being one of the first to break the idea of geographic allocation of host and domain names. ? ? --karl-- On 5/10/26 6:14 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > On 5/10/2026 5:49 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: >> The regional networks were >> partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting >> over a >> 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and >> CERFNET were commercial operators... > > > As an outside observer, I feel compelled to ask where The Little > Garden fits into the funding model? > > d/ > > ps. As an inside participant, I feel compelled to note the the NSFNet > funding/transition model was first tested 3 years earlier, with CSNet... > > > d/ > > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 10 23:59:13 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 18:59:13 +1200 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> According to https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/past-members/, that means about October 1989. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 11-May-26 18:07, Steve Crocker wrote: > When the Security Area was created, I volunteered and was accepted as the Area Director. IIRC, I suggested making Security Considerations a required section in standards documents. > > It was not limited to crypto issues. > > Steve > > Sent from my iPhone > >> On May 11, 2026, at 12:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> >> ?On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: >> ... >>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) >> >> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? >> >> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) >> >> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Mon May 11 00:12:39 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 07:12:39 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> References: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1821954699.507951.1778483559077@mail.yahoo.com> I know there was a lot of early work on security. I wasn't involved.? I just heard names of things floating about. Here are a couple wikipedia links to things i remember? when i was starting in networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET_encryption_devices There might interesting stories about interactions with the NSA but i don't know any of them BTW, i am also pretty sure there was a packet radio produced that had TRANSEC but i never worked with it. (Upgraded Packet Radio?). I only had to secure the SINCGARS radio link with encryption keys for one demo at Fort Gordon (Hurricane Hugo timeframe).? ?FYI, Packet radios used direct-sequence spread spectrum while SINCGARS used frequency hopping. Not to forget Peter Neumann (SRI). He has been working in this space a long time so he would be a good person to contact.? He has made lots of contributions. Last i heard he is still at SRI. I think you will find lots of his papers, including several papers on? IDES (Intrusion-Detection Expert System). This paper might be a good place to start for that particular effort. Jeffery R Host, "The march of IDES: early history of intrusion-detection expert systems",IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38 (4), 42-54, 2015 barbara On Sunday, May 10, 2026 at 11:59:29 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: According to https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/past-members/, that means about October 1989. Regards/Ng? mihi ? ? Brian Carpenter On 11-May-26 18:07, Steve Crocker wrote: > When the Security Area was created, I volunteered? and was accepted as the Area Director.? IIRC, I suggested making Security Considerations a required section in standards documents. > > It was not limited to crypto issues. > > Steve > > Sent from my iPhone > >> On May 11, 2026, at 12:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> >> ?On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: >> ... >>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time.? The history of PGP provides an example of this.? If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today.? (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) >> >> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? >> >> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) >> >> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >>? ? Brian Carpenter From steve at shinkuro.com Mon May 11 02:11:09 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 17:11:09 +0800 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> References: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, October 1989 matches my recollection. Thanks. Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:59?PM Brian E Carpenter < brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > According to https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/past-members/, that > means about October 1989. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 11-May-26 18:07, Steve Crocker wrote: > > When the Security Area was created, I volunteered and was accepted as > the Area Director. IIRC, I suggested making Security Considerations a > required section in standards documents. > > > > It was not limited to crypto issues. > > > > Steve > > > > Sent from my iPhone > > > >> On May 11, 2026, at 12:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> > >> ?On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > >> ... > >>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > >> > >> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > >> > >> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > >> > >> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > >> > >> Regards/Ng? mihi > >> Brian Carpenter > >> -- > >> Internet-history mailing list > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> - > >> Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From steve at shinkuro.com Mon May 11 02:33:27 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 17:33:27 +0800 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <1d36ffb8-1533-4e0b-a2f3-1cc449c1a5d3@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: In my previous note re The Little Garden, I wrote: I had a little bit of interaction with The Little Garden. I believe it was an independent effort without government funding, but others can speak more authoritatively. I was actually directly involved in one aspect of The Little Garden, but I wasn't a principal and had no involvement in its overall life. I worked for Trusted Information Systems (TIS), which had been founded and run by Steve Walker. Its headquarters were in Maryland. I joined TIS in late 1986 and opened the Los Angeles office, which I ran until I moved to Maryland in September 1989. We paid for a UUNET connection, which satisfied our needs at the time. A short time after opening the LA office, TIS also opened a very small office in the Bay Area. We wanted to connect them as well, but cost was an issue. I forget who approached whom, but Rick Adams permitted us to connect the Bay Area office, allowed The Little Garden to connect off of our line, and agreed to pay a portion of our costs. Rick did not generally permit UUNET customers to sell their connectivity to others, so this was a special favor. IIRC, John Gilmore took a liberal view of his rights, and went into business anyway adding other nodes. Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:58?PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > About the Little Garden ... > > I am sure that John G. will have many more details .. > > From the point of view of my company (Epilogue Technology) and John > Romkey (part of the company) we were getting rather tired of bumping > into barriers when we began to extend our connectivity beyond Usenet to > encompass the nascent Internet, especially in the San Francisco > peninsula area. > > John Romkey was our lead on this and one day he and I (and I think Dave > Bridgham) gathered with John G. and others at the Little Garden Chinese > Restaurant in Palo Alto to figure out what to do. I was essentially an > observer. > > I'm not sure who funded what - Epilogue might have contributed some $$, > but if we did it probably was not a lot. I think all of the money came > out of our own pockets, mostly Gilmore's. My company didn't really have > offices - many of us wee working out of our homes - and Romkey already > had a garage filled with Telebit modems and machines running usenet > stuff - I I don't remember the details except that it was a lot of > machines and wires and clearly something that grew ad hoc rather than > from a plan. I do remember the Pacific Bell telco people being amazed > at how many phone circuits were going into one house. > > Romkey's place was up on the hill in Belmont, my place was down at the > bottom of the hill, so all of our company networking went via Romkey's > garage. (I also got some net access courtesy John Rushby and his > Foonley Four machine at SRI [Rushby and I had worked together on > security stuff at SDC and at RSRE in Great Malvern in the UK.]) > > I was never very clear about how we were wired to the Little Garden or > for how long. > > Romkey got Postel to assign "aslyum.sf.ca.us" as a domain name for his > garage in Belmont, California. Eventually John moved it all back to > Boston - but still keeping the asylum.sf.ca.us domain name - and thus > being one of the first to break the idea of geographic allocation of > host and domain names. > > --karl-- > > > On 5/10/26 6:14 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > > On 5/10/2026 5:49 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > >> The regional networks were > >> partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting > >> over a > >> 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > >> CERFNET were commercial operators... > > > > > > As an outside observer, I feel compelled to ask where The Little > > Garden fits into the funding model? > > > > d/ > > > > ps. As an inside participant, I feel compelled to note the the NSFNet > > funding/transition model was first tested 3 years earlier, with CSNet... > > > > > > d/ > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From vint at google.com Mon May 11 02:56:25 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 05:56:25 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: I think that is wrong, Miles. We used the Defense Communications Agency to order dedicated circuits to connect to Arpanet. V On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 10:42?PM Miles Fidelman < mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com> wrote: > I seem to recall that researchers were getting line items to pay for > leased lines & such - and that ARPA pretty much said "now you're going to > spend that on ARPANET connections - and that a primary driver of the net > was to save ARPA some coin on telecom bills. > > Or do I have that wrong? > > Miles > > Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. > Get Outlook for Android > ------------------------------ > *From:* Vint Cerf > *Sent:* Sunday, May 10, 2026 8:49:20 PM > *To:* Miles Fidelman > *Cc:* internet-history at elists.isoc.org > *Subject:* Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened > to the public in 1992." > > Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - > funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to > develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development > initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet > Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI > and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. > ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to > the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect > commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI. > > v > > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > Re. "give away:" > > > 1. > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > went into the public domain. > 2. > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > 3. > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened > to the public in 1992. > > Miles > > > ________________________________ > From: Internet-history on > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > government. Lots of anger. > > Is it so different now? > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > So, ... is it so different today? > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > /Jack Haverty > > > It seems to me that today's > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious to > me for a decade or more.) > >> > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > --gregbo > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > -- > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > Vint Cerf > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > McLean, VA 22102 > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > Google, LLC > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > Reston, VA 20190 > +1 650-224-2788 <(650)%20224-2788> > > > > > > > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 03:46:19 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 06:46:19 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings between the 9 month major meetings. The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the large US delegations to the meetings. Take care, John Day > On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi - > > I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 > million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government > efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? > > Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to > number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any > similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches > and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. > > With best regards, > > Carl > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jaap at NLnetLabs.nl Mon May 11 05:29:09 2026 From: jaap at NLnetLabs.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:29:09 +0200 Subject: [ih] Pre-1997 TLD manager records In-Reply-To: References: <8b1def01-d885-4265-89cd-66f3835e780b@channelisles.net> <3149f455-598b-477e-ab2b-6973a697e950@channelisles.net> <16428.1778200901@hop.toad.com> <202605091022.649AMX3g087171@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Message-ID: <202605111229.64BCT9Ou011564@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Greg Skinner writes: > While you're looking for that document, I thought some people > on the list might be interested in the NL Domain Registry System > document, which I found while poking around for more information. > Note that NL was delegated 10 years before the registry (and web.archive.org) were created. I found the the toolkit. it was compiled by Doug Kingston, while on sabbatical at the cwi. It is a shell archive of 1300 lines and seems to incorporate and the RFC 920, some examples and the template John Gilmore used. I'm not sure whther it is worth posting. jaap From york at isoc.org Mon May 11 05:51:18 2026 From: york at isoc.org (Dan York) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 12:51:18 +0000 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? Message-ID: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> Hi! Something random and low priority? does anyone know of maps or lists of early UUCP nodes, particularly in the Boston area? Recently I was explaining to someone about bang-path addressing for messages and I was trying to remember the UUCP address I was giving people back in the day. I remember it was ?mit!mv!srbci!ldy?. I think maybe it was ?mitvax?? (I was part of a small consulting company in southern New Hampshire in the early 1990s that was connected to ?MV Communications? that was in turn connected, I think, to a node at MIT.) I spent a while searching the web and even plunging into the comp.mail.maps archive in Google Groups? and couldn?t find anything readily available today. I mostly found various messages pointing to sites that are no longer around (or found sites with links to sites that are gone). Anyway? just curious if anyone knows of such a map or list purely so I can fill in a mental hole in my memory. ? (Of which there seem to be more as time goes on..) Thanks, Dan -- Dan York, Senior Director, Online Trust & Safety | Internet Society york at isoc.org | +1-603-439-0024 | https://mastodon.social/@danyork internetsociety.org | @internetsociety From carl at media.org Mon May 11 07:29:25 2026 From: carl at media.org (Carl Malamud) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 19:59:25 +0530 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hmm. Amazing. OTOH, there are apparently minutes for every meeting that ISO does, but of course, the organization doesn't make anything secret and proprietary like that available to the public (though there is a handbook for committee chairs that includes directions on how to do things like the agenda and minutes ... https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100415.pdf ). Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of meetings. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 4:16?PM John Day wrote: > That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main > committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In > the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. > Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants > in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major > international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings > between the 9 month major meetings. > > The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there > were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially > true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM > stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee, > because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. > > I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were > participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the > large US delegations to the meetings. > > Take care, > John Day > > > > > On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > Hi - > > > > I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 > > million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government > > efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? > > > > Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to > > number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any > > similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches > > and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. > > > > With best regards, > > > > Carl > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > From jaap at NLnetLabs.nl Mon May 11 07:42:48 2026 From: jaap at NLnetLabs.nl (Jaap Akkerhuis) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:42:48 +0200 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> Message-ID: <202605111442.64BEgm72000670@bela.nlnetlabs.nl> Dan York via Internet-history writes: > Hi! Something random and low priority? does anyone know of maps or lists of early UUCP nodes, particularly in the Boston area? a couple of years ago i ran into Brian Reid. He mentioned he had still all maps and hinted that they were available if one asked. jaap From craig at tereschau.net Mon May 11 07:48:16 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 08:48:16 -0600 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) language skills. Craig On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA > request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting > minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of > meetings. > > -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From aam3sendonly at gmail.com Mon May 11 08:54:16 2026 From: aam3sendonly at gmail.com (Alexander McKenzie) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 11:54:16 -0400 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those implementations, carried the day. Cheers, Alex *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> *To:* Carl Malamud *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) language skills. Craig On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA > request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting > minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of > meetings. > > -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 11 09:07:06 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 09:07:06 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation hours": How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:54?AM Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US > Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport > Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the > Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in > committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings > were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers > based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of > this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a > "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a > protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. > However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the > good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by > people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented > Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. > Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations > by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those > implementations, carried the day. > > Cheers, > Alex > > *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > *To:* Carl Malamud > *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history > *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT > *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including > Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on > CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to > meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) > language skills. > > Craig > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a > FOIA > > request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of > meeting > > minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number > of > > meetings. > > > > > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From agmalis at gmail.com Mon May 11 10:12:56 2026 From: agmalis at gmail.com (Andrew G. Malis) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 13:12:56 -0400 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: In addition to the work on the OSI standards, NIST and the DoD also worked on the GOSIP profile, which was used to guide US procurements. Given GOSIP's existence, there were probably software and/or hardware procurements at the time as well. Cheers, Andy On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:54?AM Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US > Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport > Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the > Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in > committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings > were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers > based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of > this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a > "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a > protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. > However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the > good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by > people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented > Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. > Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations > by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those > implementations, carried the day. > > Cheers, > Alex > > *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > *To:* Carl Malamud > *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history > *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT > *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including > Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on > CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to > meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) > language skills. > > Craig > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a > FOIA > > request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of > meeting > > minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number > of > > meetings. > > > > > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From johnl at iecc.com Mon May 11 10:41:52 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 11 May 2026 13:41:52 -0400 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> Message-ID: <20260511174153.85101109649B8@ary.qy> It appears that Dan York via Internet-history said: >Hi! Something random and low priority? does anyone know of maps or lists of early UUCP nodes, particularly in the Boston area? Here's the map postings from the early 1980s. I remember mv but I didn't see it in these lists: https://groups.google.com/g/net.news.map/ R's, cca!ima!johnl or johnl at ima.UUCP From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Mon May 11 11:06:16 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 11:06:16 -0700 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> Message-ID: <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> On May 11, 2026, at 5:51?AM, Dan York via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi! Something random and low priority? does anyone know of maps or lists of early UUCP nodes, particularly in the Boston area? > > Recently I was explaining to someone about bang-path addressing for messages and I was trying to remember the UUCP address I was giving people back in the day. > I remember it was ?mit!mv!srbci!ldy?. I think maybe it was ?mitvax?? (I was part of a small consulting company in southern New Hampshire in the early 1990s that was connected to ?MV Communications? that was in turn connected, I think, to a node at MIT.) > > I spent a while searching the web and even plunging into the comp.mail.maps archive in Google Groups? and couldn?t find anything readily available today. I mostly found various messages pointing to sites that are no longer around (or found sites with links to sites that are gone). > > Anyway? just curious if anyone knows of such a map or list purely so I can fill in a mental hole in my memory. ? (Of which there seem to be more as time goes on..) > > Thanks, > Dan > > -- > Dan York, Senior Director, Online Trust & Safety | Internet Society > york at isoc.org | +1-603-439-0024 | https://mastodon.social/@danyork > internetsociety.org | @internetsociety > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history I was able to find several entries for ?srbci? with the Google Groups query https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=srbci. From the looks of several of these entries, such as the following, ?mv? was a UUCP neighbor of ?srbci?. #N .mv.com, mv #O MV Communications #C Mark E. Mallett #E m... at mv.MV.COM #T 603 429 2223 #P P.O. Box 4963, Manchester NH; 03108-4963 #L 42 56 N / 71 26 W City #R #R mv.MV.COM is an Internet hub providing mail, news, and other #R services for the southern NH / northern MA area on a (low!) #R fee basis. It is also the gateway for the .MV.COM "domain park", #R a registered domain covering small sites and independant businesses #R in this area. #R #R Inquiries welcome: mail to in... at mv.mv.com or call 603 429 2223. #R #U critz decvax eci pulsar rr siia summa4 verbal1 zinn #W m... at mv.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett); Sun Oct 27 16:07:18 EDT 1991 # # Domain gateways: # mv .mv.com(LOCAL) # # Full domain alias: mv= mv.mv.com # # Outgoing calls: mv decvax(DIRECT+HIGH), ditka(EVENING+FAST), harvard(EVENING+FAST), jjmhome(EVENING) # # Incoming calls: mv balrog(DAILY), contek(POLLED), (DIRECT+FAST), ctedge(DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), lemuria(DIRECT+FAST), (DIRECT), midnight(DAILY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DAILY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY/2), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (EVENING+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT) # # Misc reverse definitions: harvard mv(EVENING) decvax mv(DIRECT+HIGH) 'mit-vax' could have been an undocumented UUCP neighbor of ?mv?. It appears on USENET maps from the 1980s available by issuing a similar Google Groups query in net.news.map. Mark Plotnick is listed as the site admin on several entries. I recall he did some Chaosnet work while he was at MIT. --gregbo From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 11:08:34 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:08:34 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4796CCF0-2272-4631-9266-2870784100D8@comcast.net> All minutes and attendance list would be in the documents related to US ANSC groups, kept by what is now INCITS. International meetings of SCs and WGs would be with either ANSI or country that supported the WG, BSI, AFNOR, ANSI, etc. However, all of those were thrown out years ago. I tried to get ANSI to send them to CBI rather than throw them out, but there were all sorts of reasons not too. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 10:29, Carl Malamud wrote: > > Hmm. Amazing. > > OTOH, there are apparently minutes for every meeting that ISO does, but of course, the organization doesn't make anything secret and proprietary like that available to the public (though there is a handbook for committee chairs that includes directions on how to do things like the agenda and minutes ... https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100415.pdf ). > > Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of meetings. > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 4:16?PM John Day > wrote: >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings between the 9 month major meetings. >> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. >> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the large US delegations to the meetings. >> >> Take care, >> John Day >> >> >> >> > On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history > wrote: >> > >> > Hi - >> > >> > I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 >> > million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government >> > efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? >> > >> > Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to >> > number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any >> > similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches >> > and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. >> > >> > With best regards, >> > >> > Carl >> > -- >> > Internet-history mailing list >> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> > - >> > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 11:13:55 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:13:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Ross worked in the Network Layer group which was in a different US committee and ISO committee. Most of the work on ASN.1 was done by Bancroft Scott, but of course there was a committee working on it. That was after the Brits made a mess of it. The less said about X.400 the better. I have no idea why they would have been boning up on their French. All meetings were conducted in English. There were some NIST participants, but they were a small fraction of the total. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 10:48, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote: > > For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including > Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on > CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to > meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) > language skills. > > Craig > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA >> request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting >> minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of >> meetings. >> >> > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 11:23:26 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:23:26 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <11AF55B6-A8BC-4ADA-86BA-379FA14B74CC@comcast.net> > On May 11, 2026, at 11:54, Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history wrote: > > Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US > Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport > Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the > Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in > committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings > were roughly every 3 months. Speaking of VTP, I had that group working on an enhanced version of Telnet developed by INWG until DEC stepped in screwed it all up taking it back to pedestrian stupidity. But what would you expect? > Between meetings we developed position papers > based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of > this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a > "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a > protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. Was that the one for ESTELLE done by Richard Tenney also of BBN at the time. There was a similar code generator develop for the other OSI standard formal description technique, called LOTOS, by the Dutch. ESTELLE and LOTOS were the two developed by ISO. It was possible with both to prove several properties of protocols like progress, no deadlocks, etc. Of course course, CCITT had to have their own called SDL which was less formal. LOTOS was used to prove correctness of the later application protocols like Transaction Processing while they were being developed and provided many corrections. Take care, John > However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the > good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by > people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented > Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. > Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations > by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those > implementations, carried the day. > > Cheers, > Alex > > *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > *To:* Carl Malamud > *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history > *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT > *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including > Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on > CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to > meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) > language skills. > > Craig > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA >> request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting >> minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of >> meetings. >> >> > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 11:24:19 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:24:19 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <24214946-C959-40F1-9424-A29E322554A1@comcast.net> Quite a large number. Equally unmeasurable. > On May 11, 2026, at 12:07, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > > "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on > the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation hours": > > How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting > networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:54?AM Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US >> Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport >> Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the >> Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in >> committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings >> were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers >> based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of >> this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a >> "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a >> protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. >> However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the >> good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by >> people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented >> Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. >> Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations >> by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those >> implementations, carried the day. >> >> Cheers, >> Alex >> >> *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> >> *To:* Carl Malamud >> *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history >> *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT >> *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI >> >> For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including >> Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on >> CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to >> meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) >> language skills. >> >> Craig >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a >> FOIA >>> request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of >> meeting >>> minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number >> of >>> meetings. >>> >>> >> >> -- >> ***** >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and >> mailing lists. >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 11:30:05 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:30:05 -0400 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> Message-ID: FWIW, OSI began work on security in the early 80s, probably 1982. (OSI started in 1978). The first step would have been to do a security architecture to lay out what standards were necessary. Seeing the need, I pulled together 3 or 4 US experts and ask them to begin work on the problem. That of course attracted participation from other companies. Other security standards were developed based on that or hooks for security in other protocols. For example, the standard for creating application connections had a plug-in for authentication. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 00:31, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > ... >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From craig at tereschau.net Mon May 11 11:33:25 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 12:33:25 -0600 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on > the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation > hours": > > How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting > networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. > > I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think of it as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the code. I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, implementing a new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester project for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance of your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC 869] and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex than TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy (I think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is that ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number of operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces over challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, he'd likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides illustrating how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific demanding links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a network under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, which we did not have at the time). Craig *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in the networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the socket API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and fit it into their OS. -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From craig at tereschau.net Mon May 11 11:39:14 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 12:39:14 -0600 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 12:13?PM John Day wrote: > > Most of the work on ASN.1 was done by Bancroft Scott, but of course there > was a committee working on it. > That was after the Brits made a mess of it. > Um, the ASN.1 BER design was entirely done by BBNers. (Deutsch, Resnik, Vittal, BBN report 4466 of 1980). -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From york at isoc.org Mon May 11 12:52:09 2026 From: york at isoc.org (Dan York) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 19:52:09 +0000 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> Message-ID: <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> Greg, Thanks for the detective work! Comments inline? On May 11, 2026, at 2:06?PM, Greg Skinner wrote: I was able to find several entries for ?srbci? with the Google Groups query https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=srbci. ???? Brilliant! Of course that would be a logical way to search! From the looks of several of these entries, such as the following, ?mv? was a UUCP neighbor of ?srbci?. Yes, my recollection is that it was our *only* neighbor. Everything we sent/received went through mv. This part? # Outgoing calls: mv decvax(DIRECT+HIGH), ditka(EVENING+FAST), harvard(EVENING+FAST), jjmhome(EVENING) # # Incoming calls: mv balrog(DAILY), contek(POLLED), (DIRECT+FAST), ctedge(DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), lemuria(DIRECT+FAST), (DIRECT), midnight(DAILY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DAILY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY/2), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (EVENING+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT) # # Misc reverse definitions: harvard mv(EVENING) decvax mv(DIRECT+HIGH) ? makes me think that perhaps my memory of the ?mit? part of the bang-path may be faulty. I might have had the ?vax? part right but the owner wrong. Perhaps the address was ?decvax!mv!srbci!ldy?. 'mit-vax' could have been an undocumented UUCP neighbor of ?mv?. It appears on USENET maps from the 1980s available by issuing a similar Google Groups query in net.news.map. It could have been. It also could be a complete fabrication of my brain 30+ years later. This conversation also reminds me that what I really should is simply reach out to Mark Mallett, who used to run MV Communications, and ask him! ?I do have some contact info for him. Many thanks, Greg! Dan From steve at shinkuro.com Mon May 11 12:52:45 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 03:52:45 +0800 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: Let me emphasize Vint's point regarding funding of the Arpanet. The government paid for every line and every IMP. Several sites were eager to join the Arpanet and willing to pay for it, but we lacked a mechanism to accommodate their requests. I vividly remember answering the phone late one day. A professor at a major university doing solid work on a topic we were interested in was eager to connect his site to the Arpanet and said he had the funds to pay for it. If I had the power, I would have approved it immediately. Alas, I had to say no. My boss, Larry Roberts, spent time and energy finding a way for others to pay to join the Arpanet. He became aware that NASA had found a way for non-government organizations to pay to include scientific experiments on some launches. The relevant contracting office was at Patrick AFB in Florida. When it came time to renew the IMP contract with BBN, he moved the contract to Patrick AFB, hoping they would find a similar way for the Arpanet. This was unsuccessful. Patrick turned out to be a suboptimal location for the IMP contract, and the contract was moved back to the original contracting shop, DSS-W if I remember correctly. The above had an interesting side effect. Steve Walker was at NSA during this period. He fought an internal battle regarding their proposed COINS network. The group in charge wanted to design and build its own routers. He argued that NSA should simply buy IMPs. He won the argument but was frozen out of the project. Frustrated at NSA, he looked around for alternatives. He called me for advice regarding moving to Patrick AFB, which seemed to be the center of activity. I advised him we were pulling the contract from Patrick, but that if he sought an alternative, we could use some help... Steve On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 5:56?PM Vint Cerf via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I think that is wrong, Miles. We used the Defense Communications Agency to > order dedicated circuits to connect to Arpanet. > > V > > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 10:42?PM Miles Fidelman < > mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com> wrote: > > > I seem to recall that researchers were getting line items to pay for > > leased lines & such - and that ARPA pretty much said "now you're going to > > spend that on ARPANET connections - and that a primary driver of the net > > was to save ARPA some coin on telecom bills. > > > > Or do I have that wrong? > > > > Miles > > > > Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. > > Get Outlook for Android > > ------------------------------ > > *From:* Vint Cerf > > *Sent:* Sunday, May 10, 2026 8:49:20 PM > > *To:* Miles Fidelman > > *Cc:* internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > *Subject:* Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > > > "From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was > opened > > to the public in 1992." > > > > Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA - > > funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs > to > > develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development > > initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet > > Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, > MCI > > and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA. > > ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were > > partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting > over a > > 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and > > CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect > to > > the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect > > commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by > CNRI. > > > > v > > > > > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10?PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > Re. "give away:" > > > > > > 1. > > Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP > > went into the public domain. > > 2. > > The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry. Between > > war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid > for > > infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own. > > (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.) > > 3. > > From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from > > revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase > > telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started > > accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was > opened > > to the public in 1992. > > > > Miles > > > > > > ________________________________ > > From: Internet-history on > > behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > > Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM > > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: > > Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) > > > > There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s. That was the era of > > the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State. > > Lots of pushback especially from young folks. Even the resignation of a > > POTUS, under threat of removal from office. Lots of distrust of > > government. Lots of anger. > > > > Is it so different now? > > > > But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s. > > The USG did not "give away" the Internet. The Internet (and previously > > the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment. That followed the > > charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency. Research > > produces ideas. Experiments build prototypes to test theories. > > Research produces knowledge. Freely sharing that knowledge would be > > beneficial to the "real systems" that followed. Artifacts, such as > > protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete > > items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future. > > > > The "real system" was expected to be OSI. Of course that didn't > > happen. But it was The Plan. Even the USG had a program called GOSIP > > (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG. As > > long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had > > no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant > > objections. It might even help OSI development. OSI was the target. > > > > Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to > > both The Internet and the OSI promises. In the "multiprotocol router" > > stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were > > produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the > > winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and > > all the others would just fade away. Most of them had some ambition of > > global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN". > > But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was > > available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive > > infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP. Its adoption by the USG > > established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper. > > > > It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The > > Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for > > electronic mail service. So lots of corporations did just that. The > > IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product > > architecture. A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, > > becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet. > > > > So, ... is it so different today? > > > > The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP > > and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard. > > > > But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media > > live, on top of The Internet. I see lots of corporations creating > > competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the > > winner and become the infrastructure of the future. Even electronic > > mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate. > > > > But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any > > ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for > > others to use. Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and > > outside their scope? Perhaps such research organizations exist, other > > than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard > > enough. There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users > > to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner. > > > > Is that an "attitude of society"? > > > > /Jack Haverty > > > > > > It seems to me that today's > > > > On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13?AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the > > Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who > > where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any > reflections > > on the attitudes of the societies at the time. For instance, kc claffy > > once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that > > led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite > all > > the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than > > lock it into any particular corporate ownership. I know there is another > > thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm > asking > > for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in > > your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that > > the USG could give such a technology away as they did? I find it > > impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization > either > > public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term > > financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits. (And, > > to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe > at > > the current USG or any people in charge of it. This has seemed obvious > to > > me for a decade or more.) > > >> > > > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of > TCP/IP > > became available via open source due to Linux. > > > > > > --gregbo > > > > > > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ > > > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > > > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > > > > -- > > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > > Vint Cerf > > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > > McLean, VA 22102 > > > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > > Google, LLC > > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > > Reston, VA 20190 > > +1 650-224-2788 <(650)%20224-2788> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > Vint Cerf > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > McLean, VA 22102 > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > Google, LLC > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > Reston, VA 20190 > +1 650-224-2788 > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 11 13:23:30 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 13:23:30 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > hours spent running the network OK, I'll see that, and raise you one: "hours spent running the network and feeding that experience back into the code." that's what OSI was lacking. It wasn't "elegant design." On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:33?AM Craig Partridge wrote: > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on >> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation >> hours": >> >> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting >> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. >> >> > I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think of it > as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the code. > > I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, implementing a > new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester project > for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance of > your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC 869] > and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex than > TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy (I > think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is that > ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith > Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. > > By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number of > operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol > implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours > drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. > First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered > probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a > race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP > round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces over > challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, he'd > likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides illustrating > how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific demanding > links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a network > under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, which we > did not have at the time). > > Craig > > *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in the > networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the socket > API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 > interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still > manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and fit > it into their OS. > > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 13:34:59 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:34:59 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <68E41482-E5EB-41A2-AAB8-E0968A8333C8@comcast.net> Yes, John Larmouth of the UK had left the basic ASN.1 syntax a total mess. Uncompilable. First that had to be straightened out. But what proved to be much more important was PER, which was much more compact (compressing it often got larger) and less processing overhead. The purists liked BER. Today there are 10s of encoding rules for ASN.1. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 14:39, Craig Partridge wrote: > > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 12:13?PM John Day > wrote: >> >> Most of the work on ASN.1 was done by Bancroft Scott, but of course there was a committee working on it. >> That was after the Brits made a mess of it. > > Um, the ASN.1 BER design was entirely done by BBNers. (Deutsch, Resnik, Vittal, BBN report 4466 of 1980). > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 13:41:28 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:41:28 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7D6217F2-F0E7-4FFE-BDD5-F98C5219115F@comcast.net> You know that is really where the disconnect occurred. At the time, (the 80s) there was no market for something like the Internet. US corporations were focused on where the market was, which was corporate networks. A market for something like the Internet was definitely coming as we all knew. It was probably accelerated by at least a decade if not more by the advent of the Web. You want to play raise one games? How about how much has the Internet caused its users by never being productized in terms of ransomware, phishing, web scams, cyberattacks, etc. You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the real problems. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 16:23, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > >> hours spent running the network > > OK, I'll see that, and raise you one: > > "hours spent running the network and feeding that experience back into the > code." > > that's what OSI was lacking. It wasn't "elegant design." > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:33?AM Craig Partridge > wrote: > >> >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on >>> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation >>> hours": >>> >>> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting >>> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. >>> >>> >> I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think of it >> as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the code. >> >> I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, implementing a >> new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester project >> for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance of >> your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC 869] >> and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex than >> TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy (I >> think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is that >> ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith >> Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. >> >> By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number of >> operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol >> implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours >> drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. >> First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered >> probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a >> race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP >> round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces over >> challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, he'd >> likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides illustrating >> how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific demanding >> links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a network >> under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, which we >> did not have at the time). >> >> Craig >> >> *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in the >> networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the socket >> API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 >> interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still >> manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and fit >> it into their OS. >> >> >> -- >> ***** >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and >> mailing lists. >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From karl at iwl.com Mon May 11 13:43:52 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 13:43:52 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I don't think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented things. ? ? ? ? --karl-- On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings between the 9 month major meetings. > > The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. > > I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the large US delegations to the meetings. > > Take care, > John Day > > > >> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Hi - >> >> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 >> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government >> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? >> >> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to >> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any >> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches >> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. >> >> With best regards, >> >> Carl >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 11 13:52:07 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 13:52:07 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <7D6217F2-F0E7-4FFE-BDD5-F98C5219115F@comcast.net> References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> <7D6217F2-F0E7-4FFE-BDD5-F98C5219115F@comcast.net> Message-ID: > You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the real problems. I thought we were discussing what happened with OSI. What, now you don't want to talk about that? There's plenty to discuss about what's wrong today. However, this group has "history" in its name. Maybe it isn't the right forum for your issues. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 1:41?PM John Day wrote: > You know that is really where the disconnect occurred. > At the time, (the 80s) there was no market for something like the > Internet. US corporations were focused on where the market was, which was > corporate networks. > > A market for something like the Internet was definitely coming as we all > knew. It was probably accelerated by at least a decade if not more by the > advent of the Web. > > You want to play raise one games? How about how much has the Internet > caused its users by never being productized in terms of ransomware, > phishing, web scams, cyberattacks, etc. > > You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the > real problems. > > Take care, > John > > > On May 11, 2026, at 16:23, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> hours spent running the network > > > > OK, I'll see that, and raise you one: > > > > "hours spent running the network and feeding that experience back into > the > > code." > > > > that's what OSI was lacking. It wasn't "elegant design." > > > > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:33?AM Craig Partridge > > wrote: > > > >> > >> > >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < > >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> > >>> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses > on > >>> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation > >>> hours": > >>> > >>> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and > getting > >>> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. > >>> > >>> > >> I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think of > it > >> as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the > code. > >> > >> I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, implementing > a > >> new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester > project > >> for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance of > >> your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC > 869] > >> and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex > than > >> TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy > (I > >> think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is > that > >> ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith > >> Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. > >> > >> By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number of > >> operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol > >> implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours > >> drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. > >> First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered > >> probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a > >> race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP > >> round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces > over > >> challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, > he'd > >> likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides > illustrating > >> how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific > demanding > >> links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a > network > >> under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, > which we > >> did not have at the time). > >> > >> Craig > >> > >> *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in > the > >> networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the > socket > >> API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 > >> interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still > >> manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and > fit > >> it into their OS. > >> > >> > >> -- > >> ***** > >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > >> mailing lists. > >> > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > From karl at iwl.com Mon May 11 14:00:19 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:00:19 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3a2fefd6-e5e7-4a32-bf8c-313ff28037d1@iwl.com> On 5/11/26 9:07 AM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting > networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. I spent far too many hours trying to implement X.400 (beginning with ASN.1/BER).? Much of that time involved pounding on desks and screaming "What the F!!! does this text - xxxx, yyyy, zzzz - mean?? Why are they doing this? This has no limits!! Will anyone ever use this part? !!!!!!" The implementation was no harder than doing something hard - like IPv4 reassembly of fragments [I've got some test code that will knock out - sometimes even crash - pretty much any present day instance of IPv4 reassembly - fortunately most of those cases, although RFC legit, essentially never occur in practice - but they could if sent by an hostile peer or done by a hostile man-in-the-middle.] But many more hours were spent trying to figure out what the standards meant.? And there was really no one to ask for clarifications or insights.? And there were few peer implementations one could test against. Overall, implementing OSI stuff was at least an order of magnitude (probably more than a single order) more time consuming than for TCP/IP. At least I was able to recoup some of that time investment when I did SNMP clients and servers. From my implementer's point of view, ISO/OSI pointed an automatic weapon at its own feet and opened fire.? There were good ides in ISO/OSI but their proponents buried them under mountains of dross verbiage, nary a paragraph of which bothered to explain they why's and how's.? The death of ISO/OSI was essentially self inflicted. ? ? ? ? --karl-- From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Mon May 11 14:09:38 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:09:38 -0700 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> Message-ID: <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > ... >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much more than cryptography, of course)? > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was gone by then. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann , who was mentioned earlier in this thread. When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and services, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 --gregbo From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 11 14:22:22 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 09:22:22 +1200 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on SNA/OSI integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, I'm sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent both marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have no idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is probably the gigadollar. The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also spent large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much less money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 and the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite a small fraction of the real total cost. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. > > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I don't > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented things. > > ? ? ? ? --karl-- > > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings between the 9 month major meetings. >> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. >> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the large US delegations to the meetings. >> >> Take care, >> John Day >> >> >> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: >>> >>> Hi - >>> >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? >>> >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine lunches >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. >>> >>> With best regards, >>> >>> Carl >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From pugs78 at gmail.com Mon May 11 14:43:10 2026 From: pugs78 at gmail.com (Tom Lyon) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 14:43:10 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore? It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with IEEE 802.4. Sun announced such a product there. Don't know if we ever sold any, but it got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists. https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/ On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that > thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on SNA/OSI > integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research > Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) > invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, I'm > sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent both > marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, > UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who > thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was > largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it > certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have no > idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is probably > the gigadollar. > > The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also spent > large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much less > money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 and > the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. > > Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite a > small fraction of the real total cost. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: > > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the > > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. > > > > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I don't > > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented things. > > > > --karl-- > > > > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main > committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In > the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. > Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants > in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major > international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings > between the 9 month major meetings. > >> > >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, > there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was > especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get > around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO > committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. > >> > >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were > participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the > large US delegations to the meetings. > >> > >> Take care, > >> John Day > >> > >> > >> > >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>> > >>> Hi - > >>> > >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 > >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US > government > >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? > >>> > >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to > >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any > >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine > lunches > >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. > >>> > >>> With best regards, > >>> > >>> Carl > >>> -- > >>> Internet-history mailing list > >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>> - > >>> Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 11 15:46:00 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 15:46:00 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <3a2fefd6-e5e7-4a32-bf8c-313ff28037d1@iwl.com> References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> <3a2fefd6-e5e7-4a32-bf8c-313ff28037d1@iwl.com> Message-ID: My own experience with X.400: I'm chagrined to note that I was at 3Com, still believing it was The Future in 1989. So was Eric Benhamou, our division VP (at the time). He hired Telesystemes Reseaux in Paris to work on it for us. We sent them detailed specs, and I even went to Paris once. Jim White, was the Special Rapporteur for it, hired me in 1985, then left to start a consulting firm for it. The project eventually failed, with mutual finger-pointing. It was an insanely complicated spec, as you said, and the amazing thing was that it remained The Future as long as it did. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:00?PM Karl Auerbach wrote: > On 5/11/26 9:07 AM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > > > How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting > > networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. > > I spent far too many hours trying to implement X.400 (beginning with > ASN.1/BER). Much of that time involved pounding on desks and screaming > "What the F!!! does this text - xxxx, yyyy, zzzz - mean? Why are they > doing this? This has no limits!! Will anyone ever use this part? !!!!!!" > > The implementation was no harder than doing something hard - like IPv4 > reassembly of fragments [I've got some test code that will knock out - > sometimes even crash - pretty much any present day instance of IPv4 > reassembly - fortunately most of those cases, although RFC legit, > essentially never occur in practice - but they could if sent by an > hostile peer or done by a hostile man-in-the-middle.] > > But many more hours were spent trying to figure out what the standards > meant. And there was really no one to ask for clarifications or > insights. And there were few peer implementations one could test against. > > Overall, implementing OSI stuff was at least an order of magnitude > (probably more than a single order) more time consuming than for TCP/IP. > > At least I was able to recoup some of that time investment when I did > SNMP clients and servers. > > From my implementer's point of view, ISO/OSI pointed an automatic > weapon at its own feet and opened fire. There were good ides in ISO/OSI > but their proponents buried them under mountains of dross verbiage, nary > a paragraph of which bothered to explain they why's and how's. The > death of ISO/OSI was essentially self inflicted. > > --karl-- > > > From mgrant at grant.org Mon May 11 16:33:31 2026 From: mgrant at grant.org (Michael Grant) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 23:33:31 +0000 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hey The Event, I was heavily involved in that! I worked at COS then. I build and ran the testing lab at COS where all the vendors came in and set up their stuff. I also did a lot of conformance testing of OSI back then. Spent a lot of time in front of data scopes reading tcpdump like traces to figure out why things couldn't communicate. It was often an addressing issue. To learn the protocol stack, I made myself a set of protocol cheat sheets that looked like the ascii diagrams in the RFCs. I gave copies to a bunch of people but was eventually told I couldn't distribute them because they contained potentially copyrighted material from the CCITT books. Not sure I still have those files around any more. We, the tech folks, wanted, needed badly to get on the internet back then. We ended up first mostly communicating using uucp to some of the vendors others, it was fax. The management forbade us to get a ppp dialup line for several years. It was laughable that we used uucp and couldn't get x.400 working and I tried hard. Marshall Rose gave me a set of ISODE tapes which I spent days and days trying to get something talking to something outside of COS. If I recall, the issue was not exactly ISODE but everything else around it. There was simply no OSI Internet. You couldn't just get an X.25 connection and be on the OSI net. Nobody sold CLNP but you could do it over ethernet. Nobody in that time period ever imagined a telco dropping in a 10mbps ethernet port and giving you pure CLNP, anything outside your own premise was to be X.25 or maybe ISDN. On the application side, I don't recall, I don't think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't remember. Sun's X.400 definitely talked to sendmail though and from memory, I had ISODE X.400 talking to Sun's X.400 but it was very much in a lab playground. There was no authority to assign you a real globally unique X.400 mail address, we simply made it up. There was no way to route a message. There literally were no hostnames in OSI like in TCP/IP! Then there were no less than 5 different variants of transport named TP0 to TP4. Basically you ran TP0 over X.25 and TP4 over CLNP. Nobody could tell me what happened if you had one end on TP0 and another on TP4! Somehow X.500 was going to save the day and there would be some sort of application layer gateway somewhere! Literally we had a building (well, a couple floors of a building) filled with some of the most clued up people on OSI and I talked to everyone and nobody had good answers for the most basic questions of how this stuff was really supposed to work. It was just a job. They were just doing stuff because they were told to by higher ups. Nobody I worked with at COS at the technical level believed this stuff was actually going to go prime-time and everyone would be using it. Anyway, yeah, The Event, that was a load of fun. That was possibly the only time in the history of OSI that there was a small diverse group of vendors equipment that actually talked to each other. After it disbanded, everyone went home. There was never any way even anyone at COS could use any of the stuff to communicate with anyone. We couldn't even send an x.400 message to anyone after that. After The Event, it was pretty much down hill. I talked to people internally at COS to see if we could do something like Interop but there was no money, no desire to do it. We sold a bunch of these super expensive OSI testers that ran on Sun hardware and basically even if you passed the test suite, you still wouldn't be able to talk to another implementation without a stupid amount of config such that there really was no way ever to build an internet with this stuff. Then the vendors started pulling out of the consortium and then layoffs started. I left COS for Sun and worked on federal bid & proposals for a couple years where we saw the check-box requirement over and over from the US Gov't and it was my job to tick those boxes with Sun's OSI implementation. There, I met the folks at Sun France and they hired me away from Sun Fed and I moved to Grenoble France where I could have worked on Sun's OSI stack but by then, it was gathering dust and I ended up working on SNMP and LDAP. I recall that Sun didn't even make its own OSI stack, much of it was outsourced to some French company. I looked at it a bit but the source was fairly impenetrable. Nothing was well integrated into SunOS. Very messy. It was quite clear there was no internal commitment to do this right. Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to make it work. Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked. Nobody around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more companies were getting hooked in. Once you had a ppp connection, a domain name, and started getting e-mail (if you hadn't already been getting mail over uucp), you had not one iota of need or desire to get x.400 working, nor anything else in that stack for that matter. X.500 morphed into LDAP and that morphed into Microsoft Active Directory though LDAP still exists though I don't really know why people use it. I had wondered for a long time why LDAP hadn't become some sort of Internet like telephone directory. It would have been a nice place to store things like PGP keys in but it never really took off on a global scale. No one ever published their contact details publicly in LDAP. Clearly this would have been a spammers dream to be able to just look up everyone's address. Aside from LDAP, I have run across things using ASN.1. I don't off hand know if anything more than those subsets of OSI are still in use today. ------ Original Message ------ >From "Tom Lyon via Internet-history" To "Brian E Carpenter" Cc internet-history at elists.isoc.org Date 11/05/2026 22:43:10 Subject Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI >Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore? >It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with IEEE >802.4. >Sun announced such a product there. Don't know if we ever sold any, but it >got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists. > >https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/ > >On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that >> thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on SNA/OSI >> integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research >> Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) >> invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, I'm >> sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent both >> marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, >> UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who >> thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was >> largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it >> certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have no >> idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is probably >> the gigadollar. >> >> The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also spent >> large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much less >> money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 and >> the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. >> >> Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite a >> small fraction of the real total cost. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: >> > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the >> > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. >> > >> > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I don't >> > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented things. >> > >> > --karl-- >> > >> > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main >> committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In >> the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. >> Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants >> in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major >> international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings >> between the 9 month major meetings. >> >> >> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, >> there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was >> especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get >> around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO >> committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. >> >> >> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were >> participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the >> large US delegations to the meetings. >> >> >> >> Take care, >> >> John Day >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> >> >>> Hi - >> >>> >> >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 >> >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US >> government >> >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? >> >>> >> >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to >> >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any >> >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine >> lunches >> >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. >> >>> >> >>> With best regards, >> >>> >> >>> Carl >> >>> -- >> >>> Internet-history mailing list >> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> >>> - >> >>> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >-- >Internet-history mailing list >Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >- >Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From geoff at iconia.com Mon May 11 16:50:28 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:50:28 -0700 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> Message-ID: vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the years." During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 g On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > ... > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > > Brian Carpenter > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > earlier in this thread. > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > services, etc. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > --gregbo > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From vint at google.com Mon May 11 16:57:50 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 19:57:50 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: wow, quite a story! v On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 7:33?PM Michael Grant via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Hey The Event, I was heavily involved in that! I worked at COS then. I > build and ran the testing lab at COS where all the vendors came in and > set up their stuff. I also did a lot of conformance testing of OSI back > then. Spent a lot of time in front of data scopes reading tcpdump like > traces to figure out why things couldn't communicate. It was often an > addressing issue. > > To learn the protocol stack, I made myself a set of protocol cheat > sheets that looked like the ascii diagrams in the RFCs. I gave copies > to a bunch of people but was eventually told I couldn't distribute them > because they contained potentially copyrighted material from the CCITT > books. Not sure I still have those files around any more. > > We, the tech folks, wanted, needed badly to get on the internet back > then. We ended up first mostly communicating using uucp to some of the > vendors others, it was fax. The management forbade us to get a ppp > dialup line for several years. It was laughable that we used uucp and > couldn't get x.400 working and I tried hard. Marshall Rose gave me a > set of ISODE tapes which I spent days and days trying to get something > talking to something outside of COS. If I recall, the issue was not > exactly ISODE but everything else around it. There was simply no OSI > Internet. You couldn't just get an X.25 connection and be on the OSI > net. Nobody sold CLNP but you could do it over ethernet. Nobody in > that time period ever imagined a telco dropping in a 10mbps ethernet > port and giving you pure CLNP, anything outside your own premise was to > be X.25 or maybe ISDN. On the application side, I don't recall, I don't > think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't > remember. Sun's X.400 definitely talked to sendmail though and from > memory, I had ISODE X.400 talking to Sun's X.400 but it was very much in > a lab playground. There was no authority to assign you a real globally > unique X.400 mail address, we simply made it up. There was no way to > route a message. There literally were no hostnames in OSI like in > TCP/IP! > > Then there were no less than 5 different variants of transport named TP0 > to TP4. Basically you ran TP0 over X.25 and TP4 over CLNP. Nobody > could tell me what happened if you had one end on TP0 and another on > TP4! Somehow X.500 was going to save the day and there would be some > sort of application layer gateway somewhere! Literally we had a > building (well, a couple floors of a building) filled with some of the > most clued up people on OSI and I talked to everyone and nobody had good > answers for the most basic questions of how this stuff was really > supposed to work. It was just a job. They were just doing stuff > because they were told to by higher ups. Nobody I worked with at COS at > the technical level believed this stuff was actually going to go > prime-time and everyone would be using it. > > Anyway, yeah, The Event, that was a load of fun. That was possibly the > only time in the history of OSI that there was a small diverse group of > vendors equipment that actually talked to each other. After it > disbanded, everyone went home. There was never any way even anyone at > COS could use any of the stuff to communicate with anyone. We couldn't > even send an x.400 message to anyone after that. After The Event, it > was pretty much down hill. I talked to people internally at COS to see > if we could do something like Interop but there was no money, no desire > to do it. We sold a bunch of these super expensive OSI testers that ran > on Sun hardware and basically even if you passed the test suite, you > still wouldn't be able to talk to another implementation without a > stupid amount of config such that there really was no way ever to build > an internet with this stuff. Then the vendors started pulling out of > the consortium and then layoffs started. > > I left COS for Sun and worked on federal bid & proposals for a couple > years where we saw the check-box requirement over and over from the US > Gov't and it was my job to tick those boxes with Sun's OSI > implementation. There, I met the folks at Sun France and they hired me > away from Sun Fed and I moved to Grenoble France where I could have > worked on Sun's OSI stack but by then, it was gathering dust and I ended > up working on SNMP and LDAP. I recall that Sun didn't even make its own > OSI stack, much of it was outsourced to some French company. I looked > at it a bit but the source was fairly impenetrable. Nothing was well > integrated into SunOS. Very messy. It was quite clear there was no > internal commitment to do this right. > > Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never > understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to > make it work. Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked. Nobody > around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake > tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more > companies were getting hooked in. Once you had a ppp connection, a > domain name, and started getting e-mail (if you hadn't already been > getting mail over uucp), you had not one iota of need or desire to get > x.400 working, nor anything else in that stack for that matter. X.500 > morphed into LDAP and that morphed into Microsoft Active Directory > though LDAP still exists though I don't really know why people use it. > > I had wondered for a long time why LDAP hadn't become some sort of > Internet like telephone directory. It would have been a nice place to > store things like PGP keys in but it never really took off on a global > scale. No one ever published their contact details publicly in LDAP. > Clearly this would have been a spammers dream to be able to just look up > everyone's address. > > Aside from LDAP, I have run across things using ASN.1. I don't off hand > know if anything more than those subsets of OSI are still in use today. > > ------ Original Message ------ > From "Tom Lyon via Internet-history" > To "Brian E Carpenter" > Cc internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Date 11/05/2026 22:43:10 > Subject Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > >Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore? > >It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with IEEE > >802.4. > >Sun announced such a product there. Don't know if we ever sold any, but > it > >got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists. > > > > > https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/ > > > >On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > >internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that > >> thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on > SNA/OSI > >> integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research > >> Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) > >> invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, > I'm > >> sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent > both > >> marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, > >> UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who > >> thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was > >> largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it > >> certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have > no > >> idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is > probably > >> the gigadollar. > >> > >> The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also > spent > >> large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much > less > >> money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 > and > >> the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. > >> > >> Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite > a > >> small fraction of the real total cost. > >> > >> Regards/Ng? mihi > >> Brian Carpenter > >> > >> On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: > >> > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the > >> > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. > >> > > >> > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I > don't > >> > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented > things. > >> > > >> > --karl-- > >> > > >> > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > >> >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main > >> committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various > subgroups. In > >> the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their > participants. > >> Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple > participants > >> in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major > >> international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group > meetings > >> between the 9 month major meetings. > >> >> > >> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, > >> there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was > >> especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to > get > >> around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO > >> committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. > >> >> > >> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were > >> participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut > the > >> large US delegations to the meetings. > >> >> > >> >> Take care, > >> >> John Day > >> >> > >> >> > >> >> > >> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> >>> > >> >>> Hi - > >> >>> > >> >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the > 25 > >> >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US > >> government > >> >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? > >> >>> > >> >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy > access to > >> >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing > lists. Any > >> >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine > >> lunches > >> >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. > >> >>> > >> >>> With best regards, > >> >>> > >> >>> Carl > >> >>> -- > >> >>> Internet-history mailing list > >> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> >>> - > >> >>> Unsubscribe: > >> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >> -- > >> Internet-history mailing list > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> - > >> Unsubscribe: > >> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >> > >-- > >Internet-history mailing list > >Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >- > >Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From carl at media.org Mon May 11 17:05:05 2026 From: carl at media.org (Carl Malamud) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 05:35:05 +0530 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Agreed. It is a wonderful story and it very aptly illustrates the scale of the effort. Thanks for sending. Carl On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 5:28?AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > wow, quite a story! > v > > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 7:33?PM Michael Grant via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Hey The Event, I was heavily involved in that! I worked at COS then. I > > build and ran the testing lab at COS where all the vendors came in and > > set up their stuff. I also did a lot of conformance testing of OSI back > > then. Spent a lot of time in front of data scopes reading tcpdump like > > traces to figure out why things couldn't communicate. It was often an > > addressing issue. > > > > To learn the protocol stack, I made myself a set of protocol cheat > > sheets that looked like the ascii diagrams in the RFCs. I gave copies > > to a bunch of people but was eventually told I couldn't distribute them > > because they contained potentially copyrighted material from the CCITT > > books. Not sure I still have those files around any more. > > > > We, the tech folks, wanted, needed badly to get on the internet back > > then. We ended up first mostly communicating using uucp to some of the > > vendors others, it was fax. The management forbade us to get a ppp > > dialup line for several years. It was laughable that we used uucp and > > couldn't get x.400 working and I tried hard. Marshall Rose gave me a > > set of ISODE tapes which I spent days and days trying to get something > > talking to something outside of COS. If I recall, the issue was not > > exactly ISODE but everything else around it. There was simply no OSI > > Internet. You couldn't just get an X.25 connection and be on the OSI > > net. Nobody sold CLNP but you could do it over ethernet. Nobody in > > that time period ever imagined a telco dropping in a 10mbps ethernet > > port and giving you pure CLNP, anything outside your own premise was to > > be X.25 or maybe ISDN. On the application side, I don't recall, I don't > > think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't > > remember. Sun's X.400 definitely talked to sendmail though and from > > memory, I had ISODE X.400 talking to Sun's X.400 but it was very much in > > a lab playground. There was no authority to assign you a real globally > > unique X.400 mail address, we simply made it up. There was no way to > > route a message. There literally were no hostnames in OSI like in > > TCP/IP! > > > > Then there were no less than 5 different variants of transport named TP0 > > to TP4. Basically you ran TP0 over X.25 and TP4 over CLNP. Nobody > > could tell me what happened if you had one end on TP0 and another on > > TP4! Somehow X.500 was going to save the day and there would be some > > sort of application layer gateway somewhere! Literally we had a > > building (well, a couple floors of a building) filled with some of the > > most clued up people on OSI and I talked to everyone and nobody had good > > answers for the most basic questions of how this stuff was really > > supposed to work. It was just a job. They were just doing stuff > > because they were told to by higher ups. Nobody I worked with at COS at > > the technical level believed this stuff was actually going to go > > prime-time and everyone would be using it. > > > > Anyway, yeah, The Event, that was a load of fun. That was possibly the > > only time in the history of OSI that there was a small diverse group of > > vendors equipment that actually talked to each other. After it > > disbanded, everyone went home. There was never any way even anyone at > > COS could use any of the stuff to communicate with anyone. We couldn't > > even send an x.400 message to anyone after that. After The Event, it > > was pretty much down hill. I talked to people internally at COS to see > > if we could do something like Interop but there was no money, no desire > > to do it. We sold a bunch of these super expensive OSI testers that ran > > on Sun hardware and basically even if you passed the test suite, you > > still wouldn't be able to talk to another implementation without a > > stupid amount of config such that there really was no way ever to build > > an internet with this stuff. Then the vendors started pulling out of > > the consortium and then layoffs started. > > > > I left COS for Sun and worked on federal bid & proposals for a couple > > years where we saw the check-box requirement over and over from the US > > Gov't and it was my job to tick those boxes with Sun's OSI > > implementation. There, I met the folks at Sun France and they hired me > > away from Sun Fed and I moved to Grenoble France where I could have > > worked on Sun's OSI stack but by then, it was gathering dust and I ended > > up working on SNMP and LDAP. I recall that Sun didn't even make its own > > OSI stack, much of it was outsourced to some French company. I looked > > at it a bit but the source was fairly impenetrable. Nothing was well > > integrated into SunOS. Very messy. It was quite clear there was no > > internal commitment to do this right. > > > > Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never > > understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to > > make it work. Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked. Nobody > > around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake > > tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more > > companies were getting hooked in. Once you had a ppp connection, a > > domain name, and started getting e-mail (if you hadn't already been > > getting mail over uucp), you had not one iota of need or desire to get > > x.400 working, nor anything else in that stack for that matter. X.500 > > morphed into LDAP and that morphed into Microsoft Active Directory > > though LDAP still exists though I don't really know why people use it. > > > > I had wondered for a long time why LDAP hadn't become some sort of > > Internet like telephone directory. It would have been a nice place to > > store things like PGP keys in but it never really took off on a global > > scale. No one ever published their contact details publicly in LDAP. > > Clearly this would have been a spammers dream to be able to just look up > > everyone's address. > > > > Aside from LDAP, I have run across things using ASN.1. I don't off hand > > know if anything more than those subsets of OSI are still in use today. > > > > ------ Original Message ------ > > From "Tom Lyon via Internet-history" > > To "Brian E Carpenter" > > Cc internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > Date 11/05/2026 22:43:10 > > Subject Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > > > >Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore? > > >It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with > IEEE > > >802.4. > > >Sun announced such a product there. Don't know if we ever sold any, but > > it > > >got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists. > > > > > > > > > https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/ > > > > > >On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > > >internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > >> Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide > that > > >> thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on > > SNA/OSI > > >> integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US > (Research > > >> Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) > > >> invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, > > I'm > > >> sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent > > both > > >> marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, > > >> UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups > who > > >> thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this > was > > >> largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it > > >> certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have > > no > > >> idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is > > probably > > >> the gigadollar. > > >> > > >> The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also > > spent > > >> large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much > > less > > >> money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 > > and > > >> the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. > > >> > > >> Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably > quite > > a > > >> small fraction of the real total cost. > > >> > > >> Regards/Ng? mihi > > >> Brian Carpenter > > >> > > >> On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: > > >> > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via > the > > >> > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. > > >> > > > >> > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I > > don't > > >> > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented > > things. > > >> > > > >> > --karl-- > > >> > > > >> > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > >> >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main > > >> committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various > > subgroups. In > > >> the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their > > participants. > > >> Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple > > participants > > >> in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major > > >> international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group > > meetings > > >> between the 9 month major meetings. > > >> >> > > >> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, > > >> there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was > > >> especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to > > get > > >> around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an > ISO > > >> committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. > > >> >> > > >> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies > were > > >> participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut > > the > > >> large US delegations to the meetings. > > >> >> > > >> >> Take care, > > >> >> John Day > > >> >> > > >> >> > > >> >> > > >> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > > >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > >> >>> > > >> >>> Hi - > > >> >>> > > >> >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the > > 25 > > >> >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US > > >> government > > >> >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? > > >> >>> > > >> >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy > > access to > > >> >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing > > lists. Any > > >> >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine > > >> lunches > > >> >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more > scientific. > > >> >>> > > >> >>> With best regards, > > >> >>> > > >> >>> Carl > > >> >>> -- > > >> >>> Internet-history mailing list > > >> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > >> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > >> >>> - > > >> >>> Unsubscribe: > > >> > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > >> -- > > >> Internet-history mailing list > > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > >> - > > >> Unsubscribe: > > >> > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > >> > > >-- > > >Internet-history mailing list > > >Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > >https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > >- > > >Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > Vint Cerf > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > McLean, VA 22102 > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > Google, LLC > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > Reston, VA 20190 > +1 650-224-2788 > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 11 17:17:38 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 12:17:38 +1200 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On the application side, I don't recall, I don't > think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't > remember. EAN (from UBC) did that. We ran it for a while at CERN both as a MUA and as part of our mail interchange gateway. It wasn't part of ISODE but it certainly interworked. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 12-May-26 11:33, Michael Grant wrote: > Hey The Event, I was heavily involved in that! I worked at COS then. I > build and ran the testing lab at COS where all the vendors came in and > set up their stuff. I also did a lot of conformance testing of OSI back > then. Spent a lot of time in front of data scopes reading tcpdump like > traces to figure out why things couldn't communicate. It was often an > addressing issue. > > To learn the protocol stack, I made myself a set of protocol cheat > sheets that looked like the ascii diagrams in the RFCs. I gave copies > to a bunch of people but was eventually told I couldn't distribute them > because they contained potentially copyrighted material from the CCITT > books. Not sure I still have those files around any more. > > We, the tech folks, wanted, needed badly to get on the internet back > then. We ended up first mostly communicating using uucp to some of the > vendors others, it was fax. The management forbade us to get a ppp > dialup line for several years. It was laughable that we used uucp and > couldn't get x.400 working and I tried hard. Marshall Rose gave me a > set of ISODE tapes which I spent days and days trying to get something > talking to something outside of COS. If I recall, the issue was not > exactly ISODE but everything else around it. There was simply no OSI > Internet. You couldn't just get an X.25 connection and be on the OSI > net. Nobody sold CLNP but you could do it over ethernet. Nobody in > that time period ever imagined a telco dropping in a 10mbps ethernet > port and giving you pure CLNP, anything outside your own premise was to > be X.25 or maybe ISDN. On the application side, I don't recall, I don't > think ISODE X.400 talked to sendmail, it may have, i just can't > remember. Sun's X.400 definitely talked to sendmail though and from > memory, I had ISODE X.400 talking to Sun's X.400 but it was very much in > a lab playground. There was no authority to assign you a real globally > unique X.400 mail address, we simply made it up. There was no way to > route a message. There literally were no hostnames in OSI like in > TCP/IP! > > Then there were no less than 5 different variants of transport named TP0 > to TP4. Basically you ran TP0 over X.25 and TP4 over CLNP. Nobody > could tell me what happened if you had one end on TP0 and another on > TP4! Somehow X.500 was going to save the day and there would be some > sort of application layer gateway somewhere! Literally we had a > building (well, a couple floors of a building) filled with some of the > most clued up people on OSI and I talked to everyone and nobody had good > answers for the most basic questions of how this stuff was really > supposed to work. It was just a job. They were just doing stuff > because they were told to by higher ups. Nobody I worked with at COS at > the technical level believed this stuff was actually going to go > prime-time and everyone would be using it. > > Anyway, yeah, The Event, that was a load of fun. That was possibly the > only time in the history of OSI that there was a small diverse group of > vendors equipment that actually talked to each other. After it > disbanded, everyone went home. There was never any way even anyone at > COS could use any of the stuff to communicate with anyone. We couldn't > even send an x.400 message to anyone after that. After The Event, it > was pretty much down hill. I talked to people internally at COS to see > if we could do something like Interop but there was no money, no desire > to do it. We sold a bunch of these super expensive OSI testers that ran > on Sun hardware and basically even if you passed the test suite, you > still wouldn't be able to talk to another implementation without a > stupid amount of config such that there really was no way ever to build > an internet with this stuff. Then the vendors started pulling out of > the consortium and then layoffs started. > > I left COS for Sun and worked on federal bid & proposals for a couple > years where we saw the check-box requirement over and over from the US > Gov't and it was my job to tick those boxes with Sun's OSI > implementation. There, I met the folks at Sun France and they hired me > away from Sun Fed and I moved to Grenoble France where I could have > worked on Sun's OSI stack but by then, it was gathering dust and I ended > up working on SNMP and LDAP. I recall that Sun didn't even make its own > OSI stack, much of it was outsourced to some French company. I looked > at it a bit but the source was fairly impenetrable. Nothing was well > integrated into SunOS. Very messy. It was quite clear there was no > internal commitment to do this right. > > Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never > understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to > make it work. Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked. Nobody > around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake > tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more > companies were getting hooked in. Once you had a ppp connection, a > domain name, and started getting e-mail (if you hadn't already been > getting mail over uucp), you had not one iota of need or desire to get > x.400 working, nor anything else in that stack for that matter. X.500 > morphed into LDAP and that morphed into Microsoft Active Directory > though LDAP still exists though I don't really know why people use it. > > I had wondered for a long time why LDAP hadn't become some sort of > Internet like telephone directory. It would have been a nice place to > store things like PGP keys in but it never really took off on a global > scale. No one ever published their contact details publicly in LDAP. > Clearly this would have been a spammers dream to be able to just look up > everyone's address. > > Aside from LDAP, I have run across things using ASN.1. I don't off hand > know if anything more than those subsets of OSI are still in use today. > > ------ Original Message ------ >>From "Tom Lyon via Internet-history" > To "Brian E Carpenter" > Cc internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Date 11/05/2026 22:43:10 > Subject Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > >> Anyone else remember the Enterprise Network Event - 1988 in Baltimore? >> It was the peak of hype for the MAP/TOP flavor of OSI, complete with IEEE >> 802.4. >> Sun announced such a product there. Don't know if we ever sold any, but it >> got us past the dreaded corporate check-lists. >> >> https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.10/Enterprise-Network-Event-(OSI)-June/ >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:22?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Yes, there was *enormous* expenditure by major companies worldwide that >>> thought OSI was the key to the future. IBM had people working on SNA/OSI >>> integration (including marketing vapourware), both in the US (Research >>> Triangle Park) and Europe (La Gaude). DEC (mainly at Littleton, MA) >>> invested many millions in DECNET Phase V. Boeing also spent millions, I'm >>> sure; I have no knowledge about GM. Untold numbers of companies spent both >>> marketing and development millions under the influence of US-GOSIP, >>> UK-GOSIP, European Commission policy, etc. Not to mention startups who >>> thought OSI was an enormous future opportunity. I imagine that this was >>> largely limited to North America, Western Europe and Japan, but it >>> certainly included a lot more than sending people to meetings. I have no >>> idea how to estimate the total but I suspect the correct unit is probably >>> the gigadollar. >>> >>> The emerging national research and education networks in Europe also spent >>> large fractions of their budgets on OSI preparedness - probably much less >>> money than industry was spending, but real enough, between about 1985 and >>> the early 1990s. The same went for NASA and DoE in the US. >>> >>> Standards goers and their fine lunches and dinners were probably quite a >>> small fraction of the real total cost. >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> On 12-May-26 08:43, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote: >>> > Our company (Epilogue Tech.) was involved with ISO/OSI mostly via the >>> > MAP and TOP efforts by General Motors and Boeing. >>> > >>> > Those gatherings tended to be somewhat well attended, although I don't >>> > think many of the attendees were people who actually implemented things. >>> > >>> > --karl-- >>> > >>> > On 5/11/26 3:46 AM, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >>> >> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main >>> committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In >>> the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants. >>> Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants >>> in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major >>> international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings >>> between the 9 month major meetings. >>> >> >>> >> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, >>> there were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was >>> especially true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get >>> around IBM stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO >>> committee, because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization. >>> >> >>> >> I wouldn?t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were >>> participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the >>> large US delegations to the meetings. >>> >> >>> >> Take care, >>> >> John Day >>> >> >>> >> >>> >> >>> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> Hi - >>> >>> >>> >>> I?m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I?ve seen the 25 >>> >>> million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US >>> government >>> >>> efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers? >>> >>> >>> >>> Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to >>> >>> number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any >>> >>> similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is ?many fine >>> lunches >>> >>> and dinners? but surely there has to be something more scientific. >>> >>> >>> >>> With best regards, >>> >>> >>> >>> Carl >>> >>> -- >>> >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> >>> - >>> >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> From lk at cs.ucla.edu Mon May 11 17:27:28 2026 From: lk at cs.ucla.edu (Leonard Kleinrock) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 17:27:28 -0700 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> Message-ID: Ha! So the ?debug" command became a ?bug"! > On May 11, 2026, at 4:50?PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > > vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: > > The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric > Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, > heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all > of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the > attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the > years." > > During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: > > *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that > contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* > > his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: > > https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 > > g > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < >> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: >>> ... >>>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG >> had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet >> technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards >> cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP < >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of >> this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to >> tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become >> what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would >> welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to >> comment.) >>> >>> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much >> more than cryptography, of course)? >>> >>> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase >> "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite >> liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem >> have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many >> years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via >> DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) >>> >>> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA >> and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked >> the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was >> gone by then. >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >> >> From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups >> dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. >> One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned >> earlier in this thread. >> >> When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of >> discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC >> 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness >> about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and >> services, etc. >> >> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm >> [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 >> [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 >> >> --gregbo >> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> > > -- > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com > living as The Truth is True > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Mon May 11 17:32:14 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 20:32:14 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> <7D6217F2-F0E7-4FFE-BDD5-F98C5219115F@comcast.net> Message-ID: Much of what is wrong, the mistakes that need to be rectified are any where from 55 to 35 years ago. Sounds like history to me. We have found that resolving the mistakes makes things incredibly simpler and better than burying your head in the sand that has been recommended more than once here. Some of the mistakes were subtle, therefore worth understanding, some just short-sighted design that could be fixed, some appear to oversight but I am not entirely sure, and some forgot they were designing for an internet, not a network. So it is very much worth understanding. If it isn?t done, they are condemn to repeat the mistakes. (And have been working on it.) > On May 11, 2026, at 16:52, Bob Purvy wrote: > > > You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the real problems. > > I thought we were discussing what happened with OSI. What, now you don't want to talk about that? > > There's plenty to discuss about what's wrong today. However, this group has "history" in its name. Maybe it isn't the right forum for your issues. > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 1:41?PM John Day > wrote: >> You know that is really where the disconnect occurred. >> At the time, (the 80s) there was no market for something like the Internet. US corporations were focused on where the market was, which was corporate networks. >> >> A market for something like the Internet was definitely coming as we all knew. It was probably accelerated by at least a decade if not more by the advent of the Web. >> >> You want to play raise one games? How about how much has the Internet caused its users by never being productized in terms of ransomware, phishing, web scams, cyberattacks, etc. >> >> You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the real problems. >> >> Take care, >> John >> >> > On May 11, 2026, at 16:23, Bob Purvy via Internet-history > wrote: >> > >> >> hours spent running the network >> > >> > OK, I'll see that, and raise you one: >> > >> > "hours spent running the network and feeding that experience back into the >> > code." >> > >> > that's what OSI was lacking. It wasn't "elegant design." >> > >> > >> > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:33?AM Craig Partridge > >> > wrote: >> > >> >> >> >> >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org > wrote: >> >> >> >>> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses on >> >>> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation >> >>> hours": >> >>> >> >>> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and getting >> >>> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. >> >>> >> >>> >> >> I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think of it >> >> as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the code. >> >> >> >> I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, implementing a >> >> new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester project >> >> for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance of >> >> your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC 869] >> >> and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex than >> >> TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy (I >> >> think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is that >> >> ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith >> >> Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. >> >> >> >> By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number of >> >> operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol >> >> implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours >> >> drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. >> >> First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered >> >> probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a >> >> race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP >> >> round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces over >> >> challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, he'd >> >> likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides illustrating >> >> how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific demanding >> >> links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a network >> >> under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, which we >> >> did not have at the time). >> >> >> >> Craig >> >> >> >> *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in the >> >> networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the socket >> >> API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 >> >> interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still >> >> manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and fit >> >> it into their OS. >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> ***** >> >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and >> >> mailing lists. >> >> >> > -- >> > Internet-history mailing list >> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> > - >> > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> From dhc at dcrocker.net Mon May 11 17:33:20 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 00:33:20 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> On 5/11/2026 4:33 PM, Michael Grant via Internet-history wrote: > Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never > understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try > to make it work.? Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked.? > Nobody around me at the technical level believed this stuff would > overtake tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and > more companies were getting hooked in. I'll add another thank you for the detailed, cross-culture (networking) life story. When I worked for a company that sold TCP/IP stacks, a very large fraction of our revenue came from Europe, the purported hotbed of OSI.? As icing, I like that one of my larger customers the ISO IT team... As Einar Stefferud summarized:???OSI is a beautiful dream, and TCP/IP is living it!? https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job of satisfying the demand. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 11 18:14:54 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 18:14:54 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> <7D6217F2-F0E7-4FFE-BDD5-F98C5219115F@comcast.net> Message-ID: The bell rang, John. You can't un-ring it. I'm not going to answer you anymore. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 5:32?PM John Day wrote: > Much of what is wrong, the mistakes that need to be rectified are any > where from 55 to 35 years ago. Sounds like history to me. > > We have found that resolving the mistakes makes things incredibly simpler > and better than burying your head in the sand that has been recommended > more than once here. > > Some of the mistakes were subtle, therefore worth understanding, some just > short-sighted design that could be fixed, some appear to oversight but I am > not entirely sure, and some forgot they were designing for an internet, not > a network. > > So it is very much worth understanding. If it isn?t done, they are condemn > to repeat the mistakes. (And have been working on it.) > > On May 11, 2026, at 16:52, Bob Purvy wrote: > > > You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the > real problems. > > I thought we were discussing what happened with OSI. What, now you don't > want to talk about that? > > There's plenty to discuss about what's wrong today. However, this group > has "history" in its name. Maybe it isn't the right forum for your issues. > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 1:41?PM John Day wrote: > >> You know that is really where the disconnect occurred. >> At the time, (the 80s) there was no market for something like the >> Internet. US corporations were focused on where the market was, which was >> corporate networks. >> >> A market for something like the Internet was definitely coming as we all >> knew. It was probably accelerated by at least a decade if not more by the >> advent of the Web. >> >> You want to play raise one games? How about how much has the Internet >> caused its users by never being productized in terms of ransomware, >> phishing, web scams, cyberattacks, etc. >> >> You seem to be more interested in kicking a dead horse than facing the >> real problems. >> >> Take care, >> John >> >> > On May 11, 2026, at 16:23, Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> > >> >> hours spent running the network >> > >> > OK, I'll see that, and raise you one: >> > >> > "hours spent running the network and feeding that experience back into >> the >> > code." >> > >> > that's what OSI was lacking. It wasn't "elegant design." >> > >> > >> > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 11:33?AM Craig Partridge >> > wrote: >> > >> >> >> >> >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:09?AM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < >> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >> >> >>> "Quantifying" : this is a good way to approach this. Everyone focuses >> on >> >>> the money, especially from the USG, but there's also "implementation >> >>> hours": >> >>> >> >>> How many hours did OSI proponents spend actually writing code and >> getting >> >>> networks running? Writing papers and going to meetings doesn't count. >> >>> >> >>> >> >> I'd suggest focusing on the hours spent running the network -- think >> of it >> >> as post-initial implementation experience running and maintaining the >> code. >> >> >> >> I say that because, especially after 4.2BSD was released*, >> implementing a >> >> new protocol such as TP4 or CLNP became a straightforward semester >> project >> >> for a graduate student (two semesters if you measured the performance >> of >> >> your implementation). I did it twice between 1984 and 1987 (HMP [RFC >> 869] >> >> and RDP [RFCs 908 and 1151] - and RDP's state diagram was more complex >> than >> >> TCP's). My recollection is that Mitch Tasman found TP4 similarly easy >> (I >> >> think he was the guy who did the Wisconsin TP4). The one nit here is >> that >> >> ES-IS turned out to conflict with the BSD routing model, causing Keith >> >> Sklower (who did the BSD OSI implementation) some pain. >> >> >> >> By 1989, what differentiated the protocol suites was the sheer number >> of >> >> operational hours the implementations had accumulated and the protocol >> >> implementation (and specification) improvements those operational hours >> >> drove. It takes a long time to winkle out some issues. Two examples. >> >> First, only in 1988, after SMTP had been used for 5 years and delivered >> >> probably well over a billion messages, did I track down that SMTP had a >> >> race condition (RFC 1047). Second, as Van Jacobson improved the TCP >> >> round-trip time estimator, he captured hundreds (thousands?) of traces >> over >> >> challenging network links. If you sat down with him during that time, >> he'd >> >> likely start flipping through a stack of several dozen slides >> illustrating >> >> how different RTT estimators would have performed over specific >> demanding >> >> links. Creating those challenging data sets could only happen in a >> network >> >> under intense operational use (or really great network simulators, >> which we >> >> did not have at the time). >> >> >> >> Craig >> >> >> >> *PS: Why did 4.2BSD matter? It had a nice dispatch table mechanism in >> the >> >> networking code which made it easy to drop in a new protocol and the >> socket >> >> API would recognize the new protocol. The device driver to layer 3 >> >> interface was a bit more crude (if I remember aright), but still >> >> manageable. And many vendors knew how to take BSD-compatible code and >> fit >> >> it into their OS. >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> ***** >> >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and >> >> mailing lists. >> >> >> > -- >> > Internet-history mailing list >> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> > - >> > Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> > From york at isoc.org Mon May 11 19:12:30 2026 From: york at isoc.org (Dan York) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 02:12:30 +0000 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> Message-ID: <9783A5D6-5093-4500-ADD9-B0EBB91751AD@isoc.org> Thanks, Bill! Those are really fun to see! Great to see that someone is preserving this out there. Thanks, Dan On May 11, 2026, at 4:37?PM, Bill Ricker wrote: While the tech/admin details in UUCP-MAP entries are valuable history (and someone has saved 1987-1992 on GitHub https://github.com/encse/uucp-map which extends the 1984 and 1985 entries available in netnews archives), there were also text-as-graphics logical, graphical maps of the network, usually described as "Usenet maps" (because they were more end-user oriented than the point-to-point transport & management details of UUCP-MAP, even tho' they described (usually) Mail, News, and File flows). Two useful collections (there likely are more?) are https://stargatemuseum.org/maps/ https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/historical.html (scroll or FIND past Arpanet maps to "USENET in 1981" // bill in boston, this time NOT speaking for the Literary Estate of MAP On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 3:52?PM Dan York via Internet-history > wrote: Greg, Thanks for the detective work! Comments inline? On May 11, 2026, at 2:06?PM, Greg Skinner > wrote: I was able to find several entries for ?srbci? with the Google Groups query https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=srbci. ???? Brilliant! Of course that would be a logical way to search! From the looks of several of these entries, such as the following, ?mv? was a UUCP neighbor of ?srbci?. Yes, my recollection is that it was our *only* neighbor. Everything we sent/received went through mv. This part? # Outgoing calls: mv decvax(DIRECT+HIGH), ditka(EVENING+FAST), harvard(EVENING+FAST), jjmhome(EVENING) # # Incoming calls: mv balrog(DAILY), contek(POLLED), (DIRECT+FAST), ctedge(DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), lemuria(DIRECT+FAST), (DIRECT), midnight(DAILY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DAILY), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY/2), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (EVENING+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT) # # Misc reverse definitions: harvard mv(EVENING) decvax mv(DIRECT+HIGH) ? makes me think that perhaps my memory of the ?mit? part of the bang-path may be faulty. I might have had the ?vax? part right but the owner wrong. Perhaps the address was ?decvax!mv!srbci!ldy?. 'mit-vax' could have been an undocumented UUCP neighbor of ?mv?. It appears on USENET maps from the 1980s available by issuing a similar Google Groups query in net.news.map. It could have been. It also could be a complete fabrication of my brain 30+ years later. This conversation also reminds me that what I really should is simply reach out to Mark Mallett, who used to run MV Communications, and ask him! ?I do have some contact info for him. Many thanks, Greg! Dan -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- Bill Ricker bill.n1vux at gmail.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 11 19:17:13 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 14:17:13 +1200 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: > My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job of satisfying the demand. That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run networking services in a multiprotocol world, and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to become product. It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 12-May-26 12:33, Dave Crocker wrote: > On 5/11/2026 4:33 PM, Michael Grant via Internet-history wrote: >> Anyway, from start to finish of this episode of my life, I could never understand how this stuff would really work and boy oh boy did I try to make it work.? Nobody around me either gave a crap if it worked.? Nobody around me at the technical level believed this stuff would overtake tcp/ip which was getting more and more popular and more and more companies were getting hooked in. > > > I'll add another thank you for the detailed, cross-culture (networking) life story. > > When I worked for a company that sold TCP/IP stacks, a very large fraction of our revenue came from Europe, the purported hotbed of OSI.? As icing, I like that one of my larger customers the ISO IT team... > > As Einar Stefferud summarized:???OSI is a beautiful dream, and TCP/IP is living it!? > > https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt > > My own summary was that the OSI community did a superb job of marketing, creating a strong demand for open systems, and TCP/IP did a superb job of satisfying the demand. > > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > From york at isoc.org Mon May 11 19:24:23 2026 From: york at isoc.org (Dan York) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 02:24:23 +0000 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> Message-ID: <9A8F9F82-3F51-4AA4-B120-5DB4F9A49F91@isoc.org> And? On May 11, 2026, at 3:52?PM, Dan York via Internet-history wrote: This conversation also reminds me that what I really should is simply reach out to Mark Mallett, who used to run MV Communications, and ask him! ?I do have some contact info for him. ,,, direct connection for the win! I was able to connect with Mark Mallett who at the time operated MV Communications, a small ISP that did a HUGE amount to knit together the early Internet community of south central New Hampshire (?MV? = ?Merrimack Valley?, a region in southern NH). Mark confirmed the information Greg had found. The upstream connections from MV were ?harvard" and ?decvax?, so if my memory had a ?vax? in it, my UUCP address I was telling people was probably ?decvax!mv!srbci!ldy?. Thanks, Jaap, John Levine, Greg, and Bill for helping ? and in providing some links to a trip down memory lane. Thanks, Dan From dhc at dcrocker.net Mon May 11 19:28:31 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 02:28:31 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: Brian, On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was > just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual 'ware', it is absolutely fair. Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution.? It delivered, at best, small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification of 'utility' -- and never at scale. I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception.? Except that, really, that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. > The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run > networking services in a multiprotocol world, Yes.? As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign.? It did develop market demand. > and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to > become product. Sorry.? No.? Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, perhaps, at a department level.? And there were many other, better and more mature choices for that market segment. In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be ready 'in two years."? I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden was speaking and he noted this running promise.? He said that while that unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for production deployment and would be available in 1992.? I, of course, was unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. > It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for > purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the > experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. 1989 was too late.? As I've noted before, around that time I explored customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions tools in the opposite direction. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From carl at media.org Mon May 11 22:43:28 2026 From: carl at media.org (Carl Malamud) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 11:13:28 +0530 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very helpful and interesting. As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much better. Best regards, Carl On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Brian, > > On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was > > just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. > > Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual > 'ware', it is absolutely fair. > > Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any > portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. > > It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, > small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification > of 'utility' -- and never at scale. > > I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, > that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. > > > > > The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run > > networking services in a multiprotocol world, > > Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did > develop market demand. > > > > > and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to > > become product. > > Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, > perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and > more mature choices for that market segment. > > In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be > ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden > was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that > unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for > production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was > unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. > > > > > It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for > > purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the > > experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. > > 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored > customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception > all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions > tools in the opposite direction. > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 11 22:59:30 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 17:59:30 +1200 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <19ad769c-9ef9-4727-b00b-5058fc5a93da@gmail.com> > Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as "paperware about vaporware." Actually, that was definitely not vapourware, it was deployable and deployed, just in time for the VAX market to disappear. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 12-May-26 17:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: > Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very > helpful and interesting. > > As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead > horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to > repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. > > Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands > of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this > was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as > "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much > better. > > Best regards, > > Carl > > > On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Brian, >> >> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was >>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. >> >> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual >> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. >> >> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any >> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. >> >> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, >> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification >> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. >> >> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, >> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. >> >> >> >>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run >>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, >> >> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did >> develop market demand. >> >> >> >>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to >>> become product. >> >> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, >> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and >> more mature choices for that market segment. >> >> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be >> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden >> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that >> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for >> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was >> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. >> >> >> >>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for >>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the >>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. >> >> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored >> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception >> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions >> tools in the opposite direction. >> >> d/ >> >> -- >> Dave Crocker >> >> dhc at dcrocker.net >> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >> +1.408.329.0791 >> >> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >> Northern California Coastal Region >> Information & Planning Coordinator >> American Red Cross >> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> From carl at media.org Mon May 11 23:06:24 2026 From: carl at media.org (Carl Malamud) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 11:36:24 +0530 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <19ad769c-9ef9-4727-b00b-5058fc5a93da@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <19ad769c-9ef9-4727-b00b-5058fc5a93da@gmail.com> Message-ID: Fair enough. I spent many years on DECnet Phase IV, taught many seminars about it all over the country, was actually looking forward to Phase V. But, like you said, DEC started to implode right around then. I was particularly impressed with the name service. On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 11:29?AM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as "paperware about vaporware." > > Actually, that was definitely not vapourware, it was deployable and > deployed, just in time for the VAX market to disappear. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 12-May-26 17:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: > > Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very > > helpful and interesting. > > > > As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead > > horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to > > repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. > > > > Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands > > of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what > this > > was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as > > "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold > much > > better. > > > > Best regards, > > > > Carl > > > > > > On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> Brian, > >> > >> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > >>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was > >>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. > >> > >> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual > >> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. > >> > >> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any > >> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. > >> > >> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, > >> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification > >> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. > >> > >> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, > >> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. > >> > >> > >> > >>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run > >>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, > >> > >> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did > >> develop market demand. > >> > >> > >> > >>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to > >>> become product. > >> > >> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, > >> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and > >> more mature choices for that market segment. > >> > >> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be > >> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden > >> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that > >> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for > >> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was > >> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. > >> > >> > >> > >>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for > >>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the > >>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. > >> > >> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored > >> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception > >> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions > >> tools in the opposite direction. > >> > >> d/ > >> > >> -- > >> Dave Crocker > >> > >> dhc at dcrocker.net > >> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > >> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > >> +1.408.329.0791 > >> > >> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > >> Northern California Coastal Region > >> Information & Planning Coordinator > >> American Red Cross > >> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > >> > >> -- > >> Internet-history mailing list > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> - > >> Unsubscribe: > >> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From julf at Julf.com Tue May 12 02:08:08 2026 From: julf at Julf.com (Johan Helsingius) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 11:08:08 +0200 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <20260511174153.85101109649B8@ary.qy> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> <20260511174153.85101109649B8@ary.qy> Message-ID: On 11/05/2026 7:41 pm, John Levine via Internet-history wrote: > Here's the map postings from the early 1980s. I remember mv but I didn't see it in these lists: > > https://groups.google.com/g/net.news.map/ Thanks, John! Ah, eur.sf still has me as cjn!julf, so it was before penet. Julf From chet.ramey at case.edu Tue May 12 07:10:13 2026 From: chet.ramey at case.edu (Chet Ramey) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 10:10:13 -0400 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> Message-ID: On 5/11/26 7:50 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: > > The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric > Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, > heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all > of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the > attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the > years." The entire discussion is worth a watch. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet at case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ From jeanjour at comcast.net Tue May 12 08:52:05 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 11:52:05 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn?t were very entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter what. The PTTs absolutely didn?t want a Transport Layer or datagrams, when they couldn?t stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. It didn?t help that many individuals in European computer companies supported the PTT view. IBM was doing all they could to slow the process down or just plain stonewall it from ever getting off the ground. Then there were countries who wanted something special apparently just to put their stamp on it. The UK was especially good at this. From a standards environment there was no way to definitively kill any of these. One had to ?let the market decide.? The 5 classes of Transport was a good example. When the PTTs couldn?t stop there being something, their strategy was to option it to death and they had help: TP0 - was for SGVIII who really wanted nothing. you TP1 - was for SGVII who used over X.25 without error control (because X.25 was reliable which it wasn?t) TP2 - was for the Brits who wanted to multiplex over X.25 (which the PTTs didn?t want) and thought it would be more efficient to not have most error recovery, ignoring that TP4 under the same conditions was just as efficient. They had to have their way. TP3 - something for the Germans, I never understood what. TP4 - really all that was necessary and all that was needed and an advance over TCP. IBM more or less stayed out of that controversy, probably because others were doing their job for them. TP0 - TP3 should have just been ignored. No one with any brains thought they were useful except their faction supporters. What I found frustrating was that companies (and individuals) thought they should implement all of it. When it was abundantly clear that that one should only implement CLNP, TP4, collapse the upper 3 layers* into a single layer for modular development of applications and ignore X.400 and X.500. nBasically ignore anything from CCITT. (One amusing CCITT ploy was that since X.25 was not reliable, but they couldn?t admit that anywhere near the Transport Layer just had to have RTSE in the Application Layer to recover the X.25 errors. As I have mentioned, I am also mystified that people paid more attention to the CCITT than to what the computer companies were doing in ISO and the US. So far as I know other than the people who worked in both the IETF and OSI on the network layer, no one from the IETF contacted the ANSI work on OSI. Why not? It was clear that CCITT had no idea what they were doing and trying to go backwards instead of forwards. One begins to believe that there was an intent to make it look bad. The actions taken certainly said that. Scott Bradner once wrote an Editorial in NetworkWorld blasting OSI for not considering TCP. It seemed a bit odd, since OSI had already accepted as a starting point a proposal whose first author was Vint Cerf. OSI had accepted the recommendation. Or more amusing were the people who said something like ?well, OSI had a Session Layer.? Making obvious that they didn?t know that the OSI Session Layer was not a Session Layer and had been stolen by CCITT SGVIII for Videotex. Even when people tried to focus on subsets of OSI in efforts like the NIST Workshops* or COS, they spent more time arguing the same factions the standards committees had argued and not coming to any better conclusions. The NIST Workshops partly suggested by IBM used an age old ploy to further confuse and delay the work by separating the designers from the implementors. The myth was of course that implementors knew more about writing the code that designers. In my experience, it was just the opposite. The designers knew what subtitles had been written into the spec for implementors to take advantage of. The implementors were clueless. (NIST Workshops were often scheduled on top of OSI meetings that prevented designers from attending the Workshop, * In 1983, OSI recognized the upper 3 layers were not layers. The existing standards were ?adjusted? so the upper 2 layers could be implemented as basically null and just concentrate on the Application Layer, which was actually very interesting and a major advance over what the Internet was doing. (X.400 and X.500 are not included in that. They were purely CCITT projects with some clueless Americans participating. Much of it was the remnants of the National Software Works project DARPA funded. OSI was dealing with a lot of problems that were not present in the Internet. That gave it a much higher hill to climb. It was going to take a lot of shaking out to get there. They were very different. There was no way to simply read the spec and know what to do. (At the same time, we had BSI doing all they could to ensure the specs were not what implementors needed.) Without talking to the people on the ISO side there was no way to know what was really going on. Take care, John Day > On May 12, 2026, at 01:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: > > Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very > helpful and interesting. > > As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead > horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to > repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. > > Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands > of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this > was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as > "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much > better. > > Best regards, > > Carl > > > On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Brian, >> >> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was >>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. >> >> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual >> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. >> >> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any >> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. >> >> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, >> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification >> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. >> >> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, >> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. >> >> >> >>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run >>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, >> >> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did >> develop market demand. >> >> >> >>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to >>> become product. >> >> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, >> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and >> more mature choices for that market segment. >> >> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be >> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden >> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that >> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for >> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was >> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. >> >> >> >>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for >>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the >>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. >> >> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored >> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception >> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions >> tools in the opposite direction. >> >> d/ >> >> -- >> Dave Crocker >> >> dhc at dcrocker.net >> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >> +1.408.329.0791 >> >> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >> Northern California Coastal Region >> Information & Planning Coordinator >> American Red Cross >> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Tue May 12 09:09:11 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 12:09:11 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <1181658779.814741.1778513605850@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00C4ABC0-CB75-4202-BE97-CF0D8B103683@comcast.net> Alex, I should have pointed out that there was at least one exception to your last comment: A paper that tried to go the other way. David D. Clark and David L. Tennenhouse titled "Architectural Considerations for a New Generation of Protocols, This paper recasts many OSI concepts into the Internet. Tennenhouse had been a member of the OSI Naming and Addressing group I chaired. Many of the phrases common in those discussions are found in this paper. This is the paper where Application Layer Structure (ALS) is proposed, which of course is nothing more than an OSI Service-Data-Unit (SDU), a property of any layer. Now a major feature of QUIC which dispenses with the stream-orientation of TCP. Of course, SDU is what CYCLADES called a ?letter? in the CYCLADES Transport Protocol in 1972. It was clear then that that was what users of the protocol wanted, but not what Multics and later Unix provided. I often wondered whether or not, Clark knew the paper was about OSI ideas. But it was a pretty amusing read. Take care, John > On May 11, 2026, at 11:54, Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history wrote: > > Others from BBN who worked on the NIST contract to represent "the US > Government's view" in OSI committees included John Burress (Transport > Layer), e (Presentation Layer) and Kathy Huber (terminal support in the > Application Layer, IIRC). However the majority of our work was done in > committees of ANSI, where the "US position" was developed. ANSI meetings > were roughly every 3 months. Between meetings we developed position papers > based on input from NIST and from ARPAnet/Internet experience. As part of > this project Tom Blumer developed a protocol compiler which took in a > "formal" description of a protocol in a c-like language describing a > protocol state machine and output a procedure implementing the protocol. > However, any progress we made in getting the OSI system to resemble the > good parts of ARPAnet/Internet experiments was summarily dismissed by > people like Jon Postel, Dave Clark, and Mike Padlisky as "Not Invented > Here" when we attempted to report back to the ARPAnet/Internet community. > Ultimately it didn't much matter; the superior funding of implementations > by ARPA, and the "give it away freely" attitude toward those > implementations, carried the day. > > Cheers, > Alex > > *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> > *To:* Carl Malamud > *Cc:* Carl Malamud via Internet-history > *Sent:* Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10:48:43 AM EDT > *Subject:* Re: [ih] Quantifying OSI > > For a chunk of time, NIST funded a bunch of BBN folks to attend including > Ross Callon (whom, I understand, did a big chunk of the heavy lifting on > CLNP) and Debbie Deutsch (ASN.1 and I think parts of X.400). They used to > meet in the cafeteria periodically to brush up on their (I think French?) > language skills. > > Craig > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 8:29?AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA >> request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting >> minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of >> meetings. >> >> > > -- > ***** > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and > mailing lists. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From bpurvy at gmail.com Tue May 12 09:25:05 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 09:25:05 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect You (by "you" I mean nearly all the contributors of this list) built something that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Take a victory lap. Take ten. So now you wonder if "more attention to all the other factors" was the answer. No, it wasn't. Then you'd have been mired in politics. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:43?PM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very > helpful and interesting. > > As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead > horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to > repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. > > Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands > of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this > was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as > "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much > better. > > Best regards, > > Carl > > > On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Brian, > > > > On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > > That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was > > > just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. > > > > Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual > > 'ware', it is absolutely fair. > > > > Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any > > portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. > > > > It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, > > small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification > > of 'utility' -- and never at scale. > > > > I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, > > that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. > > > > > > > > > The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run > > > networking services in a multiprotocol world, > > > > Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did > > develop market demand. > > > > > > > > > and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to > > > become product. > > > > Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, > > perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and > > more mature choices for that market segment. > > > > In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be > > ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden > > was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that > > unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for > > production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was > > unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. > > > > > > > > > It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for > > > purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the > > > experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. > > > > 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored > > customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception > > all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions > > tools in the opposite direction. > > > > d/ > > > > -- > > Dave Crocker > > > > dhc at dcrocker.net > > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > > +1.408.329.0791 > > > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > > Northern California Coastal Region > > Information & Planning Coordinator > > American Red Cross > > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From winowicki at yahoo.com Tue May 12 13:51:20 2026 From: winowicki at yahoo.com (Bill Nowicki) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 20:51:20 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> Here is another data point on relative resources: at Sun Microsystems through the 1980s at least, much more was spent on OSI than on TCP/IP. Marketing was saying that only a few research customers were ever going to use TCP on BSD Sockets, and those had discounts. The real money, they said confidently, was in what customers wanted: OSI using AT&T Stream interfaces. They also salivated over software "products" like OSI, whereas TCP was included at no extra cost in the OS, subsidized by hardware sales. There was a moderate-sized group (for Sun) doing OSI, with a large budget flying to meetings in D.C. and Europe. Meanwhile, I had been hired into the operating systems group, where the main project was the Network File System (NFS). Engineering management and many engineers were from the University of California at Berkeley or Stanford, so were already addicted to Internet email. They gave me free reign to work on TCP as long as I kept the cost under the radar. I updated TCP code from Van Jacobson with little effort, and supported DNS since we needed it work around scalability issues and many other limitations of our rudimentary network naming service.?I was able to drive myself to most of the End-to-End Research Group meetings, and Dan Lynch shows on the West Coast, so did not need much travel budget. We justified our own Internet connection because it saved the phone budget of all those UUCP calls. We used our own machines as routers which saved buying Cisco gear. It was amusing a couple years after I left Sun when I chatted with Milo Medin about how he was using OSI at NASA. Milo pointed out that GOSIP only meant that he was limited to vendors that had OSI software "available"; NASA did not need to deploy OSI nor even to buy it. It did mean that smaller vendors were generally locked out of US government customers: they could only buy from Sun or large companies like DEC or IBM. It was also amusing to hear that the Corporation for Open Systems was running PC=NFS using TCP/IP. to get their work done. Sun eventually found out that customers really did want TCP/IP on Sockets, so spent a lot of time and money putting it back in after throwing it all out. Apparently, marketing did not talk to many actual customers, but other marketing people. Bill On Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 09:25:28 AM PDT, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect You (by "you" I mean nearly all the contributors of this list) built something that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Take a victory lap. Take ten. So now you wonder if "more attention to all the other factors" was the answer. No, it wasn't. Then you'd have been mired in politics. On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:43?PM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very > helpful and interesting. > > As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead > horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to > repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. > > Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands > of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this > was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as > "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much > better. > > Best regards, > > Carl > > > On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Brian, > > > > On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > > That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was > > > just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. > > > > Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual > > 'ware', it is absolutely fair. > > > > Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any > > portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. > > > > It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution.? It delivered, at best, > > small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification > > of 'utility' -- and never at scale. > > > > I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception.? Except that, really, > > that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. > > > > > > > > > The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run > > > networking services in a multiprotocol world, > > > > Yes.? As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign.? It did > > develop market demand. > > > > > > > > > and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to > > > become product. > > > > Sorry.? No.? Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, > > perhaps, at a department level.? And there were many other, better and > > more mature choices for that market segment. > > > > In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be > > ready 'in two years."? I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden > > was speaking and he noted this running promise.? He said that while that > > unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for > > production deployment and would be available in 1992.? I, of course, was > > unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. > > > > > > > > > It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for > > > purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the > > > experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. > > > > 1989 was too late.? As I've noted before, around that time I explored > > customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception > > all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions > > tools in the opposite direction. > > > > d/ > > > > -- > > Dave Crocker > > > > dhc at dcrocker.net > > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > > +1.408.329.0791 > > > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > > Northern California Coastal Region > > Information & Planning Coordinator > > American Red Cross > > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From dhc at dcrocker.net Tue May 12 14:02:49 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 21:02:49 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <2a209583-b4e9-4e61-84d8-727992625149@dcrocker.net> On 5/12/2026 1:51 PM, Bill Nowicki via Internet-history wrote: > Marketing was saying that only a few research customers were ever going to use TCP on BSD Sockets, and those had discounts. Around 1987, at Ungermann-Bass, we put TCP onto the 'intelligent' ethernet PC cards.? One of the earliest customers was Rutgers IT department.? Some months after they started using the product, I got a call from the our sales person saying they wanted to buy an IP router from us. I noted to them the obvious fact that we did not have such a product and did not have one in the pipeline and I knew that they already knew this and was pretty sure so did the guy at Rutgers. She said yeah, but he liked us. So I asked how long he was willing to wait.? She called back saying 3 months. I went to the engineer who had told me he'd love to put IP onto the company's router and asked how long it would take him.? (He was just coming off a project.)? I listened while he worked it out and he said two months.? I said great, that's a month of testing. Before seeking authority from our boss, I went to our marketing guy and told him of the opportunity.? He, too, was fully dismissive, saying that there was only going to be a tiny market. My boss said we tried to never say no to a customer.? He asked about effort and time.? Heard the answer.? Gave the goahead.? But alas, UB marketing was never able to sell into a general market. But for a brief moment, I was competing with cisco... d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From byeager at fastmail.fm Tue May 12 14:41:40 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 14:41:40 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Interesting. In 1986 Stanford networking had a meeting with DEC sales. They wanted DECNET routing. We had two isolated VAX systems running VMS from what I recall. Two DECNET systems. I said, ?No way. DECNET will be obsolete in a couple of years. DEC should wake up to this and move to the IP protocols.? I certainly sensed this given that Bill Yunt who was the director of the new Stanford networking group was also the Director of BARRNET - Bay Area net that was pure IP. We had a BARRNET (1987?) router and Golden - LAN to Internet gateway. Then sometime in 1988 the NSF backbone connection and soon after - 1989 or so - I had a DEC station 3500 on my desktop to do some contract work with DEC. It ran Ultrix with the complete IP stack. Tick tock - too late ? DEC was acquired by Compaq and sometime afterwards cancelled my contract ! Happily, I had an unrestricted account that had about $180,000 from Cisco royalties. That covered much more than my salary until our grant renewed. I really liked the dec station and preferred to the Sun Workstations albeit we had a sun server in 1987 and dropped the DEC2060. I think we actually had an early version of the sun server in 1986 some time to begin our migration away from DEC. Strange battles but IP as well as the IETF were clearly on the path to be the winners. I had other OSI ?discussions? in 1996 in a New Orleans meeting regarding a transition to IMAP. Terry Gray from the U of Washington joined me. He was Mark Crispin?s boss and the IMAP distribution was at UW. Email is another story. Bill > On May 12, 2026, at 1:51 PM, Bill Nowicki via Internet-history wrote: > > Here is another data point on relative resources: at Sun Microsystems through the 1980s at least, much more was spent on OSI than on TCP/IP. > > Marketing was saying that only a few research customers were ever going to use TCP on BSD Sockets, and those had discounts. The real money, they said confidently, was in what customers wanted: OSI using AT&T Stream interfaces. They also salivated over software "products" like OSI, whereas TCP was included at no extra cost in the OS, subsidized by hardware sales. > > There was a moderate-sized group (for Sun) doing OSI, with a large budget flying to meetings in D.C. and Europe. Meanwhile, I had been hired into the operating systems group, where the main project was the Network File System (NFS). Engineering management and many engineers were from the University of California at Berkeley or Stanford, so were already addicted to Internet email. They gave me free reign to work on TCP as long as I kept the cost under the radar. I updated TCP code from Van Jacobson with little effort, and supported DNS since we needed it work around scalability issues and many other limitations of our rudimentary network naming service. I was able to drive myself to most of the End-to-End Research Group meetings, and Dan Lynch shows on the West Coast, so did not need much travel budget. We justified our own Internet connection because it saved the phone budget of all those UUCP calls. We used our own machines as routers which saved buying Cisco gear. > > It was amusing a couple years after I left Sun when I chatted with Milo Medin about how he was using OSI at NASA. Milo pointed out that GOSIP only meant that he was limited to vendors that had OSI software "available"; NASA did not need to deploy OSI nor even to buy it. It did mean that smaller vendors were generally locked out of US government customers: they could only buy from Sun or large companies like DEC or IBM. It was also amusing to hear that the Corporation for Open Systems was running PC=NFS using TCP/IP. to get their work done. Sun eventually found out that customers really did want TCP/IP on Sockets, so spent a lot of time and money putting it back in after throwing it all out. Apparently, marketing did not talk to many actual customers, but other marketing people. > Bill > On Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 09:25:28 AM PDT, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect > > You (by "you" I mean nearly all the contributors of this list) built > something that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Take a > victory lap. Take ten. > > So now you wonder if "more attention to all the other factors" was the > answer. No, it wasn't. Then you'd have been mired in politics. > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 10:43?PM Carl Malamud via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very >> helpful and interesting. >> >> As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead >> horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to >> repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. >> >> Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands >> of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this >> was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as >> "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much >> better. >> >> Best regards, >> >> Carl >> >> >> On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Brian, >>> >>> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was >>>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. >>> >>> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual >>> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. >>> >>> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any >>> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. >>> >>> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, >>> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification >>> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. >>> >>> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, >>> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. >>> >>> >>> >>>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run >>>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, >>> >>> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did >>> develop market demand. >>> >>> >>> >>>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to >>>> become product. >>> >>> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, >>> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and >>> more mature choices for that market segment. >>> >>> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be >>> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden >>> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that >>> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for >>> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was >>> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. >>> >>> >>> >>>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for >>>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the >>>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. >>> >>> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored >>> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception >>> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions >>> tools in the opposite direction. >>> >>> d/ >>> >>> -- >>> Dave Crocker >>> >>> dhc at dcrocker.net >>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >>> +1.408.329.0791 >>> >>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >>> Northern California Coastal Region >>> Information & Planning Coordinator >>> American Red Cross >>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From gnu at toad.com Tue May 12 14:55:07 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 14:55:07 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> Message-ID: <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> John Day via Internet-history wrote: > One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very > entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter > what. I'm shocked that you would say that. But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction through the modern IETF. > The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams, > when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all > they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4. They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80% of the world's Internet traffic! There was a whole "sunset4" WG! I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue maintaining. Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're already doing it so there's no need to say so". The result was that no draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever adopted by the wg or by the IETF. The factional campaign to kill IPv4 continues. The whole history is documented in these expired drafts: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01 Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by most implementers -- but never written down in a spec. This has been going on for years and years. And the rest of IETF lets them get away with it. For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983 because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before IP broadcast was standardized. This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else). But despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122, 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a spec. The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast, nor for anything else. A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a unicast host. This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with only 6 usable addresses rather than 7). I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends). The implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021, Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022. Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it live. But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works -- because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to IPv6"!!! See the expired Internet-Draft at: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08 It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day". But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6 to become such a faction. And the IETF seems to have no working defenses against such factions. John PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my watch". Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that time. Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF, and never have been! From dhc at dcrocker.net Tue May 12 15:03:44 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 22:03:44 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5b05e8f7-42c1-490a-89e5-86d0bc558ee2@dcrocker.net> On 5/12/2026 2:41 PM, william yeager via Internet-history wrote: > I had a DEC station 3500 on my desktop to do some contract work with DEC. It ran Ultrix with the complete IP stack. That was produced by the rogue, West Coast part of DEC.? Assuming it was the same product I had while at DEC, it seemed surprising crippled for I/O, and the like. When I asked about this, I was told it was intentional. There had been an earlier RISC project that was killed because it didn't run VMS. This kind of purity view ran deep in DEC, including killing an SNMP management console that productized the free software and was in direct response to DEC customer demand.? But it was killed because it did? not conform to the 'strategic' network management work.? Which eventually shipped and failed. This workstation was designed to look entirely unmenacing to the mainframe DEC products.? However, I was told, it was the fasted machine DEC had... d/ ps.? My 2021 Toyota RAV plugin hybrid can be quick off the line. It was widely touted as the /second/ fastest car Toyota made.? The fasted was sold as fast, while the RAV4 did not have this as a major selling point.? Then I read in independent review that compared the two cars and it said the RAV4 was faster... -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From jeanjour at comcast.net Tue May 12 15:37:40 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 18:37:40 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <0B6F8311-652A-4946-B564-D487610C19B9@comcast.net> And you were never in the many connection/connectionless debates in OSI. There was no comparison. Tempers were hot, lots of shouting, pounding the table as well as procedural games that were definitely against the procedures. Similar discussions over transport, addressing, even upper layers. Just convincing X.400 that defining the syntax of message was not a formal description was quite a fight. You are right. The IPv6 debate came the closest to what had been going on in OSI at that level for over a decade. It wasn?t fun. > On May 12, 2026, at 17:55, John Gilmore wrote: > > John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very >> entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter >> what. > > I'm shocked that you would say that. > > But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction > through the modern IETF. > >> The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams, >> when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all >> they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. > > This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4. > > They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80% > of the world's Internet traffic! There was a whole "sunset4" WG! > > I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said > that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue > maintaining. Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're > already doing it so there's no need to say so". The result was that no > draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever > adopted by the wg or by the IETF. The factional campaign to kill IPv4 > continues. The whole history is documented in these expired drafts: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01 > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01 > > Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that > straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by > most implementers -- but never written down in a spec. This has been > going on for years and years. And the rest of IETF lets them get away > with it. > > For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983 > because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before > IP broadcast was standardized. This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in > 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else). But > despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122, > 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a > spec. The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast, > nor for anything else. A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address > somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a > unicast host. This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses > throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with > only 6 usable addresses rather than 7). > > I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed > standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's > upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference > (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends). The > implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in > production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021, > Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022. > Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping > 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it > live. But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works -- > because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to > IPv6"!!! See the expired Internet-Draft at: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08 > > It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day". > But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6 > to become such a faction. And the IETF seems to have no working > defenses against such factions. > > John > > PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in > standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the > IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's > monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my > watch". Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the > RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that > time. Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF, > and never have been! From byeager at fastmail.fm Tue May 12 16:21:23 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 16:21:23 -0700 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <5b05e8f7-42c1-490a-89e5-86d0bc558ee2@dcrocker.net> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <798289256.1219689.1778619080941@mail.yahoo.com> <5b05e8f7-42c1-490a-89e5-86d0bc558ee2@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <3CA7A6AA-06CF-40D1-9E27-FFBE65DF7FC8@fastmail.fm> The below is interesting because the project on which I was working was called Dr. Network. I was placing a pseudo-AI layer on top of the SNMP API in the Dec Station I had. It is possible that I downloaded the latter, compiled and installed it. I went to an office somewhere near Boston, a short train ride, gave a talk on the proposal and DEC accepted it. I wanted to make sense of the SNMP numbers and use them for diagnostics + alerts on our LAN rather than just regurgitate lists. It was very cool ... The I/O didn?t bother me. I did have a friend, Geoff Mogul, who was a recent Stanford phd and worked in the Palo Alto Alma Street office at that time. I went there for demos of the DEC station. Bill > On May 12, 2026, at 3:03 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote: > > This kind of purity view ran deep in DEC, including killing an SNMP management console that productized the free software and was in direct response to DEC customer demand. But it was killed because it did not conform to the 'strategic' network management work. Which eventually shipped and failed. ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 12 19:27:31 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 14:27:31 +1200 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> Message-ID: <78c54fc8-0ffa-4da5-aa9a-bfcab9597f96@gmail.com> John, On 13-May-26 03:52, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn?t were very entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter what. > The PTTs absolutely didn?t want a Transport Layer or datagrams, when they couldn?t stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. What they wanted, IMHO, was simply to defend their business model, which was charging for long distance calls by distance and duration. X.25 did that, and for entrenched PTTs that really was the only feature of OSI that they cared about: getting X.25 and X.75 accepted as the OSI layer 3. It amounted to restraint of trade, which the European Commission should have resisted, but in fact the relevant part of the EC was largely captured by the PTTs during the 1980s. I think this obsession with X.25 doomed OSI in Europe (and Canada and Japan). That's why the PTTs so vigorously opposed efforts to acquire international leased lines at 2 Mbps and 34 Mbps, and so strongly supported the CCITT/ITU prohibition on customers switching traffic between such lines. That had force of law in many countries. > It didn?t help that many individuals in European computer companies supported the PTT view. IBM was doing all they could to slow the process down or just plain stonewall it from ever getting off the ground. It rather depended which bit of IBM you talked to. In the US they were working on somewhat imaginary OSI/SNA integration and pushing the SNA flavour of datagrams (Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking (APPN)). I don't think the goal was really to support OSI apart from lip service to US-GOSIP, but they did want to perpetuate SNA. In Europe, especially IBM France, they were definitely trying to stay in the good graces of the PTTs and please everybody at the same time. And there was a TCP/IP underground within IBM too. Things only changed in ~1996 when Lou Gerstner and Irving Wladawsky-Berger created IBM's Internet Division (which incidentally hired me away from CERN). > Then there were countries who wanted something special apparently just to put their stamp on it. The UK was especially good at this. I'd add Germany to that. The British and German research networks (JANET and DFN respectively) were the most insistent on OSI purism. IMHO, it's no coincidence that their leaders (Peter Linington and Klaus Ullmann) were both theoretical physicists by training. (Linington and I were contemporaries at Cambridge, but my major was experimental physics.) But it all blew up by the end of 1989. https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/RARE-TCP-IP-report.txt Brian > > From a standards environment there was no way to definitively kill any of these. One had to ?let the market decide.? The 5 classes of Transport was a good example. When the PTTs couldn?t stop there being something, their strategy was to option it to death and they had help: > TP0 - was for SGVIII who really wanted nothing. you > TP1 - was for SGVII who used over X.25 without error control (because X.25 was reliable which it wasn?t) > TP2 - was for the Brits who wanted to multiplex over X.25 (which the PTTs didn?t want) and thought it would be more efficient to not have most error recovery, ignoring that TP4 under the same conditions was just as efficient. They had to have their way. > TP3 - something for the Germans, I never understood what. > TP4 - really all that was necessary and all that was needed and an advance over TCP. > > IBM more or less stayed out of that controversy, probably because others were doing their job for them. TP0 - TP3 should have just been ignored. No one with any brains thought they were useful except their faction supporters. > > What I found frustrating was that companies (and individuals) thought they should implement all of it. When it was abundantly clear that that one should only implement CLNP, TP4, collapse the upper 3 layers* into a single layer for modular development of applications and ignore X.400 and X.500. nBasically ignore anything from CCITT. (One amusing CCITT ploy was that since X.25 was not reliable, but they couldn?t admit that anywhere near the Transport Layer just had to have RTSE in the Application Layer to recover the X.25 errors. > > As I have mentioned, I am also mystified that people paid more attention to the CCITT than to what the computer companies were doing in ISO and the US. So far as I know other than the people who worked in both the IETF and OSI on the network layer, no one from the IETF contacted the ANSI work on OSI. Why not? It was clear that CCITT had no idea what they were doing and trying to go backwards instead of forwards. One begins to believe that there was an intent to make it look bad. The actions taken certainly said that. > > Scott Bradner once wrote an Editorial in NetworkWorld blasting OSI for not considering TCP. It seemed a bit odd, since OSI had already accepted as a starting point a proposal whose first author was Vint Cerf. OSI had accepted the recommendation. Or more amusing were the people who said something like ?well, OSI had a Session Layer.? Making obvious that they didn?t know that the OSI Session Layer was not a Session Layer and had been stolen by CCITT SGVIII for Videotex. > > Even when people tried to focus on subsets of OSI in efforts like the NIST Workshops* or COS, they spent more time arguing the same factions the standards committees had argued and not coming to any better conclusions. The NIST Workshops partly suggested by IBM used an age old ploy to further confuse and delay the work by separating the designers from the implementors. The myth was of course that implementors knew more about writing the code that designers. In my experience, it was just the opposite. The designers knew what subtitles had been written into the spec for implementors to take advantage of. The implementors were clueless. (NIST Workshops were often scheduled on top of OSI meetings that prevented designers from attending the Workshop, > > * In 1983, OSI recognized the upper 3 layers were not layers. The existing standards were ?adjusted? so the upper 2 layers could be implemented as basically null and just concentrate on the Application Layer, which was actually very interesting and a major advance over what the Internet was doing. (X.400 and X.500 are not included in that. They were purely CCITT projects with some clueless Americans participating. Much of it was the remnants of the National Software Works project DARPA funded. > > OSI was dealing with a lot of problems that were not present in the Internet. That gave it a much higher hill to climb. It was going to take a lot of shaking out to get there. They were very different. There was no way to simply read the spec and know what to do. (At the same time, we had BSI doing all they could to ensure the specs were not what implementors needed.) Without talking to the people on the ISO side there was no way to know what was really going on. > > Take care, > John Day > >> On May 12, 2026, at 01:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very >> helpful and interesting. >> >> As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead >> horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to >> repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. >> >> Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands >> of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this >> was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as >> "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much >> better. >> >> Best regards, >> >> Carl >> >> >> On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Brian, >>> >>> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was >>>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. >>> >>> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual >>> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. >>> >>> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any >>> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. >>> >>> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, >>> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification >>> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. >>> >>> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, >>> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. >>> >>> >>> >>>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run >>>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, >>> >>> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did >>> develop market demand. >>> >>> >>> >>>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to >>>> become product. >>> >>> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, >>> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and >>> more mature choices for that market segment. >>> >>> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be >>> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden >>> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that >>> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for >>> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was >>> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. >>> >>> >>> >>>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for >>>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the >>>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. >>> >>> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored >>> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception >>> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions >>> tools in the opposite direction. >>> >>> d/ >>> >>> -- >>> Dave Crocker >>> >>> dhc at dcrocker.net >>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >>> +1.408.329.0791 >>> >>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >>> Northern California Coastal Region >>> Information & Planning Coordinator >>> American Red Cross >>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 12 20:12:59 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 15:12:59 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> John, What actually describes what the IETF is doing to IPv4 is https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6540.html I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. I agree that a few (literally) still believe that transition is the goal, rather than coexistence. Somewhat objectively, over the last 10 years, 5 RFCs mention only IPv4 in their title, 15 mention both IPv4 and IPv6, and 109 mention only IPv6. Given that IPv4 has been stable for many years, these numbers seem unsurprising. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 13-May-26 09:55, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote: > John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very >> entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter >> what. > > I'm shocked that you would say that. > > But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction > through the modern IETF. > >> The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams, >> when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all >> they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. > > This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4. > > They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80% > of the world's Internet traffic! There was a whole "sunset4" WG! > > I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said > that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue > maintaining. Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're > already doing it so there's no need to say so". The result was that no > draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever > adopted by the wg or by the IETF. The factional campaign to kill IPv4 > continues. The whole history is documented in these expired drafts: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01 > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01 > > Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that > straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by > most implementers -- but never written down in a spec. This has been > going on for years and years. And the rest of IETF lets them get away > with it. > > For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983 > because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before > IP broadcast was standardized. This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in > 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else). But > despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122, > 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a > spec. The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast, > nor for anything else. A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address > somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a > unicast host. This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses > throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with > only 6 usable addresses rather than 7). > > I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed > standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's > upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference > (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends). The > implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in > production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021, > Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022. > Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping > 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it > live. But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works -- > because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to > IPv6"!!! See the expired Internet-Draft at: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08 > > It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day". > But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6 > to become such a faction. And the IETF seems to have no working > defenses against such factions. > > John > > PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in > standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the > IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's > monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my > watch". Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the > RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that > time. Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF, > and never have been! From jeanjour at comcast.net Wed May 13 04:14:09 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 07:14:09 -0400 Subject: [ih] Quantifying OSI In-Reply-To: <78c54fc8-0ffa-4da5-aa9a-bfcab9597f96@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <78c54fc8-0ffa-4da5-aa9a-bfcab9597f96@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4AA1DF11-5264-4E21-A0FB-ACF5131E0BEC@comcast.net> Below > On May 12, 2026, at 22:27, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > John, > > On 13-May-26 03:52, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn?t were very entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter what. >> The PTTs absolutely didn?t want a Transport Layer or datagrams, when they couldn?t stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. > > What they wanted, IMHO, was simply to defend their business model, which was charging for long distance calls by distance and duration. X.25 did that, and for entrenched PTTs that really was the only feature of OSI that they cared about: getting X.25 and X.75 accepted as the OSI layer 3. Totally agree. They were defending their business plan. But that didn?t make their opposition any less. The whole virtual circuit vs datagram debate started well before OSI started. But their business plan wasn?t ?just X.25 and X.75?. The big buzzword of the time was ?value-added services in the network?. (Remember that.) They were planning all sorts of applications to be ?in the network? which meant exclusively in their monopoly. Videotex and Minitel were the early examples of what they had in mind. Consequently, it wasn?t just datagrams that they were against. It was an end-to-end Transport Protocol as well. Transport was the major threat to their business model. The existence of a Transport protocol would have precluded that. Not the applications, but being exclusively in their monopoly. This was the real threat. (This was the subject of Pouzin?s infamous presentation in Toronto with a castle labeled PTT and a user hanging from a gallows off one of the parapets.) ;-) The one where when the moderator noted the session was running over time (people were lining the walls for the next session.) Louis asked what he should do and the audience spontaneously yell, ?Go on! Go on!? ;-) Never seen that again.) X.25 and X.75 wasn?t the only issue. So-called ?value-added services? held out the promise of far more revenue and power. It was far more important to them than the network protocols. > > It amounted to restraint of trade, which the European Commission should have resisted, but in fact the relevant part of the EC was largely captured by the PTTs during the 1980s. I think this obsession with X.25 doomed OSI in Europe (and Canada and Japan). That's why the PTTs so vigorously opposed efforts to acquire international leased lines at 2 Mbps and 34 Mbps, and so strongly supported the CCITT/ITU prohibition on customers switching traffic between such lines. That had force of law in many countries. Then the PTTs were still PTTs, i.e. ministries of the government. Could they even have been guilty of restraint of trade? They could do whatever they wanted. > >> It didn?t help that many individuals in European computer companies supported the PTT view. IBM was doing all they could to slow the process down or just plain stonewall it from ever getting off the ground. > > It rather depended which bit of IBM you talked to. In the US they were working on somewhat imaginary OSI/SNA integration and pushing the SNA flavour of datagrams (Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking (APPN)). I don't think the goal was really to support OSI apart from lip service to US-GOSIP, but they did want to perpetuate SNA. Absolutely. It ended up that the solution was to treat TCP as a link layer and run SNA over it or at least that was my interpretation. Or as I often say, ?You can take a peer architecture and subset it to be hierarchical, but you can?t go the other way.? IBM learned that the hardware. (Perhaps if SNA and OS/360 were better structured, they would have had a better chance, but I doubt it.) > In Europe, especially IBM France, they were definitely trying to stay in the good graces of the PTTs and please everybody at the same time. In general, it is interesting how IBM and the PTTs stayed out of each other?s way or tried to for a long time. (You left out the ECMA lunacy of suing IBM for access to the source of LU6.2 and then proposing that LU6.2 replace the upper 3 layers of OSI. It was supposed to be a blow to IBM, when it was just what they wanted. Br?er Rabbit was thrown into briar patch.) > And there was a TCP/IP underground within IBM too. Things only changed in ~1996 when Lou Gerstner and Irving Wladawsky-Berger created IBM's Internet Division (which incidentally hired me away from CERN). > >> Then there were countries who wanted something special apparently just to put their stamp on it. The UK was especially good at this. > > I'd add Germany to that. Agreed. The Germans were responsible for TP3 as I said before. > The British and German research networks (JANET and DFN respectively) were the most insistent on OSI purism. Not sure how purist they were. ;-) At least not from my point of view. > IMHO, it's no coincidence that their leaders (Peter Linington and Klaus Ullmann) were both theoretical physicists by training. (Linington and I were contemporaries at Cambridge, but my major was experimental physics.) Linington and I have known each other a long time. Linington?s focus seemed to be more on the applications. > > But it all blew up by the end of 1989. https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/RARE-TCP-IP-report.txt\\ The die had been cast long before that. John > > Brian > >> From a standards environment there was no way to definitively kill any of these. One had to ?let the market decide.? The 5 classes of Transport was a good example. When the PTTs couldn?t stop there being something, their strategy was to option it to death and they had help: >> TP0 - was for SGVIII who really wanted nothing. you >> TP1 - was for SGVII who used over X.25 without error control (because X.25 was reliable which it wasn?t) >> TP2 - was for the Brits who wanted to multiplex over X.25 (which the PTTs didn?t want) and thought it would be more efficient to not have most error recovery, ignoring that TP4 under the same conditions was just as efficient. They had to have their way. >> TP3 - something for the Germans, I never understood what. >> TP4 - really all that was necessary and all that was needed and an advance over TCP. >> IBM more or less stayed out of that controversy, probably because others were doing their job for them. TP0 - TP3 should have just been ignored. No one with any brains thought they were useful except their faction supporters. >> What I found frustrating was that companies (and individuals) thought they should implement all of it. When it was abundantly clear that that one should only implement CLNP, TP4, collapse the upper 3 layers* into a single layer for modular development of applications and ignore X.400 and X.500. nBasically ignore anything from CCITT. (One amusing CCITT ploy was that since X.25 was not reliable, but they couldn?t admit that anywhere near the Transport Layer just had to have RTSE in the Application Layer to recover the X.25 errors. >> As I have mentioned, I am also mystified that people paid more attention to the CCITT than to what the computer companies were doing in ISO and the US. So far as I know other than the people who worked in both the IETF and OSI on the network layer, no one from the IETF contacted the ANSI work on OSI. Why not? It was clear that CCITT had no idea what they were doing and trying to go backwards instead of forwards. One begins to believe that there was an intent to make it look bad. The actions taken certainly said that. >> Scott Bradner once wrote an Editorial in NetworkWorld blasting OSI for not considering TCP. It seemed a bit odd, since OSI had already accepted as a starting point a proposal whose first author was Vint Cerf. OSI had accepted the recommendation. Or more amusing were the people who said something like ?well, OSI had a Session Layer.? Making obvious that they didn?t know that the OSI Session Layer was not a Session Layer and had been stolen by CCITT SGVIII for Videotex. >> Even when people tried to focus on subsets of OSI in efforts like the NIST Workshops* or COS, they spent more time arguing the same factions the standards committees had argued and not coming to any better conclusions. The NIST Workshops partly suggested by IBM used an age old ploy to further confuse and delay the work by separating the designers from the implementors. The myth was of course that implementors knew more about writing the code that designers. In my experience, it was just the opposite. The designers knew what subtitles had been written into the spec for implementors to take advantage of. The implementors were clueless. (NIST Workshops were often scheduled on top of OSI meetings that prevented designers from attending the Workshop, >> * In 1983, OSI recognized the upper 3 layers were not layers. The existing standards were ?adjusted? so the upper 2 layers could be implemented as basically null and just concentrate on the Application Layer, which was actually very interesting and a major advance over what the Internet was doing. (X.400 and X.500 are not included in that. They were purely CCITT projects with some clueless Americans participating. Much of it was the remnants of the National Software Works project DARPA funded. >> OSI was dealing with a lot of problems that were not present in the Internet. That gave it a much higher hill to climb. It was going to take a lot of shaking out to get there. They were very different. There was no way to simply read the spec and know what to do. (At the same time, we had BSI doing all they could to ensure the specs were not what implementors needed.) Without talking to the people on the ISO side there was no way to know what was really going on. >> Take care, >> John Day >>> On May 12, 2026, at 01:43, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote: >>> >>> Thanks everybody for your contributions and memories on this thread. Very >>> helpful and interesting. >>> >>> As to the comment about how this discourse is akin to shooting a dead >>> horse, I believe we need to learn from history or we will be doomed to >>> repeat it, and sometimes that means shooting a dead horse again. >>> >>> Like many of you, I spent a lot of time looking at OSI. I spent thousands >>> of dollars buying specs and many many hours trying to figure out what this >>> was all about for my book on Decnet Phase V, a book I now think of as >>> "paperware about vaporware." My book on Novell networks certainly sold much >>> better. >>> >>> Best regards, >>> >>> Carl >>> >>> >>> On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 7:58?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Brian, >>>> >>>> On 5/11/2026 7:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>>>> That's true, but it leaves an impression that the OSI community was >>>>> just vapourware, which I don't think is fair. >>>> >>>> Depending on the moment in time and the qualifications for being actual >>>> 'ware', it is absolutely fair. >>>> >>>> Unless the view is that having even the smallest bit of software of any >>>> portion of what is needed makes it not be vaporware. >>>> >>>> It was touted for 15 years as /the/ solution. It delivered, at best, >>>> small bits of capability -- which I won't honor with the classification >>>> of 'utility' -- and never at scale. >>>> >>>> I suppose X.25 might be considered an exception. Except that, really, >>>> that wasn't OSI in terms of what was promoted. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>> The OSI vision was *very* attractive to people (like me) trying to run >>>>> networking services in a multiprotocol world, >>>> >>>> Yes. As I said, it was a very successful marketing campaign. It did >>>> develop market demand. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>> and by the mid-1980s OSI was (apparently) well specified and ready to >>>>> become product. >>>> >>>> Sorry. No. Not by any stretch of operational pragmatics, except, >>>> perhaps, at a department level. And there were many other, better and >>>> more mature choices for that market segment. >>>> >>>> In fact there was a running joke that OSI was repeatedly promised to be >>>> ready 'in two years." I was at a conference in 1990 where Heidi Heiden >>>> was speaking and he noted this running promise. He said that while that >>>> unfortunate history was true, OSI really was almost mature enough for >>>> production deployment and would be available in 1992. I, of course, was >>>> unable to refrain from shouting out a comment on that. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>> It was very disappointing that it wasn't actually ready and fit for >>>>> purpose when we needed it (which was, roughly speaking, 1989, for the >>>>> experiments at LEP, the electron/positron collider). TCP/IP stepped in. >>>> >>>> 1989 was too late. As I've noted before, around that time I explored >>>> customer needs for transitioning from TCP to OSI and without exception >>>> all I heard from our customers was a very strong need for transitions >>>> tools in the opposite direction. >>>> >>>> d/ >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Dave Crocker >>>> >>>> dhc at dcrocker.net >>>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social >>>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social >>>> +1.408.329.0791 >>>> >>>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter >>>> Northern California Coastal Region >>>> Information & Planning Coordinator >>>> American Red Cross >>>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jeanjour at comcast.net Wed May 13 04:37:26 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 07:37:26 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <6D7BA55C-8DE4-423B-8C13-E6D410D411F8@comcast.net> I am a bit confused by this message. As you and I have discussed off-list IPv4 (and IPv6) are broken. There were two fundamental problems that needed to rectified in the early 90s: 1) that hosts are considered part of the network. (This enables multihoming and is a step toward a simple solution to mobility, which you have declared MIPv6 basically dead.) As late as Dave Clark?s book a few years ago, he says hosts are not part of the network. 2) the loss of the Internet Layer which enables and simplifies boany number of issues including creating better security for free. In our discussion, you said that the decision to go with IPv6 was largely based on what was easy for most to understand (longer addresses) and not tackle the two issues above. When it was clear that that was just marking time and the more important issues for the future of the Internet were the two above. We have also discussed how every router on the planet does not follow the either IP specification. Why? As it was explained to me, because ?if we didn?t do it, it wouldn?t work.? Seemed like a good reason to me. Is your view on this, ?out of sight, out of mind?? For the list, the above was explained in more detail in much longer emails between Brian and I. You are playing with statistics, Brian. Counting RFCs that have IPv6 in the title. A lot don?t. I preferred to count the number RFCs issued by the IPv6 group. I gave up when it was clear there were over 500. The fact that this whole discussion began with a proposal by some for an alternative to IPv6 is indicative of the problem. If you remember, I agreed with you that these proposals should not be pursued because they were just patches and didn?t get to the fundamental issues. If any proposal doesn?t address the two points above, there is no need to pursue it. They will prove to be just different morasses than the one you are in. Take care, John > On May 12, 2026, at 23:12, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > John, > > What actually describes what the IETF is doing to IPv4 is > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6540.html > > I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 > will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that > if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. I agree that a few > (literally) still believe that transition is the goal, rather > than coexistence. > > Somewhat objectively, over the last 10 years, 5 RFCs mention > only IPv4 in their title, 15 mention both IPv4 and IPv6, and > 109 mention only IPv6. Given that IPv4 has been stable for many > years, these numbers seem unsurprising. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 13-May-26 09:55, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote: >> John Day via Internet-history wrote: >>> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very >>> entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter >>> what. >> I'm shocked that you would say that. >> But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction >> through the modern IETF. >>> The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams, >>> when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all >>> they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. >> This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4. >> They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80% >> of the world's Internet traffic! There was a whole "sunset4" WG! >> I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said >> that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue >> maintaining. Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're >> already doing it so there's no need to say so". The result was that no >> draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever >> adopted by the wg or by the IETF. The factional campaign to kill IPv4 >> continues. The whole history is documented in these expired drafts: >> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01 >> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01 >> Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that >> straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by >> most implementers -- but never written down in a spec. This has been >> going on for years and years. And the rest of IETF lets them get away >> with it. >> For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983 >> because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before >> IP broadcast was standardized. This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in >> 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else). But >> despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122, >> 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a >> spec. The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast, >> nor for anything else. A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address >> somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a >> unicast host. This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses >> throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with >> only 6 usable addresses rather than 7). >> I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed >> standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's >> upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference >> (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends). The >> implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in >> production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021, >> Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022. >> Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping >> 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it >> live. But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works -- >> because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to >> IPv6"!!! See the expired Internet-Draft at: >> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08 >> It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day". >> But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6 >> to become such a faction. And the IETF seems to have no working >> defenses against such factions. >> John >> >> PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in >> standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the >> IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's >> monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my >> watch". Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the >> RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that >> time. Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF, >> and never have been! From ajs at crankycanuck.ca Wed May 13 10:11:33 2026 From: ajs at crankycanuck.ca (Andrew Sullivan) Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 13:11:33 -0400 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: Hi, On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 05:09:52PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrot >I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) > I have at least two, maybe three, distinct things in mind (it depends on whether you think 3, below, is just a subspecies of one of the other 2) 1. The decision to be as liberal as suggested, above. This extends I think to the general attitude about TCP/IP and the funding of the BSD UNIX TCP/IP stack, which guaranteed the code would be available at least for other researchers. This might even extend to the decision by the military to continue with TCP/IP instead of committing to GOSIP. Partly, as I think has been noted elsewhere in the thread, this was a result of the intellectual property rules about government-funded work of that period. But of course, that just punts the problem a little distance: it was a period where governments were not regarded as a kind of deficient corporate private enterprise, but instead a distinct mode of doing things with expectations about what the upshot of that work would be. After all, when the ARPANET work was getting going, the people funding it must have had some inkling about what it meant for the USG to fund something, even if (as later BBN assertions about ownership tried to say) there was not complete agreement about that meaning. 2. The decision to move the NSFNet out of the way of a burgeoning network of networks that had all manner of commercial traffic, so that the Internet could really take off. I have seen several claims (some on this list but also more strongly elsewhere) to the effect that the increasing traffic on private networks that were sort-of interconnected to the NSFNet had created a problem that could only be resolved the way it was. But that is not true: MILNET didn't draw that conclusion, but instead drew the conclusion that it needed to extract itself from certain kinds of interconnections, and make sure they didn't happen again. It would have been possible (even if less than great) to insist that a network that was just for research was a legitimate thing that needed to be preserved, quite apart from other networks that could be useful to serve commercial needs. When I heard Al Gore talk about this, however, he said that he perceived the opportunity in making this product of (not incidentally, government-funded) research into the basis for the kind of information infrastructure that many people in the era thought to be important. It's also clear from what he said, and also from looking at the historical record, that there was political capital that had to be expended to make things work out as they did. I don't feel especially excited about whether one calls this "priming the pump" as opposed to "giving away": the central point is that rather than reserving the maturing product of government-funded research to the government of the US or even just to the United States, the USG of the day decided that this could all just take off in the market with as little government involvement as needed. (I find the mental experiment of imagining any of that happening in the present age to be an instructive, not to say depressing, lesson.) 3. The plan from the Clinton Administration (finally realized at the end of the Obama Administration) to get the USG out of a special role in the administration of certain parameters of the Net (the so-called IANA transition), which explicitly disclaimed the special status of the USG in the administration of the Internet (indeed, that disclaiming was the very thing Ted Cruz objected to). I think each of these represents a way in which the USG decided that its better role was creating the conditions and, having done so, to stand back and let the newly planted seeds take root and bloom. A different country (say, France with minitel) or a society with different preoccupations about what to do with knowledge (say, a later administration -- can't think of which one off the top of my head) would likely have reacted differently, either from being interested in pursuing control (possibly hegemonic and either primary control within the Administration or maybe primarily national control) or from being interested in extracting the absolute maximum monetary rewards from the system and its operation. It is almost incredible to me that some kind of cartel-like control or enclosure of the Internet didn't happen from the beginning (though I can construct a pretty good argument it's happening now). Much of my life I have witnessed governments take perfectly well-admninistered public goods and hand them over to private operators who do, at best, no better a job but who make everything more expensive. (At worst, those operators actually sabotage the service.) The Internet work didn't go that way, perhaps partly because it was built from individual (already partly self-interested) netowrks. I like to call what happened "giving away" because of the way that constrasts with the usual contemporary narrative about how government "ought to be run like a business." But if people prefer the metaphor of "priming the pump", I don't especially care. It still seems to me to be a remarkably different set of social expectations than what obtains today. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs at crankycanuck.ca From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Wed May 13 13:33:48 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 08:33:48 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <6D7BA55C-8DE4-423B-8C13-E6D410D411F8@comcast.net> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <6D7BA55C-8DE4-423B-8C13-E6D410D411F8@comcast.net> Message-ID: <6e4c31f8-ac23-41f3-a0ec-726b9e411992@gmail.com> > I preferred to count the number RFCs issued by the IPv6 group. I gave up when it was clear there were over 500. The 506 non-obsoleted RFCs whose titles or WG of origin are specific to IPv6 are listed here: https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/20.%20Further%20Reading/RFC%20bibliography.md Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 13-May-26 23:37, John Day wrote: > I am a bit confused by this message. > > As you and I have discussed off-list IPv4 (and IPv6) are broken. There were two fundamental problems that needed to rectified in the early 90s: > 1) that hosts are considered part of the network. (This enables multihoming and is a step toward a simple solution to mobility, which you have declared MIPv6 basically dead.) As late as Dave Clark?s book a few years ago, he says hosts are not part of the network. > 2) the loss of the Internet Layer which enables and simplifies boany number of issues including creating better security for free. > > In our discussion, you said that the decision to go with IPv6 was largely based on what was easy for most to understand (longer addresses) and not tackle the two issues above. When it was clear that that was just marking time and the more important issues for the future of the Internet were the two above. > > We have also discussed how every router on the planet does not follow the either IP specification. Why? As it was explained to me, because ?if we didn?t do it, it wouldn?t work.? Seemed like a good reason to me. Is your view on this, ?out of sight, out of mind?? > > For the list, the above was explained in more detail in much longer emails between Brian and I. > > You are playing with statistics, Brian. Counting RFCs that have IPv6 in the title. A lot don?t. I preferred to count the number RFCs issued by the IPv6 group. I gave up when it was clear there were over 500. The fact that this whole discussion began with a proposal by some for an alternative to IPv6 is indicative of the problem. > > If you remember, I agreed with you that these proposals should not be pursued because they were just patches and didn?t get to the fundamental issues. If any proposal doesn?t address the two points above, there is no need to pursue it. They will prove to be just different morasses than the one you are in. > > Take care, > John > >> On May 12, 2026, at 23:12, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> >> John, >> >> What actually describes what the IETF is doing to IPv4 is >> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6540.html >> >> I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 >> will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that >> if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. I agree that a few >> (literally) still believe that transition is the goal, rather >> than coexistence. >> >> Somewhat objectively, over the last 10 years, 5 RFCs mention >> only IPv4 in their title, 15 mention both IPv4 and IPv6, and >> 109 mention only IPv6. Given that IPv4 has been stable for many >> years, these numbers seem unsurprising. >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On 13-May-26 09:55, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote: >>> John Day via Internet-history wrote: >>>> One of the issues that OSI had that the Internet didn't were very >>>> entrenched factions that were going to have their way no matter >>>> what. >>> I'm shocked that you would say that. >>> But I'd guess you've never tried to get a simple historical correction >>> through the modern IETF. >>>> The PTTs absolutely didn't want a Transport Layer or datagrams, >>>> when they couldn't stop it (the US wanted nothing else) they did all >>>> they could to restrict it and make it something to avoid. >>> This exactly describes what IETF is doing to IPv4. >>> They did actively try to kill it -- while it was carrying more than 80% >>> of the world's Internet traffic! There was a whole "sunset4" WG! >>> I tried to get the IETF intarea wg to simply work on a draft that said >>> that IPv4 is a valid protocol suite that the IETF will continue >>> maintaining. Half of the WG said "no way", the other half said "we're >>> already doing it so there's no need to say so". The result was that no >>> draft was accepted, so no statement that IPv4 remains valid was ever >>> adopted by the wg or by the IETF. The factional campaign to kill IPv4 >>> continues. The whole history is documented in these expired drafts: >>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sunset4-ipv6-ietf-01 >>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01 >>> Meanwhile this IPv6 faction shoots down every other simple proposal that >>> straightens out historical kinks in IPv4 that have already been fixed by >>> most implementers -- but never written down in a spec. This has been >>> going on for years and years. And the rest of IETF lets them get away >>> with it. >>> For example, the lowest address in each subnet was reserved back in 1983 >>> because the 4.2 BSD UNIX release used it as a broadcast address, before >>> IP broadcast was standardized. This was fixed in the 4.3 BSD release in >>> 1986 to use the last address in the subnet (like everyone else). But >>> despite the issue and its resolution being documented in RFCs 1122, >>> 1812, and 3021, the lowest-address restriction was never removed in a >>> spec. The lowest address has never since 1986 been used for broadcast, >>> nor for anything else. A mythology grew up about it that the .0 address >>> somehow referred to "the whole subnet" and couldn't be used for a >>> unicast host. This wastes many millions of perfectly good addresses >>> throughout the Internet, particularly in small subnets like a /29 (with >>> only 6 usable addresses rather than 7). >>> I and implementers wrote a draft that explained the history, proposed >>> standardizing the .0 address as unicast, and demonstrated that it's >>> upward compatible because distant hosts can't even tell the difference >>> (by definition, they don't know where your subnet starts or ends). The >>> implementers have already straightened it all out and it's running in >>> production -- OpenBSD since 2010, NetBSD since 2016, Windows since 2021, >>> Linux since 2021, Fedora and Ubuntu since 2022, Android since 2022. >>> Amazon has been using these addresses in production since 2021; ping >>> 44.192.0.0 or access http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ to check it >>> live. But IETF still refuses to merely document that it works -- >>> because "it would reduce the pressure for Internet sites to move to >>> IPv6"!!! See the expired Internet-Draft at: >>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-08 >>> It's possible that IETF had no entrenched factions "back in the day". >>> But the very slow uptake of IPv6 has caused the people who designed IPv6 >>> to become such a faction. And the IETF seems to have no working >>> defenses against such factions. >>> John >>> >>> PS: In a completely separate incident, there was the 5-year delay in >>> standardizing DNS Security because one or more high-up people in the >>> IETF decided that "no standard that requires the use of Jim Bidzos's >>> monopoly crypto algorithm (RSA) is ever going to be approved on my >>> watch". Despite having a free DNSSEC license for the patent and for the >>> RSA software, and the patent only having three years left to run at that >>> time. Sure, there are no "get our way no matter what" factions in IETF, >>> and never have been! > From gnu at toad.com Thu May 14 10:49:09 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 10:49:09 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> Brian E Carpenter wrote: > I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 > will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that > if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. Brian, I seriously respect your work on IPv6. You and the v6 pioneers have saved the Internet from its success disaster of address exhaustion. But here you are recommending a double standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard If IPv6 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it either. You're not suggesting that IPv6 is broken, nor am I. Yet IPv6 continues to be fixed. IPv6 continues to be fixed by IETF -- and IPv4 doesn't. Neither one is broken. Both should evolve -- are evolving. But not at IETF. John From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Thu May 14 11:03:06 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 18:03:06 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> Message-ID: <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI.? When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity of our last names. BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help.? I know Peter more through music (bassoonist).?? barbara On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the years." During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 g On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > ... > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time.? The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this.? If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today.? (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > >? Brian Carpenter > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > earlier in this thread. > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > services, etc. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > --gregbo > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Thu May 14 15:35:39 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 22:35:39 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people.? I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John Markoff reporting in all the original articles) https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html Then there is this long running case? around the same timeframe https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html Vint is quoted in the link above. John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm This link is more of a retrospective of that event. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. barbara On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:03:06 AM PDT, Barbara Denny wrote: Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI.? When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity of our last names. BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help.? I know Peter more through music (bassoonist).?? barbara On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the years." During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 g On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > ... > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time.? The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this.? If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today.? (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > >? Brian Carpenter > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > earlier in this thread. > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > services, etc. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > --gregbo > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From vgcerf at gmail.com Thu May 14 16:30:09 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 19:30:09 -0400 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I sure do NoT remember that quote!!! v On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 6:36?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people. > I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John > Markoff reporting in all the original articles) > https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html > Then there is this long running case around the same timeframe > > https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html > Vint is quoted in the link above. > John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm > This link is more of a retrospective of that event. > > https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ > This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first > time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. > barbara > On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:03:06 AM PDT, Barbara Denny < > b_a_denny at yahoo.com> wrote: > > Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might > want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI. > When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity > of our last names. > BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help. I know Peter more > through music (bassoonist). > barbara > > On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff > goodfellow via Internet-history > wrote: > > vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: > > The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric > Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, > heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all > of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the > attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the > years." > > During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: > > *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that > contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* > > his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: > > https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 > > g > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > > ... > > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > > cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP < > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example > of > > this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > > what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > > comment.) > > > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs > seem > > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we > poked > > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > > gone by then. > > > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > > > Brian Carpenter > > > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > > earlier in this thread. > > > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, > RFC > > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > > services, etc. > > > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > > > --gregbo > > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > > -- > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com > living as The Truth is True > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jack at 3kitty.org Thu May 14 20:09:45 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 20:09:45 -0700 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: In the 1990s, I remember seeing in various trade press entire articles that I had written - that I had never seen before.? It turned out that ghost-written articles were being written by someone and submitted with my name as author. Weren't there efforts back then to define standards for proving authorship using digital signatures or such stuff...?? What ever happened to that? /Jack Haverty On 5/14/26 16:30, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > I sure do NoT remember that quote!!! > > v > > > On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 6:36?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people. >> I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John >> Markoff reporting in all the original articles) >> https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html >> Then there is this long running case around the same timeframe >> >> https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html >> Vint is quoted in the link above. >> John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm >> This link is more of a retrospective of that event. >> >> https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ >> This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first >> time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. >> barbara >> On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:03:06 AM PDT, Barbara Denny < >> b_a_denny at yahoo.com> wrote: >> >> Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might >> want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI. >> When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity >> of our last names. >> BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help. I know Peter more >> through music (bassoonist). >> barbara >> >> On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff >> goodfellow via Internet-history >> wrote: >> >> vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: >> >> The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric >> Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, >> heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all >> of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the >> attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the >> years." >> >> During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: >> >> *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that >> contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* >> >> his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: >> >> https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 >> >> g >> >> On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < >>> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: >>>> On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: >>>> ... >>>>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG >>> had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet >>> technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards >>> cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP < >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example >> of >>> this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to >>> tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become >>> what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would >>> welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to >>> comment.) >>>> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much >>> more than cryptography, of course)? >>>> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase >>> "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite >>> liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs >> seem >>> have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many >>> years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via >>> DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) >>>> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA >>> and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we >> poked >>> the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was >>> gone by then. >>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>> Brian Carpenter >>> From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups >>> dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. >>> One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned >>> earlier in this thread. >>> >>> When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of >>> discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, >> RFC >>> 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness >>> about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and >>> services, etc. >>> >>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm >>> [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 >>> [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 >>> >>> --gregbo >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> -- >> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com >> living as The Truth is True >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Thu May 14 20:43:54 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 03:43:54 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <347405611.2169657.1778816634106@mail.yahoo.com> Maybe i should also mention CMU's CERT (It isn't an acronym anymore for this organization).? It began in 1998 as part of CMU's SEI (Software Engineering Institute).? I think? activities in cybersecurity started earlier there so dates might be confusing. The SEI is an FFRDC. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/divisions/cert/#history If you are interested in learning more about the organization, this link also contains a link to their yearly report. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/news/2025-year-in-review-highlights-sei-impact-in-software-cyber-ai-and-acquisition-for-national-security/ barbara On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 04:30:25 PM PDT, vinton cerf wrote: I sure do NoT remember that quote!!! v On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 6:36?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: ?Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people.? I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John Markoff reporting in all the original articles) https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html Then there is this long running case? around the same timeframe https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html Vint is quoted in the link above. John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm This link is more of a retrospective of that event. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. barbara ? ? On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:03:06 AM PDT, Barbara Denny wrote:? ? Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI.? When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity of our last names. BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help.? I know Peter more through music (bassoonist).?? barbara ? ? On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote:? ?vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the years." During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 g On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > ... > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time.? The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this.? If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today.? (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > >? Brian Carpenter > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > earlier in this thread. > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > services, etc. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > --gregbo > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Thu May 14 21:57:11 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 16:57:11 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: On 15-May-26 05:49, John Gilmore wrote: > Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 >> will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that >> if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. > > Brian, I seriously respect your work on IPv6. You and the v6 pioneers > have saved the Internet from its success disaster of address exhaustion. > But here you are recommending a double standard: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard > > If IPv6 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it either. > > You're not suggesting that IPv6 is broken, nor am I. Yet IPv6 continues > to be fixed. Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small and medium enterprises. CIDR and BGP4 scale pretty well, but not for tens of millions of multihomed sites. And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig. Apart from that, I would have to do a lot of work to classify which of those IPv6 related drafts are fixes to IPv6, which are about IPv4/IPv6 coexistence, and which are evolution. What I can tell you is that the rate of IPv6-related RFCs per kiloRFC peaked a few years ago, in the RFC 6000-6999 series (16 on coexistence, 86 on IPv6 alone, or about 10% of the IETF's output). In the current RFC9000-9999 series, which is almost done, we so far have 4 on coexistence, 49 on IPv6 as such. Or, about 5% of the IETF's output. Brian > > IPv6 continues to be fixed by IETF -- and IPv4 doesn't. > > Neither one is broken. > > Both should evolve -- are evolving. But not at IETF. > > John > From tony1athome at gmail.com Thu May 14 22:32:28 2026 From: tony1athome at gmail.com (Tony Li) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 22:32:28 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Hi Brian, >> Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the > ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged > in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to > support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small > and medium enterprises. ILNP was the best answer to that question and works well. All we have to do is say yes. Tony From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Thu May 14 22:39:36 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 22:39:36 -0700 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1B2558BD-1417-48C1-BF45-D47101FA5406@icloud.com> On May 14, 2026, at 3:35?PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: > > Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people. > I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John Markoff reporting in all the original articles) > https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html > Then there is this long running case around the same timeframe > https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html > Vint is quoted in the link above. > John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm > This link is more of a retrospective of that event. > https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ > This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. > barbara A few months before the Morris worm incident, Geoff Goodfellow posted an article to the RISKS digest written by John Markoff and Andrew Pollack that mentioned an investigation of Kevin Poulsen for phone tampering. [1] (Kevin Poulsen was an SRI employee. [2]) --gregbo [1] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/26#subj4 [2] https://computerhistory.org/profile/kevin-poulsen/ From otroan at employees.org Thu May 14 23:35:21 2026 From: otroan at employees.org (Ole Troan) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 08:35:21 +0200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Message-ID: >>> Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the >> ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged >> in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to >> support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small >> and medium enterprises. > > > ILNP was the best answer to that question and works well. All we have to do is say yes. Yes, definitely. One thing ILNP is not good at is network-based multi-homing. Allowing the network to do the path selection. I.e. rewrite locators at the network edge. The current NAT based solution does actually solve that problem well (while creating others). The entrenched part of the IETF can of course not accept that, because it would undermine their whole ?value-system?. Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? Ole From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Fri May 15 00:14:40 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 00:14:40 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Message-ID: On May 14, 2026, at 11:35?PM, Ole Troan via Internet-history wrote: > > One thing ILNP is not good at is network-based multi-homing. Allowing the network to do the path selection. I.e. rewrite locators at the network edge. > > The current NAT based solution does actually solve that problem well (while creating others). The entrenched part of the IETF can of course not accept that, because it would undermine their whole ?value-system?. > > Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? > > Ole > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history I wasn?t involved, but the issue was debated on the big-internet and sipp lists during the 1990s. Search for ?8+8?. --gregbo From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 15 00:26:53 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 19:26:53 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <7f6b1190-5150-45f1-a249-c83a6237eb50@gmail.com> On 15-May-26 18:35, Ole Troan wrote: >>>> Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the >>> ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged >>> in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to >>> support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small >>> and medium enterprises. >> >> >> ILNP was the best answer to that question and works well. All we have to do is say yes. > > Yes, definitely. > One thing ILNP is not good at is network-based multi-homing. Allowing the network to do the path selection. I.e. rewrite locators at the network edge. > > The current NAT based solution does actually solve that problem well (while creating others). The entrenched part of the IETF can of course not accept that, because it would undermine their whole ?value-system?. I could name names, but I think the operational part of the IPv6 community has mainly got over that. My personal opinion is, given that ILNP seems to lack those thrust rockets, is that NPTv6 (prefix translation) is the least bad option. (It's actually a little bit like customer-edge ILNP. Or maybe a *lot* like. It's clearly a loc/id separation solution. It's been in Linux since kernel 3.7.) > Back to history. This is a case where history sheds light on current problems. > IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? IMHO, the "too hard" bucket intervened. I'm among the guilty. Brian > > Ole From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Fri May 15 01:49:14 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 08:49:14 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <347405611.2169657.1778816634106@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> <841621712.1993992.1778781786005@mail.yahoo.com> <1116684221.2112466.1778798139015@mail.yahoo.com> <347 405611.2169657.1778816634106@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1913491189.2208804.1778834954267@mail.yahoo.com> I had a little bit more time to search further. The CERT Coordination Center at CMU's SEI was established in November 1988 in response to the Morris worm at DARPA's direction according to wikipedia.? i think it is the CERT division that was founded in 1998. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERT_Coordination_Center The wiki entry goes into more detail regarding? the relationship with other computer security incident groups including US-CERT (sounds like now part of Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency/DHS instead of the SEI)? . barbara On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 08:44:02 PM PDT, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: Maybe i should also mention CMU's CERT (It isn't an acronym anymore for this organization).? It began in 1998 as part of CMU's SEI (Software Engineering Institute).? I think? activities in cybersecurity started earlier there so dates might be confusing. The SEI is an FFRDC. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/divisions/cert/#history If you are interested in learning more about the organization, this link also contains a link to their yearly report. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/news/2025-year-in-review-highlights-sei-impact-in-software-cyber-ai-and-acquisition-for-national-security/ barbara ? ? On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 04:30:25 PM PDT, vinton cerf wrote:? I sure do NoT remember that quote!!! v On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 6:36?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: ?Not sure what you were thinking when you said serious and which people.? I imagine many people aren't familiar with this law case (Note John Markoff reporting in all the original articles) https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/08/us/hacker-indicted-on-spy-charges.html Then there is this long running case? around the same timeframe https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hackstock/950217hacker-case-underscores.html Vint is quoted in the link above. John Markoff also covered the Morris Worm This link is more of a retrospective of that event. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/06/1988-the-internet-comes-down-with-a-virus/ This article also claims the Markoff piece on the Morris worm is the first time the Internet is mentioned in the NY Times. barbara ? ? On Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 11:03:06 AM PDT, Barbara Denny wrote:? ? Another name popped up into my head whose works on security you might want to look into is Dorothy Denning. She also spent some time at SRI.? When I first got to SRI, she was mentioned to me because of the similarity of our last names. BTW, if you can't reach Peter I might be able to help.? I know Peter more through music (bassoonist).?? barbara ? ? On Monday, May 11, 2026 at 04:51:19 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote:? ?vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the years." During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 g On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > > ... > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG > had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet > technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards > cryptographic technology at that time.? The history of PGP < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of > this.? If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to > tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become > what they are today.? (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would > welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to > comment.) > > > > When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much > more than cryptography, of course)? > > > > It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase > "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite > liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem > have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many > years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via > DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) > > > > Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA > and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked > the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was > gone by then. > > > > Regards/Ng? mihi > >? Brian Carpenter > > From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups > dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. > One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned > earlier in this thread. > > When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of > discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC > 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness > about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and > services, etc. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm > [2] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 > [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 > > --gregbo > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ? -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From ocl at gih.com Fri May 15 02:27:54 2026 From: ocl at gih.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Olivier_MJ_Cr=C3=A9pin-Leblond?=) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 10:27:54 +0100 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: References: <2e6620f3-22cb-4c83-ba52-a1e6f9014415@3kitty.org> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <6B7708BE-A671-4A28-A808-073D01F715E6@icloud.com> Message-ID: <7522e90f-6e64-47d7-a2e0-d2b02f3d55ed@gih.com> Ah, the Morris Worm - we in the UK running on JANET CBS+X.25, thus *not* TCP-IP, saw this happen in real time until the whole TCP-IP Internet was shut down. The one article that I remember as having a high impact was the report from Jon Rochlis and Mark Eichin from MIT - With microscope and tweezers: the worm from MIT's perspective, published in June 1989. (but it circulated around the 'net a few months before) You can find it at: the Proceeds of the ACM - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/63526.63528 Kindest regards, Olivier On 12/05/2026 00:50, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > vis-a-vis the Morris worm released in November 1988: > > The Berkeley Hillside Club on Feb 24, 2022 had a Fireside Meeting with Eric > Allman -- the programmer who developed sendmail "... about those early, > heady days as electronic communication began to be an essential part of all > of our lives. This conversation will discuss the origins of sendmail, the > attitudes of the time, and how the Internet grew and changed over the > years." > > During this Fireside Meetings Q&A yours truly asked Eric: > > *"Could you give some backstory about the sendmail DEBUG command that > contributed to the Morris Internet Worm incident of 1988?"* > > his backstory reply is queued below at the 51:15 minute mark: > > https://youtu.be/j6h-jCxtSDA?si=EepWGNh4Yv5ckv1l&t=3075 > > g > > On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:10?PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> On May 10, 2026, at 9:31?PM, Brian E Carpenter < >> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: >>> On 11-May-26 12:09, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: >>> ... >>>> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG >> had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet >> technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards >> cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of >> this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to >> tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become >> what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would >> welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to >> comment.) >>> When did people start to think seriously about security (which is much >> more than cryptography, of course)? >>> It was RFC 1311 (March 1992) that introduced the infamous phrase >> "Security issues are not discussed in this memo" which was used quite >> liberally for a long time. "Security Considerations" sections in RFCs seem >> have become normal around 1989, but most of them were very weak for many >> years. (At CERN, we saw elementary attacks from about 1986, mainly via >> DECNET, and we first appointed a network security person in about 1988.) >>> Of course, by the time the PGP mess came along, it was clear that NSA >> and its friends were taking a lot of interest in the Internet, and we poked >> the hornet's nest in the mid-1990s with RFC 1984. But DARPA funding was >> gone by then. >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >> From what I remember, there were various mailing lists and newsgroups >> dating back (at least) to the 1980s where security issues were discussed. >> One list, the RISKS digest, is maintained by Peter Neumann< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_G._Neumann>, who was mentioned >> earlier in this thread. >> >> When the Morris worm was released in November 1988, it sparked a lot of >> discussion on many lists, such as the RISKS digest. [1] [2] Eventually, RFC >> 1135 was written about it. [3] IMO, that incident raised consciousness >> about security among IETF people, implementors of network protocols and >> services, etc. >> >> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm >> [2]https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/7/69 >> [3]https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 >> >> --gregbo >> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> From sob at sobco.com Fri May 15 05:28:39 2026 From: sob at sobco.com (Scott Bradner) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 08:28:39 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <13D456FE-A687-4A7B-8C47-29634415A931@sobco.com> > On May 15, 2026, at 2:35?AM, Ole Troan via Internet-history wrote: ... > > Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? as I recall, the message I got back from Beth meeting where Mike discussed the proposal was that it broke multicast but at the time, I thought that the underlying reason was closer to Brian's "too hard" (i.e. required too much thinking) Scott From sob at sobco.com Fri May 15 05:36:51 2026 From: sob at sobco.com (Scott Bradner) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 08:36:51 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <13D456FE-A687-4A7B-8C47-29634415A931@sobco.com> References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> <13D456FE-A687-4A7B-8C47-29634415A931@sobco.com> Message-ID: <58C688A2-28C7-45EE-AD94-F7286633A348@sobco.com> s/Beth/the/ (thanks Apple) > On May 15, 2026, at 8:28?AM, Scott Bradner via Internet-history wrote: > > > >> On May 15, 2026, at 2:35?AM, Ole Troan via Internet-history wrote: > ... >> >> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? > > as I recall, the message I got back from Beth meeting where Mike discussed the proposal was that it broke multicast but at the time, I thought that the underlying reason > was closer to Brian's "too hard" (i.e. required too much thinking) > > Scott > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From bill.n1vux at gmail.com Sat May 9 13:11:55 2026 From: bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker) Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 16:11:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] Happy MAP Birthday Message-ID: Happy Michael A Padlipsky Birthday to those who celebrate! (Or, as MAP would say, muted cheers.) -- Bill, Literary Estate of MAP From bill.n1vux at gmail.com Mon May 11 13:37:52 2026 From: bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:37:52 -0400 Subject: [ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area? In-Reply-To: <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> References: <6395744C-A819-4455-8F84-8B599BF00CC4@isoc.org> <101B2BDF-63AB-4198-A7ED-4139A2B93916@icloud.com> <541A392D-8979-4038-BA0D-0DE3A22AD8D7@isoc.org> Message-ID: While the tech/admin details in UUCP-MAP entries are valuable history (and someone has saved 1987-1992 on GitHub https://github.com/encse/uucp-map which extends the 1984 and 1985 entries available in netnews archives), there were also text-as-graphics logical, graphical maps of the network, usually described as "Usenet maps" (because they were more end-user oriented than the point-to-point transport & management details of UUCP-MAP, even tho' they described (usually) Mail, News, and File flows). Two useful collections (there likely are more?) are https://stargatemuseum.org/maps/ https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/historical.html (scroll or FIND past Arpanet maps to "USENET in 1981" // bill in boston, this time NOT speaking for the Literary Estate of MAP On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 3:52?PM Dan York via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Greg, > > Thanks for the detective work! Comments inline? > > On May 11, 2026, at 2:06?PM, Greg Skinner wrote: > > I was able to find several entries for ?srbci? with the Google Groups > query https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=srbci. > > ???? Brilliant! Of course that would be a logical way to search! > > From the looks of several of these entries, such as the following, ?mv? > was a UUCP neighbor of ?srbci?. > > Yes, my recollection is that it was our *only* neighbor. Everything we > sent/received went through mv. > > This part? > > # Outgoing calls: > mv decvax(DIRECT+HIGH), ditka(EVENING+FAST), harvard(EVENING+FAST), > jjmhome(EVENING) > # > # Incoming calls: > mv balrog(DAILY), > contek(POLLED), (DIRECT+FAST), ctedge(DIRECT), > (DIRECT), (WEEKLY), (DIRECT), > (DIRECT), lemuria(DIRECT+FAST), (DIRECT), > midnight(DAILY+FAST), (DIRECT), > (DAILY), (DIRECT), > (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (WEEKLY/2), > (DIRECT), (DIRECT), > (DIRECT), (WEEKLY+FAST), > (DIRECT), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), > (EVENING+FAST), (DIRECT), (DIRECT), > (DIRECT) > # > # Misc reverse definitions: > harvard mv(EVENING) > decvax mv(DIRECT+HIGH) > > ? makes me think that perhaps my memory of the ?mit? part of the bang-path > may be faulty. I might have had the ?vax? part right but the owner wrong. > Perhaps the address was ?decvax!mv!srbci!ldy?. > > 'mit-vax' could have been an undocumented UUCP neighbor of ?mv?. It > appears on USENET maps from the 1980s available by issuing a similar Google > Groups query in net.news.map. > > It could have been. It also could be a complete fabrication of my brain > 30+ years later. > > This conversation also reminds me that what I really should is simply > reach out to Mark Mallett, who used to run MV Communications, and ask him! > ?I do have some contact info for him. > > Many thanks, Greg! > > Dan > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Bill Ricker bill.n1vux at gmail.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux From gnu at toad.com Fri May 15 10:50:12 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 10:50:12 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> Brian E Carpenter wrote: > And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this > does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more > powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig. This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic cable covering a similar distance. I suggest that Moore's Law is what distinguishes the NASA rockets of the 1960's era from SpaceX's reusable rockets of the 2020's. Now they have complex processors throughout, and can manage hairy maneuvers themselves, most importantly a soft landing back on Earth. This vastly reduces the cost of launching the Starlink satellites into orbit to catch and relay those packets, making the whole project economically feasible. (Compare with the rapidly bankrupt Iridium effort, which used conventional rockets.) And if you haven't seen how a Starlink base station works -- it's a triumph of Moore's Law. The Starlink dish is a ~1,200-element phased array achieving ~33-34 dBi antenna gain, comparable to a 60 cm satellite TV dish but with electronic beam steering that can track satellites and execute handoffs in microseconds. SpaceX achieved consumer pricing through aggressive silicon integration (reducing beamformer chips from ~80 to ~6 between Gen 1 and Gen 3), hybrid PCB materials (mixing expensive RF laminates with cheap FR-4), and software-defined calibration. Manufacturing cost is estimated at ~$400. See this analysis: https://abgoyal.com/posts/starlink-dish-rf-deep-dive/ John PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. From johnl at iecc.com Fri May 15 11:23:57 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 15 May 2026 18:23:57 -0000 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5E <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5E <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> According to John Gilmore via Internet-history : >This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light >varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of >delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and >vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic >cable covering a similar distance. That used to be true, but now there's hollow core fiber where the signal goes through air rather than glass. I understand it also is lower loss than conventional glass fiber so it needs fewer repeaters. See, for example https://www.nokia.com/blog/hollow-core-fiber-not-just-for-low-latency/ R's, John -- Regards, John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly From vgcerf at gmail.com Fri May 15 11:45:30 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 14:45:30 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> Message-ID: john is correct about hollow core - still somewhat limited by how long a strand can be produced but probably good for internal data center vs subsea cables. v On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 2:24?PM John Levine via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > According to John Gilmore via Internet-history : > >This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light > >varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of > >delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and > >vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic > >cable covering a similar distance. > > That used to be true, but now there's hollow core fiber where the signal > goes through air rather than glass. I understand it also is lower loss > than conventional glass fiber so it needs fewer repeaters. > > See, for example > https://www.nokia.com/blog/hollow-core-fiber-not-just-for-low-latency/ > > R's, > John > -- > Regards, > John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for > Dummies", > Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Fri May 15 13:19:30 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 16:19:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? Message-ID: <20260515201930.1318318C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Brian E Carpenter > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed ... We don't know > how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens > of millions of small and medium enterprises. I thought about that pretty extensively at one time - let me see if I can remember my thoughts about it. Basically, TANSTAAFL. Site multi-homing gives benefits; benefits usually aren't free; somebody has to pay. My recollection is that trying to get the path-selection subsystem to do all the work needed to support widespread site multi-homing (with just single locators for things in the multi-homed site) is just too expensive. (That's because path selection for such destinations has to happen over a wider area of the network connectivity graph - so traffic can take multiple paths to get to them. Of course, the current Internet doesn't even _have_ a general Abstraction Action Boundary mechanism, so once the visibility of a topological abstraction spreads beyond a local area - say, its Abstraction Naming Boundary - it has to be globally visible. So millions of small multi-homed enterprises means millions of globally visible destinations, with Internet-wide path-selection overhead costs for them all.) In an internet using a Destination Vector path-selection subsystem, one has to do it with multiple locators. (In other words, multiple Abstraction Naming Boundaries overlapping over each multi-homed site.) That allows one to have less globally visible topological abstractions. Then the name->locator translation database system has to return all the multiple locators for any given multi-homeddestination - and the entity looking it up has to pick the one it is going to use. Yes, more expensive - but, like I said, TANSTAAFL. In an internet using a Map Distribution path-selection subsystem, one can hand out a small, more detailed, local map. (This is basically what people do on the roads, when they are going to a multi-homed road destination.) There are a whole bunch of complications havind to do with pat set-up/installation but I'm going to pass over them because I doubt anyone cares. Noel From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 15 13:37:18 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 08:37:18 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <470969ea-4732-4f9e-a236-c8707a10d720@gmail.com> > PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with > why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. It's to do with the fact that if the rate of BGP4 updates increases dramatically, as it would if we were trying to multihome tens of millions of enterprises, they would still have to be propagated at the speed of light. Moore's law could presumably provide for storage and processing of those millions of BGP routes but only after the updates make it to every default router. It's unclear that BGP routing could ever converge at that scale. Tony Li should be answering your question, not me, however. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 16-May-26 05:50, John Gilmore wrote: > Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this >> does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more >> powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig. > > This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light > varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of > delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and > vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic > cable covering a similar distance. > > I suggest that Moore's Law is what distinguishes the NASA rockets of the > 1960's era from SpaceX's reusable rockets of the 2020's. Now they have > complex processors throughout, and can manage hairy maneuvers > themselves, most importantly a soft landing back on Earth. This vastly > reduces the cost of launching the Starlink satellites into orbit to > catch and relay those packets, making the whole project economically > feasible. (Compare with the rapidly bankrupt Iridium effort, which used > conventional rockets.) > > And if you haven't seen how a Starlink base station works -- it's a > triumph of Moore's Law. The Starlink dish is a ~1,200-element phased > array achieving ~33-34 dBi antenna gain, comparable to a 60 cm satellite > TV dish but with electronic beam steering that can track satellites and > execute handoffs in microseconds. SpaceX achieved consumer pricing > through aggressive silicon integration (reducing beamformer chips from > ~80 to ~6 between Gen 1 and Gen 3), hybrid PCB materials (mixing > expensive RF laminates with cheap FR-4), and software-defined > calibration. Manufacturing cost is estimated at ~$400. See this > analysis: > > https://abgoyal.com/posts/starlink-dish-rf-deep-dive/ > > John > > PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with > why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. From karl at iwl.com Fri May 15 13:50:00 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 13:50:00 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5E <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> Message-ID: <038fdd65-3d1b-41c3-8938-c796af07095b@iwl.com> I've had vacuum filled fiber on my catalog of bogus network products for several years. ? ? ?https://www.cavebear.com/cb_catalog/current/fastfiber/ I thought that vacuum filled fiber would remain a joke - but flash traders are willing to invest in many things and the more I internally reflect on the state of fiber optics I ought to have more quickly realized that filling a fiber with nothing would eventually become a real thing. Maybe I can get 'em to invest in our relativistic network links from the Interop net of 1998... it remains rather bogus... ? ? ?https://www.cavebear.com/cb_catalog/techno/gaganet/ On 5/15/26 11:23 AM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote: > According to John Gilmore via Internet-history : >> This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light >> varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of >> delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and >> vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic >> cable covering a similar distance. > That used to be true, but now there's hollow core fiber where the signal > goes through air rather than glass. I understand it also is lower loss > than conventional glass fiber so it needs fewer repeaters. > > See, for example > https://www.nokia.com/blog/hollow-core-fiber-not-just-for-low-latency/ > > R's, > John From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 15 14:53:45 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 09:53:45 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <470969ea-4732-4f9e-a236-c8707a10d720@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <470969ea-4732-4f9e-a236-c8707a10d720@gmail.com> Message-ID: <285d9189-279d-4d75-b5c9-9629de9388aa@gmail.com> Of course, I meant "every default-free router". Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 16-May-26 08:37, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with >> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. > > It's to do with the fact that if the rate of BGP4 updates increases > dramatically, as it would if we were trying to multihome tens of > millions of enterprises, they would still have to be propagated > at the speed of light. Moore's law could presumably provide for > storage and processing of those millions of BGP routes but only > after the updates make it to every default router. It's unclear > that BGP routing could ever converge at that scale. Tony Li > should be answering your question, not me, however. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 16-May-26 05:50, John Gilmore wrote: >> Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>> And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this >>> does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more >>> powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig. >> >> This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light >> varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of >> delivery of packets. Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and >> vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic >> cable covering a similar distance. >> >> I suggest that Moore's Law is what distinguishes the NASA rockets of the >> 1960's era from SpaceX's reusable rockets of the 2020's. Now they have >> complex processors throughout, and can manage hairy maneuvers >> themselves, most importantly a soft landing back on Earth. This vastly >> reduces the cost of launching the Starlink satellites into orbit to >> catch and relay those packets, making the whole project economically >> feasible. (Compare with the rapidly bankrupt Iridium effort, which used >> conventional rockets.) >> >> And if you haven't seen how a Starlink base station works -- it's a >> triumph of Moore's Law. The Starlink dish is a ~1,200-element phased >> array achieving ~33-34 dBi antenna gain, comparable to a 60 cm satellite >> TV dish but with electronic beam steering that can track satellites and >> execute handoffs in microseconds. SpaceX achieved consumer pricing >> through aggressive silicon integration (reducing beamformer chips from >> ~80 to ~6 between Gen 1 and Gen 3), hybrid PCB materials (mixing >> expensive RF laminates with cheap FR-4), and software-defined >> calibration. Manufacturing cost is estimated at ~$400. See this >> analysis: >> >> https://abgoyal.com/posts/starlink-dish-rf-deep-dive/ >> >> John >> >> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with >> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. From johnl at iecc.com Fri May 15 15:03:42 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 15 May 2026 18:03:42 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <038fdd65-3d1b-41c3-8938-c796af07095b@iwl.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <038fdd65-3d1b-41c3-8938-c796af07095b@iwl.com> Message-ID: <20260515220342.98C3F10A7D828@ary.qy> It appears that Karl Auerbach via Internet-history said: >I've had vacuum filled fiber on my catalog of bogus network products for >several years. I wouldn't disagree, but the core of hollow core fiber usually contains air or an inert gas, so I don't see how it's relevant. The refractive index of air is 1.0003 so the speed difference vs vacuum is insignificant. R's, John From karl at iwl.com Fri May 15 17:30:31 2026 From: karl at iwl.com (Karl Auerbach) Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 17:30:31 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <20260515220342.98C3F10A7D828@ary.qy> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <10u7obt$13kj$2@gal.iecc.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <038fdd65-3d1b-41c3-8938-c796af07095b@iwl.com> <20260515220342.98C3F10A7D828@ary.qy> Message-ID: <07e08832-74f1-42ff-a50b-46d5a07327f2@iwl.com> Thanks, I had not known that the real-life non-glass filled fiber had a gas filler instead. One under-explored aspect of Internet history are the opportunities that have existed for fake or useless products (as jokes.) John Romkey did a Brain Wave Transfer Protocol - and I don't think it was an April 1 thing.? And our Internet toasters were real (and worked!) And one of the joys of a bogus catalog is that I don't actually have to build the stuff or make it work. I think one of the things that helped the Internet take off was that most of us seem to have a sense of humor - something notably absent from some other networking communities. One of the claimed benefits of my hypothetical vacuum filled fiber was that one could introduce a bit of neon, apply enough voltage, and get a very visual form - Las Vegas mode - of cable tracing.? ;-) (In real life I've spent too many days and nights crawling around through unpleasant spaces [particularly in damp and wet vaults under the streets of downtown San Francisco] trying to figure out which cable is which and were they go.? But I'll chose to work in a damp/cold tunnel rather than on top of a very tall, shaking snorkel lift.) One of my other bogus products, the Maximum Momentum Router, winds up outgoing packets to speeds that could blow a hole in an unprotected wall. ? ? ?https://www.cavebear.com/cb_catalog/current/maxmoment/ ? ? ? ? --karl-- On 5/15/26 3:03 PM, John Levine wrote: > It appears that Karl Auerbach via Internet-history said: >> I've had vacuum filled fiber on my catalog of bogus network products for >> several years. > I wouldn't disagree, but the core of hollow core fiber usually > contains air or an inert gas, so I don't see how it's relevant. The > refractive index of air is 1.0003 so the speed difference vs vacuum is > insignificant. > > R's, > John From dhc at dcrocker.net Fri May 15 17:44:09 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 00:44:09 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <20260515201930.1318318C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260515201930.1318318C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <67c2612a-9a1c-4a6b-9b0a-42b0427261d0@dcrocker.net> On 5/15/2026 1:19 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: > > From: Brian E Carpenter > > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed ... We don't know > > how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens > > of millions of small and medium enterprises. > > ... > > Basically, TANSTAAFL. Site multi-homing gives benefits; benefits usually > aren't free; somebody has to pay. Since I found myself with an operational activity from my home and my ISP went out for some day and my cell-phone fallback was not up to the task, I bought an OTC router that permits multi-homing and got an account with a second ISP.? (And per my insight of some decades ago, I have both be active, rather than have the second be on hot standby and hopefully start performing when it is needed.) The multi-homed router does NAT, so my internal hosts don't see any functional -- or even addressing -- difference depending on which ISP is used for a connection. This does provide simple, cheap, useful operational redundancy. What it does not do is maintain a connection across an ISP failure. Back when this topic was active 25-30 years ago, I suggested putting a shim between the app and TCP, providing an appearance of a TCP connection to the app, but mapping it down to multiple, alternative connections over different ISPs. This could then be robust and maintain a TCP connection across ISP failures. When I was researching this, I discovered that the design of TLS is actually of an extensible session layer, which probably would make possible to do a design that could be deployed as just an upgrade to the TLS software. Never got any interest in the approach. And from what I recall, neither did any other approach.? This suggests that the Internet is simply much too reliable to motivate people for an additional robustness layer... d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 15 18:04:58 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian Carpenter) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 13:04:58 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <67c2612a-9a1c-4a6b-9b0a-42b0427261d0@dcrocker.net> References: <20260515201930.1318318C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <67c2612a-9a1c-4a6b-9b0a-42b0427261d0@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: SHIM6 did that, Happy Eyeballs does some of it. It is the real reason for having a session layer. (via tiny screen & keyboard) Regards, Brian Carpenter On Sat, 16 May 2026, 12:44 Dave Crocker via Internet-history, < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 5/15/2026 1:19 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: > > > From: Brian E Carpenter > > > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed ... We don't > know > > > how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for > tens > > > of millions of small and medium enterprises. > > > > ... > > > > Basically, TANSTAAFL. Site multi-homing gives benefits; benefits usually > > aren't free; somebody has to pay. > > > Since I found myself with an operational activity from my home and my > ISP went out for some day and my cell-phone fallback was not up to the > task, I bought an OTC router that permits multi-homing and got an > account with a second ISP. (And per my insight of some decades ago, I > have both be active, rather than have the second be on hot standby and > hopefully start performing when it is needed.) > > The multi-homed router does NAT, so my internal hosts don't see any > functional -- or even addressing -- difference depending on which ISP is > used for a connection. > > This does provide simple, cheap, useful operational redundancy. > > What it does not do is maintain a connection across an ISP failure. > > Back when this topic was active 25-30 years ago, I suggested putting a > shim between the app and TCP, providing an appearance of a TCP > connection to the app, but mapping it down to multiple, alternative > connections over different ISPs. This could then be robust and maintain > a TCP connection across ISP failures. > > When I was researching this, I discovered that the design of TLS is > actually of an extensible session layer, which probably would make > possible to do a design that could be deployed as just an upgrade to the > TLS software. > > Never got any interest in the approach. > > And from what I recall, neither did any other approach. This suggests > that the Internet is simply much too reliable to motivate people for an > additional robustness layer... > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From dhc at dcrocker.net Fri May 15 18:28:21 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 01:28:21 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <20260515201930.1318318C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <67c2612a-9a1c-4a6b-9b0a-42b0427261d0@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <0b02088c-3250-46c6-9df0-6837832eacdb@dcrocker.net> On 5/15/2026 6:04 PM, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > SHIM6 did that, Happy Eyeballs does some of it. It is the real reason for > having a session layer. While any computer science problem can be aided by the addition of a layer of indirection, deciding where to place that layer is important.? And often the best choice is not obvious. Shim6 is down at the IP level below TCP.? My suggestion was above TCP and below apps, with a TCP emulation and mapping. (I think a fatal problem with my proposal was the operational requirement to configure firewalls to permit this additional 'transport' layer through.) Going the other direction, around 1993/94 there was a proposal to multiplex telnet sessions to the same server, from the same terminal concentrator.? The original proposal would have allowed one telnet session to block another.? I proposed inserting the multiplexing farther /down/ so that each session had its own TCP connection.? RFC 1692 d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Fri May 15 20:29:25 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 15:29:25 +1200 Subject: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <9a07aece-93bb-42bf-96c5-eb8ee2ac11cd@gmail.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <1f05264f-db7f-40ad-b7b9-45ea1168c463@iwl.com> <10C7714C-79F3-421C-AA94-C18B8B155ED7@icloud.com> Message-ID: <15a536fc-c2d5-4dcb-aab3-73d7f6847179@gmail.com> > (say, a later administration -- can't think of which one off the top of my head) IMNSHO, what Magaziner/Gore/Clinton did was to apply strongly libertarian principles to the Internet - let a thousand flowers bloom, and don't worry if some of them turn out to be pernicious weeds. Certainly, no US Administration since then has reversed this - that's how we got pervasive surveillance by "social" network empires, a large part of the Internet being funded by unregulated advertising, climate change exacerbated by crypto-currency mining, and now climate change being exacerbated even more by unregulated pervasive AI empires. Indeed, this would never have intentionally happened in France, but the Internet has always been a subversive technology, so it's happened in many countries that would have stopped it if they had understood it. Regulation in most capitalist countries has been too little or too late to have any real impact. Other countries have learned how to switch the Internet off when it becomes inconvenient, or have invested heavily in national firewalls. (Are there AI-assisted firewalls yet? If not, why not?) Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 14-May-26 05:11, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote: > Hi, > > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 05:09:52PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrot > >> I?m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by ?give away.? IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time. The history of PGP provides an example of this. If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today. (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.) >> > > I have at least two, maybe three, distinct things in mind (it depends on whether you think 3, below, is just a subspecies of one of the other 2) > > 1. The decision to be as liberal as suggested, above. This extends I think to the general attitude about TCP/IP and the funding of the BSD UNIX TCP/IP stack, which guaranteed the code would be available at least for other researchers. This might even extend to the decision by the military to continue with TCP/IP instead of committing to GOSIP. Partly, as I think has been noted elsewhere in the thread, this was a result of the intellectual property rules about government-funded work of that period. But of course, that just punts the problem a little distance: it was a period where governments were not regarded as a kind of deficient corporate private enterprise, but instead a distinct mode of doing things with expectations about what the upshot of that work would be. After all, when the ARPANET work was getting going, the people funding it must have had some inkling about what it meant for the USG to fund something, even if (as later BBN assertions about ownership tried to say) there was not complete agreement about that meaning. > > 2. The decision to move the NSFNet out of the way of a burgeoning network of networks that had all manner of commercial traffic, so that the Internet could really take off. I have seen several claims (some on this list but also more strongly elsewhere) to the effect that the increasing traffic on private networks that were sort-of interconnected to the NSFNet had created a problem that could only be resolved the way it was. But that is not true: MILNET didn't draw that conclusion, but instead drew the conclusion that it needed to extract itself from certain kinds of interconnections, and make sure they didn't happen again. It would have been possible (even if less than great) to insist that a network that was just for research was a legitimate thing that needed to be preserved, quite apart from other networks that could be useful to serve commercial needs. When I heard Al Gore talk about this, however, he said that he perceived the opportunity in making this product of (not incidentally, government-funded) research into the basis for the kind of information infrastructure that many people in the era thought to be important. It's also clear from what he said, and also from looking at the historical record, that there was political capital that had to be expended to make things work out as they did. I don't feel especially excited about whether one calls this "priming the pump" as opposed to "giving away": the central point is that rather than reserving the maturing product of government-funded research to the government of the US or even just to the United States, the USG of the day decided that this could all just take off in the market with as little government involvement as needed. (I find the mental experiment of imagining any of that happening in the present age to be an instructive, not to say depressing, lesson.) > > 3. The plan from the Clinton Administration (finally realized at the end of the Obama Administration) to get the USG out of a special role in the administration of certain parameters of the Net (the so-called IANA transition), which explicitly disclaimed the special status of the USG in the administration of the Internet (indeed, that disclaiming was the very thing Ted Cruz objected to). > > I think each of these represents a way in which the USG decided that its better role was creating the conditions and, having done so, to stand back and let the newly planted seeds take root and bloom. A different country (say, France with minitel) or a society with different preoccupations about what to do with knowledge (say, a later administration -- can't think of which one off the top of my head) would likely have reacted differently, either from being interested in pursuing control (possibly hegemonic and either primary control within the Administration or maybe primarily national control) or from being interested in extracting the absolute maximum monetary rewards from the system and its operation. > > It is almost incredible to me that some kind of cartel-like control or enclosure of the Internet didn't happen from the beginning (though I can construct a pretty good argument it's happening now). Much of my life I have witnessed governments take perfectly well-admninistered public goods and hand them over to private operators who do, at best, no better a job but who make everything more expensive. (At worst, those operators actually sabotage the service.) The Internet work didn't go that way, perhaps partly because it was built from individual (already partly self-interested) netowrks. I like to call what happened "giving away" because of the way that constrasts with the usual contemporary narrative about how government "ought to be run like a business." But if people prefer the metaphor of "priming the pump", I don't especially care. It still seems to me to be a remarkably different set of social expectations than what obtains today. > > Best regards, > > A > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sun May 17 04:02:11 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 07:02:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) Message-ID: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Ole Troan > Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the > start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's > 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened > and why that path was not chosen? I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure why 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation to the internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used in the Internet) failed to catch on. Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm pretty certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be possible, I hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet technical community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in the IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and identity to that architecture. (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper "On the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture which it pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 - to make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't remember if Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I have a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from a hard copy. Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from Jerry's original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - "services, nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested to me (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is still fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his point. I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an end-end communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). Excerpts here are from: http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet Architecture". ) Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical community? It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too many programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I don't care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, but because I believe it is accurate.) Whhaaatttt? Let me make an analogy. The basic plan for the layout of Washington, D.C. (the 'architecture', in the sense I have used it above) was drawn up by Pierre Charles L'Enfant. Now, imagine that the basic plan for Washington had instead been drawn up by a committee of the brick-layers who had built the original buildings in Washington. Does anyone think they would have come up with as timeless a layout? The brick-layers, good people though they undoubtdedly were. were almost certainly just not able to operate at the level of abstraction on which L'Enfant did. To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see the value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully constituted, in a working system. (In this they were not without predecessors: when Paul Baran came up with the basic idea of a packet network, I gather that when people from the Bell system (in the US) looked at his scheme, they largely did not think it would work. The irony of that is, well, ironic; given that their enormous, important, circuit-switched network has, today, been largely been replaced by a packet-switching network. I have very vague memories that a similar sort of thing happened in the early days of internet work - that most people from Bell did not think it was the correct direction. Even Bell's Datakit system - reportedly a predecessor to ATM - retained circuits.) I think that it's sort of related to Clarke's Third Law ("When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.") Most people (in general, not just elderly scientists) cannot discard their knowledge in one approach, to strike out in a whole new direction. To put it another way: there's a reason that IPv6 looks a lot like IPv4, with a few more bits. I could go on at some length, but I expect I'd just be boring people; I can add more if anyone is intereted. Noel From ocl at gih.com Sun May 17 08:51:20 2026 From: ocl at gih.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Olivier_MJ_Cr=C3=A9pin-Leblond?=) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 16:51:20 +0100 Subject: [ih] Fwd: [ NNSquad ] Peter G. Neumann has died In-Reply-To: <20260517143338.GA25554@vortex.com> References: <20260517143338.GA25554@vortex.com> Message-ID: <68087f02-1590-458a-a177-6f15f6ebc56c@gih.com> FYI - Peter, aka PGN has passed away. Very sad day indeed for many of us. Peter was a gentleman and a scholar. His RISKS-L Forum was widely regarded as a high?signal, expert?driven, and influential mailing list within the early Internet community, valued for its rigorous analysis of computer?related risks and its role in shaping professional norms around safety, reliability, and responsible system design. This was all due to PGN's rigorous moderation. Many will miss him. Heartfelt condolences to his family. Olivier -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [ NNSquad ] Peter G. Neumann has died Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 07:33:38 -0700 From: Lauren Weinstein To: nnsquad-dist at vortex.com Peter G. Neumann has died Peter G. Neumann, renowned computer scientist, ARPANET/Internet pioneer and expert on technology risks, working at SRI International since 1971, has died at age 93. Peace. He has been my friend and colleague for over half a century. He will be greatly missed. L - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren at vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren) Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren Signal: By request on need to know basis Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list https://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sun May 17 10:17:49 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 17:17:49 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Fwd: [ NNSquad ] Peter G. Neumann has died In-Reply-To: <68087f02-1590-458a-a177-6f15f6ebc56c@gih.com> References: <20260517143338.GA25554@vortex.com> <68087f02-1590-458a-a177-6f15f6ebc56c@gih.com> Message-ID: <372066081.1383996.1779038269224@mail.yahoo.com> I always enjoyed seeing and talking to Peter. Even though he was in a different division at SRI, he would help put together and play in a small ensemble for our December holiday party when we had them. He continued playing bassoon in music ensembles until a few years ago. His pleasant manner provided a a nice relief when things were hectic.? He will be missed. Thanks for letting us know. barbara On Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 08:51:32 AM PDT, Olivier MJ Cr?pin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote: FYI - Peter, aka PGN has passed away. Very sad day indeed for many of us. Peter was a gentleman and a scholar. His RISKS-L Forum was widely regarded as a high?signal, expert?driven, and influential mailing list within the early Internet community, valued for its rigorous analysis of computer?related risks and its role in shaping professional norms around safety, reliability, and responsible system design. This was all due to PGN's rigorous moderation. Many will miss him. Heartfelt condolences to his family. Olivier -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: ??? [ NNSquad ] Peter G. Neumann has died Date: ??? Sun, 17 May 2026 07:33:38 -0700 From: ??? Lauren Weinstein To: ??? nnsquad-dist at vortex.com Peter G. Neumann has died Peter G. Neumann, renowned computer scientist, ARPANET/Internet pioneer and expert on technology risks, working at SRI International since 1971, has died at age 93. Peace. He has been my friend and colleague for over half a century. He will be greatly missed. L - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren at vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren) Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren Signal: By request on need to know basis Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list https://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From LMM at acm.org Sun May 17 11:19:30 2026 From: LMM at acm.org (Larry Masinter) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 11:19:30 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> References: <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <20260428172957.9B68F106749D2@ary.qy> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> Message-ID: ((sitting as a draft in my mailbox for too long)) Adding forms and file upload didn't cause significant complexity to the network protocol part of the web or additional server load. Although update and user editing were part of the early vision of the web, most of the complexity fell on the user interface. There isn't a HTML element. You could do a POST (HTTP method) via HTTP and build a UI to submit one via
. And RFC 1967 was (I think) the first to add the "file upload" capability https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1867 but forms and file upload wasn't a major performance issue (in the same way that IMG did) because it still would be one network connection per user mouse-click. Web complexity grew because the functionality was split between HTML and HTTP with separate workflows for producing and deploying each. That HTTP proceeded to build what it needed on top of TCP rather than, say, building on expanding XNS Courier remote procedure call) might be thought of as another cause -- the "plumbers" who were in charge of network infrastructure didn't give the HTTP use cases seriously (until HTTP/3.0?) -- https://LarryMasinter.net https://interlisp.org On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 7:06?PM Brian E Carpenter < brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote: > Larry, I agree that made a big difference but surely it was > that really made HTML/HTTP different? > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian > > On 29-Apr-26 09:59, Larry Masinter via Internet-history wrote: > >> Gopher was (is?) a similar cautionary tale. It was a good design and > >> although it was a lot less flexible than the web, it was also a lot > >> easier to implement and loaded the servers less. > > > > http 0.9 was essentially gopher: open a connection, GET the document in > one > > exchange, close the connection. One transaction per document/directory > > list. The complexity came from using multiple connections for a single > > document with many embedded images rather than portable compound document > > formats, moving the format complexity into the protocol. > > > > As. a side note, adding M. McCahill, University of Minnesota, (RFC 1436) > > as an editor of RFC 1738 (URL) helped show the gopher community how to > > preserve their investment in gopher servers while migrating to the web. > From jack at 3kitty.org Sun May 17 12:43:21 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 12:43:21 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Hi Noel, The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 - see https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien19.txt This was a seminal document that influenced the decisions made when TCP V2 was evolving into TCP/IP V4.? I recall discussions in some meeting about how one system's "address" is another system's "name".? The whole issue of Naming, Addressing, and Routing was on the ICCB's list of "things to work on" back in the early 1980s.? ? I wasn't involved in the IPV6 discussions so I'm not sure what was discussed there.? It's possible that the ICCB's to-do list got lost as the people moved around. /Jack Haverty On 5/17/26 04:02, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: > > From: Ole Troan > > > Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the > > start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's > > 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened > > and why that path was not chosen? > > I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure why > 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the > same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation to the > internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used in > the Internet) failed to catch on. > > Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm pretty > certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be possible, I > hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet technical > community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in the > IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and > identity to that architecture. > > (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper "On > the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I > realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture which it > pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 - to > make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had > originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't remember if > Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I have > a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from a > hard copy. > > Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from Jerry's > original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - "services, > nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested to me > (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is still > fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be > something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his point. > > I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP > work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing > region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such > that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an end-end > communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). Excerpts > here are from: > > http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > > "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet > Architecture". ) > > > Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of > location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical community? > It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too many > programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I don't > care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, but > because I believe it is accurate.) > > Whhaaatttt? > > Let me make an analogy. The basic plan for the layout of Washington, D.C. > (the 'architecture', in the sense I have used it above) was drawn up by > Pierre Charles L'Enfant. Now, imagine that the basic plan for Washington had > instead been drawn up by a committee of the brick-layers who had built the > original buildings in Washington. Does anyone think they would have come up > with as timeless a layout? The brick-layers, good people though they > undoubtdedly were. were almost certainly just not able to operate at the > level of abstraction on which L'Enfant did. > > To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast > majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see the > value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully constituted, > in a working system. > > (In this they were not without predecessors: when Paul Baran came up with the > basic idea of a packet network, I gather that when people from the Bell > system (in the US) looked at his scheme, they largely did not think it would > work. The irony of that is, well, ironic; given that their enormous, > important, circuit-switched network has, today, been largely been replaced by > a packet-switching network. > > I have very vague memories that a similar sort of thing happened in the early > days of internet work - that most people from Bell did not think it was the > correct direction. Even Bell's Datakit system - reportedly a predecessor to > ATM - retained circuits.) > > I think that it's sort of related to Clarke's Third Law ("When a > distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is > almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is > very probably wrong.") Most people (in general, not just elderly scientists) > cannot discard their knowledge in one approach, to strike out in a whole new > direction. > > To put it another way: there's a reason that IPv6 looks a lot like IPv4, with > a few more bits. > > > I could go on at some length, but I expect I'd just be boring people; I can > add more if anyone is intereted. > > Noel -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From dhc at dcrocker.net Sun May 17 13:27:00 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 20:27:00 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <1a1cc921-064d-4751-a1d6-ada4c1ae7e3d@dcrocker.net> > The whole issue of Naming, Addressing, and Routing As a long-time, distant observer of this topic, I've been unclear about the expected use of some constructs, and suspect I haven't been alone.? Compelling use cases often make the difference in garnering support, and clarifying design requirements. I understand needing to identify a venue for a datagram in transit and then determining how to get to it.? I also understand the benefit of distinguishing among interfaces, since different i/fs can have very different paths to them. So, for example, host/domain name and IP address had obvious use cases from the start.? Even more so, given decades of experience. I've been less clear about the operational benefits of an additional identifier at the datagram level.? I mean, it sounds like a fine idea, but I was never able to crossed the bridge of and see a compelling need.? Especially since it seems like a higher-level construct of that sort should suffice. Perhaps I've just missed the both.? But it seems clear I've had a lot of company. And while the above isn't worded in the proper form, it is intended as an invitation... d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 17 13:50:28 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 08:50:28 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <20260428172957.9B68F106749D2@ary.qy> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> Message-ID: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> Thanks Larry, just three further comments: > forms and file upload wasn't a major performance issue (in the same way that IMG did) Absolutely, it was images that dramatically increased the quantity of traffic. > There isn't a HTML element Of course, sorry about the brain glitch. > rather than, say, building on expanding XNS Courier remote procedure call) You do realise that Tim's day job when he designed HTTP was implementing RPC for CERN physics experiments? I have no doubt he knew of Courier, but he rolled his own. I don't know the exact sequence of events, but I had Bruce Nelson's PARC CSL-81-9 on my bookshelf in those days. Robert Cailliau and I implemented a homebrew RPC at CERN a few years before, in the group where Tim worked in 1980, on the same machine where Tim implemented Enquire. RPC was definitely present at the birth of the Web. Incidentally, Tim credited his choice of TCP/IP as the substrate for both his RPC and HTTP to the existence of Wollongong TCP/IP, since the physics user community was split at that time between VAX/VMS and various Unix flavours and he needed a common network layer. No Wollongong, no Web? Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 18-May-26 06:19, Larry Masinter wrote: > ((sitting as a draft in my mailbox for too long)) > > Adding forms and file upload didn't cause significant complexity to the network protocol part of the web or additional server load. > > Although update and user editing were part of the early vision of the web, most of the complexity fell on the user interface. > > There isn't a HTML element. You could do a POST (HTTP method) via HTTP and build a UI to submit one via .? And RFC 1967 was (I think) the first to add the "file upload" capability > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1867 > > but forms and file upload? wasn't a major performance issue (in the same way that IMG did) because it still would be one network connection per user mouse-click. > > Web complexity grew because the functionality was split between HTML and HTTP with separate workflows for producing and deploying each. > > That HTTP proceeded to build what it needed on top of TCP rather than, say, building on expanding XNS Courier remote procedure call) might be thought of as another cause -- the "plumbers" who were in charge of network infrastructure didn't give the HTTP use cases seriously (until HTTP/3.0?) > > -- > https://LarryMasinter.net https://interlisp.org > > > On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 7:06?PM Brian E Carpenter > wrote: > > Larry, I agree that made a big difference but surely it was > that really made HTML/HTTP different? > > Regards/Ng? mihi > ? ? Brian > > On 29-Apr-26 09:59, Larry Masinter via Internet-history wrote: > >> Gopher was (is?) a similar cautionary tale. It was a good design and > >> although it was a lot less flexible than the web, it was also a lot > >> easier to implement and loaded the servers less. > > > > http 0.9 was essentially gopher: open a connection, GET the document in one > > exchange, close the connection. One transaction per document/directory > > list.? The complexity came from using multiple connections for a single > > document with many embedded images rather than portable compound document > > formats, moving the format complexity into the protocol. > > > > As. a side note, adding? M. McCahill, University of Minnesota, (RFC 1436) > > as an editor of RFC 1738 (URL) helped show the gopher community how to > > preserve their investment in gopher servers while migrating to the web. > From dhc at dcrocker.net Sun May 17 14:00:44 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 21:00:44 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> References: <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <20260428172957.9B68F106749D2@ary.qy> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 5/17/2026 1:50 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > No Wollongong, no Web? I wonder. HTTP seems pretty transport-agnostic to me.? It's PDU format arguably echos Internet mail's header style, but that was hardly unique by then. On the other hand -- and this might have been your point -- having it running on TCP/IP gave it access to -- and accessible by -- a vastly larger and more heterogeneous population of potential participants. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 17 15:16:38 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 10:16:38 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <8116.1776977644@hop.toad.com> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B108-01CF67CBFA2F@comcast.net> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <1c237917-0ff1-4e29-b82b-da58f582eaef@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <2283.1777340767@hop.toad.com> <20260428172957.9B68F106749D2@ary.qy> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> Message-ID: <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> On 18-May-26 09:00, Dave Crocker wrote: > On 5/17/2026 1:50 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> No Wollongong, no Web? > > > I wonder. > > HTTP seems pretty transport-agnostic to me.? It's PDU format arguably > echos Internet mail's header style, but that was hardly unique by then. > > On the other hand -- and this might have been your point -- having it > running on TCP/IP gave it access to -- and accessible by -- a vastly > larger and more heterogeneous population of potential participants. Exactly. But the pragmatic reason at the time (1988, when TimBL did his RPC project) was much more parochial. Physicists used VAXen and were just at the crossover point of deserting VMS. And, not to labour the point, OSI wasn't ready. I'm not saying that Tim didn't have a wider vision, but he also had users. The large LEP experiments at CERN started taking data in 1989, so there was a very strong running code aspect to choosing TCP/IP. (That is also why I backed off from CERN's OSI strategy in the same year.) Brian From geoff at iconia.com Sun May 17 15:39:13 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 15:39:13 -0700 Subject: [ih] IS: Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93 (NYT Obit) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: *For decades, he criticized the industry?s lax attitudes toward both computer security and individual digital privacy. And he developed solutions.* EXCERPT: In November 1952, a Harvard sophomore, Peter G. Neumann, had a two-hour breakfast with Albert Einstein, in which they discussed the physicist?s philosophy that ?Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.? Einstein?s aphorism led to a lifelong romance with both the beauty and the perils of complexity for Dr. Neumann, who went on to become one of the nation?s leading computer security researchers. Dr. Neumann died on Sunday at the Santa Clara Medical Center in Santa Clara, Calif. He was still working full time on a Pentagon-supported advanced computer security design, which is being adopted by companies such as Google and Microsoft. He was 93. The cause of death was complications from a recent fall, his daughter, Helen Neumann, said. Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.In 2010, Mr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute. An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter ? and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them. Recently an industry organization known as the CHERI Alliance has begun to commercialize the design for consumer products and industrial applications. ?Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to the future,? said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. ?He describes himself as having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware designed to support security.? Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands. Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for his book, ?Computer-Related Risks.? [...] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/obituaries/peter-g-neumann-dead.html -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From byeager at fastmail.fm Sun May 17 15:52:34 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 15:52:34 -0700 Subject: [ih] IS: Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93 (NYT Obit) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <794EB2D9-3CAB-4C6F-B92D-3BC9E4091640@fastmail.fm> > On May 17, 2026, at 3:39 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > > Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientistand security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer > industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes. Sigh. Definitely a really precious gem of a being as well as computer scientist. I only live a few blocks away, visited SRI many times in the 70s and 80s and, alas, never had the opportunity to meet him. > ?Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to > the future,? said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who > is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. ?He describes himself as > having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his > graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware designed to support security.? His legacy is amazing, and I agree with Whit 100%. Bill ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sun May 17 16:04:09 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 16:04:09 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <0ECDC098-6055-495B-A9DE-D4CE23568FE1@icloud.com> On May 17, 2026, at 12:43?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi Noel, > > The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 - see https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien19.txt > > This was a seminal document that influenced the decisions made when TCP V2 was evolving into TCP/IP V4. I recall discussions in some meeting about how one system's "address" is another system's "name". The whole issue of Naming, Addressing, and Routing was on the ICCB's list of "things to work on" back in the early 1980s. I wasn't involved in the IPV6 discussions so I'm not sure what was discussed there. It's possible that the ICCB's to-do list got lost as the people moved around. > > /Jack Haverty > Based on what I?ve seen on some IPng mailing lists, there were people who were aware of contributions such as Shoch?s. For example, on big-internet, Paul Francis (formerly Tsuchiya) used IEN31 as the basis for his arguments. [1] [2] . (IEN31 and IEN23 were action items assigned in IEN22 in response to IEN19. [3] [4]) --gregbo [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien31.txt [2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/big-internet/gi1rrsf5aPZTZEA6BB_QCAAEY6w/ [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien23.pdf [4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien22.pdf From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sun May 17 19:59:37 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 02:59:37 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] IS: Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93 (NYT Obit) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <668752525.2865314.1779073177287@mail.yahoo.com> I played in a concert this afternoon? and learned a little more about what happened to Peter.? I was told his? fall resulted in a broken leg and then his health snowballed down from there. The latest in a series of? medical events a fellow musician knew about was he developed pneumonia.?? I am happy to report i was wrong about Peter and his music. He was still playing in at least one of his music groups recently. I find knowing more about what happens to someone is helpful. barbara On Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 03:40:04 PM PDT, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: *For decades, he criticized the industry?s lax attitudes toward both computer security and individual digital privacy. And he developed solutions.* EXCERPT: In November 1952, a Harvard sophomore, Peter G. Neumann, had a two-hour breakfast with Albert Einstein, in which they discussed the physicist?s philosophy that ?Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.? Einstein?s aphorism led to a lifelong romance with both the beauty and the perils of complexity for Dr. Neumann, who went on to become one of the nation?s leading computer security researchers. Dr. Neumann died on Sunday at the Santa Clara Medical Center in Santa Clara, Calif. He was still working full time on a Pentagon-supported advanced computer security design, which is being adopted by companies such as Google and Microsoft. He was 93. The cause of death was complications from a recent fall, his daughter, Helen Neumann, said. Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.In 2010, Mr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute. An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter ? and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them. Recently an industry organization known as the CHERI Alliance has begun to commercialize the design for consumer products and industrial applications. ?Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to the future,? said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. ?He describes himself as having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware designed to support security.? Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands. Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for his book, ?Computer-Related Risks.? [...] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/obituaries/peter-g-neumann-dead.html -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Mon May 18 01:14:40 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 01:14:40 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <2D7D89AE-80B9-4966-87F1-76D7F0A89F6F@icloud.com> On May 17, 2026, at 12:43?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi Noel, > > The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 - see https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien19.txt > > This was a seminal document that influenced the decisions made when TCP V2 was evolving into TCP/IP V4. I recall discussions in some meeting about how one system's "address" is another system's "name". The whole issue of Naming, Addressing, and Routing was on the ICCB's list of "things to work on" back in the early 1980s. I wasn't involved in the IPV6 discussions so I'm not sure what was discussed there. It's possible that the ICCB's to-do list got lost as the people moved around. > > /Jack Haverty > I found out a few more things that may be of help. Very early in the email archives of the lisp WG, there is a charter that mentions RFC 4984, an IAB workshop on routing and addressing. [1] [2] The workshop description provides a reading list, including Mike O?Dell?s GSE draft. [3] (Unfortunately, the link to the draft goes to Geoff Huston?s potaroo recent articles page, but the draft can be retrieved from the datatracker. [4]. Incidentally, IEN19 is one of the reading list entries.) Lixia participated in the workshop, so perhaps she would comment on any additional ties between these efforts and ICCB work. --gregbo [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/lisp/FqNh_G6aNy6QrYfRRYNwvJ1Dz4o/ [2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4984.txt [3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/rtgadrws/about/ [4] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-ipngwg-gseaddr-00.txt From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 18 01:23:52 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 20:23:52 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <6f411111-ab05-46e5-9e94-54ca98c5a4ff@gmail.com> I was wondering after this conversation about the history of IETF effort on IPv6. As I suggested, it seems to have been about 10% of IETF output over a number of years. I have now plotted the numbers. The graph is at https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/IPv6-RFCs.png. It shows how many IPv6-related RFCs were published per year since 1995 (top curve) and how many of those were specifically about IPv4/IPv6 coexistence (bottom curve). The data were extracted algorithmically from the RFC index, so should be treated as approximate. The code is here if anyone cares: https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/RFC6stats.py Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 15-May-26 16:57, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > On 15-May-26 05:49, John Gilmore wrote: >> Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>> I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6 >>> will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that >>> if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it. >> >> Brian, I seriously respect your work on IPv6. You and the v6 pioneers >> have saved the Internet from its success disaster of address exhaustion. >> But here you are recommending a double standard: >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard >> >> If IPv6 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it either. >> >> You're not suggesting that IPv6 is broken, nor am I. Yet IPv6 continues >> to be fixed. > > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the > ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged > in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to > support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small > and medium enterprises. CIDR and BGP4 scale pretty well, but not for tens of millions > of multihomed sites. And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, > this does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more powerful > rockets to a terrestrial pig. > > Apart from that, I would have to do a lot of work to classify which of those IPv6 > related drafts are fixes to IPv6, which are about IPv4/IPv6 coexistence, and which > are evolution. > > What I can tell you is that the rate of IPv6-related RFCs per kiloRFC peaked a > few years ago, in the RFC 6000-6999 series (16 on coexistence, 86 on IPv6 alone, > or about 10% of the IETF's output). > > In the current RFC9000-9999 series, which is almost done, we so far have > 4 on coexistence, 49 on IPv6 as such. Or, about 5% of the IETF's output. > > Brian > >> >> IPv6 continues to be fixed by IETF -- and IPv4 doesn't. >> >> Neither one is broken. >> >> Both should evolve -- are evolving. But not at IETF. > > >> >> John >> From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 18 01:42:08 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 20:42:08 +1200 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <2D7D89AE-80B9-4966-87F1-76D7F0A89F6F@icloud.com> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2D7D89AE-80B9-4966-87F1-76D7F0A89F6F@icloud.com> Message-ID: <8bf9bc9f-c4b3-4592-a651-2aca8e94bec9@gmail.com> On 18-May-26 20:14, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > On May 17, 2026, at 12:43?PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Hi Noel, >> >> The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 - see https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien19.txt >> >> This was a seminal document that influenced the decisions made when TCP V2 was evolving into TCP/IP V4. I recall discussions in some meeting about how one system's "address" is another system's "name". The whole issue of Naming, Addressing, and Routing was on the ICCB's list of "things to work on" back in the early 1980s. I wasn't involved in the IPV6 discussions so I'm not sure what was discussed there. It's possible that the ICCB's to-do list got lost as the people moved around. >> >> /Jack Haverty >> > > I found out a few more things that may be of help. Very early in the email archives of the lisp WG, there is a charter that mentions RFC 4984, an IAB workshop on routing and addressing. [1] [2] The workshop description provides a reading list, including Mike O?Dell?s GSE draft. [3] (Unfortunately, the link to the draft goes to Geoff Huston?s potaroo recent articles page, but the draft can be retrieved from the datatracker. [4]. Incidentally, IEN19 is one of the reading list entries.) Lixia participated in the workshop, so perhaps she would comment on any additional ties between these efforts and ICCB work. From my point of view, the immediate follow-on from that workshop was the revived activity in the Routing Research Group that's already been mentioned. It was common ground, as I recall, that some kind of identifier/locator split was needed, but there was no common ground on how to get there. That was just months before I left the IESG, retired from IBM, and moved to New Zealand, so I was not really involved in the follow-up discussions. But there's no doubt that we were well aware of what John Shoch wrote in 1978. Brian > > --gregbo > > [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/lisp/FqNh_G6aNy6QrYfRRYNwvJ1Dz4o/ > [2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4984.txt > [3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/rtgadrws/about/ > [4] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-ipngwg-gseaddr-00.txt From vint at google.com Mon May 18 02:31:36 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 05:31:36 -0400 Subject: [ih] IS: Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93 (NYT Obit) In-Reply-To: <794EB2D9-3CAB-4C6F-B92D-3BC9E4091640@fastmail.fm> References: <794EB2D9-3CAB-4C6F-B92D-3BC9E4091640@fastmail.fm> Message-ID: I knew and worked with Peter off and on since the late 1960s since SRI had a critical role in the Arpanet and subsequent Internet development. Peter was perceptive and articulate about the risks we still face as we attempt to use computing technology to enhance our ability to think and do. His contributions will be enduring. He was a kind and empathetic person, at least insofar as my interactions with him go. But he was also emphatic in his concern for thoughtful uses of technology and had little patience for people who did not understand this mindset. I will miss him but I am grateful for having known him. vint On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 6:52?PM william yeager via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > On May 17, 2026, at 3:39 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via > Internet-history wrote: > > > > Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer > scientistand security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, > Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a > computer > > industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes. > > > Sigh. Definitely a really precious gem of a being as well as computer > scientist. I only live a few blocks away, visited SRI many times in the 70s > and 80s and, alas, never had the opportunity to meet him. > > > ?Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to > > the future,? said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who > > is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. ?He describes himself as > > having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his > > graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with > hardware designed to support security.? > > > His legacy is amazing, and I agree with Whit 100%. > > Bill > > > ?????????? > ????? > > ???? ????????? > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From johnl at iecc.com Mon May 18 07:24:44 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 18 May 2026 10:24:44 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B10 <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> It appears that Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history said: >labour the point, OSI wasn't ready. I'm not saying that Tim didn't >have a wider vision, but he also had users. ... Ted Nelson had been faffing about trying to implement his Xanadu hypertext idea for decades, but never got very far because it was much too ambitious. Tim built what's pretty much the implementable subset (i.e., one-way rather than two-way links) and that's the Web. Unlike its predecessors it worked, he had users that liked it, and here we are. R's, John From dhc at dcrocker.net Mon May 18 07:31:27 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 14:31:27 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B10 <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> Message-ID: <3ec15315-9ace-439b-8175-51e0c703ee95@dcrocker.net> On 5/18/2026 7:24 AM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote: > Unlike its predecessors it worked which predecessors? d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From bpurvy at gmail.com Mon May 18 08:13:32 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 08:13:32 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> Message-ID: A little-known fact is. Ted worked at DataPoint for a couple years. It wasn't a good fit, as I understand ? On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 7:24?AM John Levine via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > It appears that Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> said: > >labour the point, OSI wasn't ready. I'm not saying that Tim didn't > >have a wider vision, but he also had users. ... > > Ted Nelson had been faffing about trying to implement his Xanadu hypertext > idea > for decades, but never got very far because it was much too ambitious. Tim > built > what's pretty much the implementable subset (i.e., one-way rather than > two-way > links) and that's the Web. Unlike its predecessors it worked, he had users > that > liked it, and here we are. > > R's, > John > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From johnl at iecc.com Mon May 18 08:25:39 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine) Date: 18 May 2026 11:25:39 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> Message-ID: <62599e99-d6cc-8a22-3961-63071d48ba1c@iecc.com> > A little-known fact is. Ted worked at DataPoint for a couple years. It > wasn't a good fit, as I understand ? In the 19808s he somehow persuaded Datapoint to hire him and a couple of programmers he knew to build Xanadau. I visited him in San Antonia where he indeed was not thrilled to be. Needless to say, nothing came of it. R's, John From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon May 18 09:14:47 2026 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 12:14:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) Message-ID: <20260518161447.2A23118C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Jack Haverty > The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were > in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 Jerry builds very heavily, and explicitly, on Shoch's work, in RFC-1498. The big step foward that Jerry made there, to me, his careful separation of classes of 'objects' (described/defined by their roles), and 'names' for them - their nature/structure reflecting the use(s) to which they were put. > From: Dave Crocker > As a long-time, distant observer of this topic, I've been unclear about > the expected use of some constructs, and suspect I haven't been alone. > Compelling use cases often make the difference in garnering support, > and clarifying design requirements. ... Perhaps I've just missed the > both. But it seems clear I've had a lot of company. Exactly; that is precisely why location/identity separation never caught on. The thing is that one _can't_ forsee all the uses, and how having explicit recognition/names of all the classes of objects will be a banefit. The future is too complex to predict accurately. So one can't rely on cost/benefit analyses, when doing long-term architectual planning. One has to accept that if one has correctly listed all the classes of fundamental objects. and introduced at least one namespace for each of them (others can be added later), one will have a structure that can meet any future need. (In the same way that having 'processes' can support pretty much any application.) I will add here one of the thoughts which I left out of the previous message: the effect of scaling on architecture (defined here as a set of object classes, and the interaction between them). An architecture which works well a one level of scale often won't work well at several orders of magnitude larger. That's often because the 'smaller' one has cut a corner, and lumped together two classes of objects. Which is why the Internet is having a hard time supporting wide-scale multihoming; the mechanisms available, using the objects supported when the network was small, aren't rich enough. Oh well. (An example of this effect in operation with 'processes' is the addition of 'tasks'; 'processes' a la 1970's had too many things under one hat. Adding tasks pulled one out.) The thing is that in a communication network (where all the players have to be basically the same, and share a set of semantics to communicate), one can't dream up an improvement which is a _change_ to _existing_ stufff, and deploy it piecemeal - as one can with an application, like an editor, where it can be taken up in corners, locally. Which is why ripping out the variable length addresses of IPv3 (architecturally too poor as it was) for the shortish fixed-length ones of v4 was a flaw the Internet has been unable to fix. > I've been less clear about the operational benefits of an additional > identifier at the datagram level. By "at the datagram level", do you mean 'in packets'? If so, it's not clear that identity-only names (e.g. endpoint IDs) would be in every packet. This echoes a long-previous problem, when the programmers couln't wrap their minds around the concept that there might be 'addresses' that _weren't_ in every packet. That's why we had to invent 'locator' - although it's not clear that the lesson took, as that term has since been redefined, to many, to mean just 'a name with topological content embedded in it'. The original definition was 'a name with topological content embedded in it _which does not necessaily appear in every packet_'. (And yes, I am aware that I am using "topology" with a meaning that's different from the way mathematicians mean it. The networking field often uses it to mean 'data-carrying connectivity structure'; I apologise for hijacking "topology" to mean that, but I couldn't think of an existing term with that meaning. I suppose I should have coined a new one.) Noel From geoff at iconia.com Mon May 18 11:18:33 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 11:18:33 -0700 Subject: [ih] =?utf-8?q?CACM_In_Memoriam=3A_Peter_G=2E_Neumann_=281932?= =?utf-8?b?4oCTMjAyNik=?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: quite the detailed and nuanced writeup by Gene Spafford & Mr Simson L. Garfinkel ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Gene Spafford Date: Mon, May 18, 2026 at 10:27?AM Subject: Re: PGN FYI, the CACM ?In Memoriam? piece has been published online: In Memoriam: Peter G. Neumann (1932?2026) https://cacm.acm.org/news/in-memoriam-peter-g-neumann-1932-2026/ -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From j at shoch.com Mon May 18 19:57:28 2026 From: j at shoch.com (John Shoch) Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 19:57:28 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? Message-ID: I think this sub-thread began with a questions posed by Ole Troan: "Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen?" Can I presume the syllogism is location:identity :: address:name ? I can add a little context, and some historical pointers. Noel and Jack, thanks for the kind reminder about the paper from 48 years ago :), when there was an earlier opportunity to address this challenge -- at the time of IPv4. Those were fun times. I had discussed the naming/addressing/routing issues at an early Internet Working Group ca. 1978, trying to suggest what we had done in Pup to define and de-couple these ideas. More importantly we were trying to suggest some of the short-comings of hierarchical addressing,and the direction we were already going -- in what was to become the second-generation XNS. I must confess that I don't know exactly what interactions took place over the next couple of years, but I can only assume that there were a lot of continuing side conversations about our approach. About three years later, in Jan. 1981, there was another Internet meeting at ISI; the 3 of us were there, as well as a who's-who of internet people at the time. The minutes were written by Jon Postel: https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien175.txt One of the items on the agenda was again: "X. ADDRESSING DISCUSSION Vint Cerf opened the topic with a call for a very general discussion of the issues and spent some time developing a list of goals for the the addressing and routing procedures." As was often the case, Vint had his eye on the right target: "C. Discussion: Vint Cerf led a further discussion on addressing. The main focus was on the tradeoff between a flat address space and a hierarchical one. In a flat address system there is no relation between the address and the location, and routing has to be by central knowledge or broadcast. In a hierarchical address system the address is composed of fields which identify the location in a routing tree. Vint suggests that we have both in one! Let an address be composed of two parts: a hierarchical address (called an address) and a flat address (called an identifier). The address can be used as a routing guide or hint, but the identifier must match for a message to be delivered. The identifiers are globally unique names for hosts and do not change when hosts move." This was, of course, what had already been implemented in XNS by Yogen Dalal and the SDD team: --Every Ethernet interface had a unique 48-bit identifier (MAC address) drawn from a flat space, with no hierarchy. (We might call this an "address" or a "name" -- yes, I know it is hard to map this onto my own original formulation.) --This same address was used as the internet address (eliminating any mapping or ARP between internet addresses and Ethernet addresses!). --Internet packets, though, also carried a network number -- essentially a hint as to the network where this address was last seen. --Gateways would simply use these network numbers for efficient routing of packets, and did not need to look at the longer unique address (which was only checked at the destination). --But if the device had moved (i.e., if the identity had a new location) the sender would have to fall back to a higher-level lookup (think Xerox Clearinghouse or DNS) to get a more recent network hint. So, Vint and a whole room of wizards were discussing location/identity or address/name 45 years ago. Ole Troan asked, "why that path was not chosen?" It's a little trite, but we had already taken the advice of Robert Frost: *"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I?"* *"I took the one less traveled by,"* *"And that has made all the difference."* 1981 was about the time I was moving to the business side of things; maybe some of you who were there can reconstruct how the other path was chosen, and became more traveled..... John Shoch On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 12:00?PM wrote: > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 12:14:47 -0400 (EDT) > From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) > To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org > Cc: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu > Subject: Re: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? > (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) > Message-ID: <20260518161447.2A23118C073 at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > > > From: Jack Haverty > > > The issues of location and identity that I first remember seeing were > > in John Schoch's IEN in 1978 > > Jerry builds very heavily, and explicitly, on Shoch's work, in RFC-1498. T > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Mon May 18 21:22:43 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 16:22:43 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <34CAA4A5-6CD1-4849-A562-90582B557491@tony.li> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <470969ea-4732-4f9e-a236-c8707a10d720@gmail.com> <34CAA4A5-6CD1-4849-A562-90582B557491@tony.li> Message-ID: <46f65a80-8bd9-49fc-b21a-fa9a7f39ee68@gmail.com> Thank you, Tony. > 1M IPv4 prefixes and 0.25M IPv6 prefixes. In fact, since it appears that at least 50% of end hosts now have IPv6 connectivity, that isn't as bad as it might have been. But of course few of them are multihoming. However, the last time I looked (in 2020), things were definitely getting relatively worse. (Fig. 3 of https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/sqlaw-revisited-published). Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 19-May-26 16:02, Tony Li wrote: > > Hi all, > >>> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with >>> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. >> >> It's to do with the fact that if the rate of BGP4 updates increases >> dramatically, as it would if we were trying to multihome tens of >> millions of enterprises, they would still have to be propagated >> at the speed of light. Moore's law could presumably provide for >> storage and processing of those millions of BGP routes but only >> after the updates make it to every default router. It's unclear >> that BGP routing could ever converge at that scale. Tony Li >> should be answering your question, not me, however. > > Sorry for the delay, I?ve been travelling. > > Multi-homing is not hard to fix. You just have to do it properly. > > If you want multi-homing to scale, you have to avoid having every multi-homed site resort to PI space and their own prefix in the DFZ. BGP converges sub-linearly with the number of prefixes in the DFZ and overloading BGP is not going to help anyone or anything. If you care about the details of path hunting and flap damping, we can get into that. > > Thus, if a multi-homed site is not going to use PI space, then it needs to be part of multiple provider prefixes. ILNP showed us a clean way of doing that, but it was too much of an architectural change for us to swallow. > > So here we sit. People abuse the DFZ with PI space, and are now talking about attaching PI prefixes to each and every edge router. Pollution due to deaggregation for inbound traffic engineering purposes. 1M IPv4 prefixes and 0.25M IPv6 prefixes. And no way of saying ?stop?. > > It has been my privilege and honor to serve for lo these many decades, but when these chickens come home to roost, I will be retiring. > > Regards, > Tony > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 19 01:20:19 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 20:20:19 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: <46f65a80-8bd9-49fc-b21a-fa9a7f39ee68@gmail.com> References: <4797caab-7eb5-43ec-89b4-d572a59cf38e@dcrocker.net> <65EF3C2D-A088-488A-8A2F-982D5EDE3402@comcast.net> <23877.1778622907@hop.toad.com> <71fe31f3-c1b1-44e0-8077-467973238ff5@gmail.com> <26185.1778780949@hop.toad.com> <24914.1778867412@hop.toad.com> <470969ea-4732-4f9e-a236-c8707a10d720@gmail.com> <34CAA4A5-6CD1-4849-A562-90582B557491@tony.li> <46f65a80-8bd9-49fc-b21a-fa9a7f39ee68@gmail.com> Message-ID: <38710dd3-04c4-47b5-b592-f3e38e440f20@gmail.com> I find myself scratching at this itch. Having failed to learn from history, are we repeating it? It turns out we have data on that (thanks to Geoff Huston). Look in particular at the third graph at https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/sqlaw.html. Although it ends with a 2025 data point, I created it a few minutes ago. The bottom line: IPv6 prefixes don't seem to be aggregating any better than IPv4 prefixes did ~ten years earlier. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 19-May-26 16:22, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Thank you, Tony. > >> 1M IPv4 prefixes and 0.25M IPv6 prefixes. > > In fact, since it appears that at least 50% of end hosts now have IPv6 > connectivity, that isn't as bad as it might have been. But of course few > of them are multihoming. > > However, the last time I looked (in 2020), things were definitely > getting relatively worse. > (Fig. 3 of https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/sqlaw-revisited-published). > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 19-May-26 16:02, Tony Li wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >>>> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with >>>> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4. >>> >>> It's to do with the fact that if the rate of BGP4 updates increases >>> dramatically, as it would if we were trying to multihome tens of >>> millions of enterprises, they would still have to be propagated >>> at the speed of light. Moore's law could presumably provide for >>> storage and processing of those millions of BGP routes but only >>> after the updates make it to every default router. It's unclear >>> that BGP routing could ever converge at that scale. Tony Li >>> should be answering your question, not me, however. >> >> Sorry for the delay, I?ve been travelling. >> >> Multi-homing is not hard to fix. You just have to do it properly. >> >> If you want multi-homing to scale, you have to avoid having every multi-homed site resort to PI space and their own prefix in the DFZ. BGP converges sub-linearly with the number of prefixes in the DFZ and overloading BGP is not going to help anyone or anything. If you care about the details of path hunting and flap damping, we can get into that. >> >> Thus, if a multi-homed site is not going to use PI space, then it needs to be part of multiple provider prefixes. ILNP showed us a clean way of doing that, but it was too much of an architectural change for us to swallow. >> >> So here we sit. People abuse the DFZ with PI space, and are now talking about attaching PI prefixes to each and every edge router. Pollution due to deaggregation for inbound traffic engineering purposes. 1M IPv4 prefixes and 0.25M IPv6 prefixes. And no way of saying ?stop?. >> >> It has been my privilege and honor to serve for lo these many decades, but when these chickens come home to roost, I will be retiring. >> >> Regards, >> Tony >> From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Tue May 19 01:22:36 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 01:22:36 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Comments inline On May 17, 2026, at 4:02?AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: > >> From: Ole Troan > >> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the >> start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's >> 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened >> and why that path was not chosen? > > I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure why > 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the > same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation to the > internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used in > the Internet) failed to catch on. > > Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm pretty > certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be possible, I > hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet technical > community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in the > IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and > identity to that architecture. > > (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper "On > the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I > realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture which it > pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 - to > make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had > originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't remember if > Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I have > a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from a > hard copy. > I found a Local Network Note that is very similar to RFC 1498 that is dated 3 March 1981. [1] (More on this later.) > Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from Jerry's > original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - "services, > nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested to me > (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is still > fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be > something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his point. > > I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP > work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing > region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such > that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an end-end > communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). Excerpts > here are from: > > http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet > Architecture". ) > I had to go to the Internet Archive to access this paper. [2] > Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of > location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical community? > It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too many > programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I don't > care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, but > because I believe it is accurate.) > Whhaaatttt? [?] > To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast > majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see the > value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully constituted, > in a working system. IMO, this is not unreasonable, especially if those programmers answer to managers who have to deal with practical constraints, such as budgets. Anyway, back to RFC 1498, since these issues were known at the time the TCP and IP IENs that preceded their corresponding RFCs were written, what did other people in Saltzer?s group think about this? For that matter, what did DCA think about this? Were they ever approached with any of these concerns, such as how much more difficult mobility, etc. would be without location/identity separation? Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is that not sufficient? They seem to have support from industry, working code, use cases, etc. Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. --gregbo [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-028.pdf [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102344/http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt [3] https://www.lispers.net From lear at lear.ch Tue May 19 02:17:27 2026 From: lear at lear.ch (Eliot Lear) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 11:17:27 +0200 Subject: [ih] Internet without entrenched factions? In-Reply-To: References: <472F3468-4831-4A0A-A3E6-6AE422427CFA@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5169637c-00cd-40c8-9398-3c197f46a4e9@lear.ch> On 15.05.2026 08:35, Ole Troan via Internet-history wrote: > Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn?t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O?Dell?s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen? There were two reasons it failed.? On the technical front, nobody actually seriously analyzed the security properties of what it means for p1:a to be the same as p2:a, such that an attacker couldn't pretend to be a.? That was key because 8+8's supposed benefit was redundancy/mobility without having to advertise a end user prefixes.? Mostly, however, economics didn't demand the solution.? We had enough memory and CPUs to keep things going, so that's what happened.? Same reason that neither ILNP nor LISP took off to solve the problem later in the decade. I just took a look at the CIDR report; eyeballing it, FIB growth looks stable, and I'm not hearing routing vendors worry in the way Tony worried when the situation was a LOT less clear in the 2000s (Tony was quite right to worry). Eliot -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 495 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From vint at google.com Tue May 19 03:57:41 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 06:57:41 -0400 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: Trying to reconstruct some of the discussion [could be faulty memory here] Given the net/host structure as an "address", one can imagine a routing table with entries of the form "net/host" and doing a lookup in a FIB to see what the next hop is. I know I had that pretty clearly in mind. I also had in mind that a host could be connected to more than one network and that somehow, a packet destined for that host needed to be delivered to the right spigot on that host. Maybe "to the right spigot" is where the reasoning was weak? The domain name concept, mapping names into host/net addresses derived from the earlier host.txt files of the Arpanet and supported the possibility of multi-homing if the mapping revealed more than one destination net/host address for a given host. Ironically, especially with the arrival of the WWW, a single net/host address could be the destination for more than one domain name. What apparently seemed clear to me at the time is the the table could just as well have had an "end-point ID" and that the forwarding table could have end-point IDs in them. The routing system (think BGP, IS-IS, etc) would need to speak somehow to the topology of paths that could reach that endpoint. But then the question of scalability arose. If the end-point ID space were flat, the routing tables would not have hierarchy to support compressed representations of the topology of the global system. The scaling question continued to nag me and the notion of autonomous systems each with an internal and external routing mechanism (IGP for intra-AS and BGP for extra-AS) mirrored the original Internet networks (Arpanet, SATNET, PRNET) which had internal routing capability and address spaces and relied on "gateways" to help Internet packets find their way to a destination. The global routing system needed to know what sequence of gateways would lead to the destination network. A multi-homed host would have different addresses depending on the path taken to the destination network. If there is a flaw in this reasoning, it may be the notion that a network (AS) is the destination. If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of destination host" the other routing choice might have been more obvious. The flat name space of end-point IDs still raised the question how the routing tables would scale. By 1981 I was well into trying to promote the existing implementations to various computer manufacturers, etc, so making a major change at that point seemed to serious impede progress. Most hosts were single-homed and domain names could map into multiple net/host addresses if necessary for hosts with more than one network address. v On Tue, May 19, 2026 at 4:22?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Comments inline > > On May 17, 2026, at 4:02?AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> From: Ole Troan > > > >> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the > >> start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's > >> 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened > >> and why that path was not chosen? > > > > I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure > why > > 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the > > same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation > to the > > internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used > in > > the Internet) failed to catch on. > > > > Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm > pretty > > certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be > possible, I > > hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet > technical > > community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in > the > > IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and > > identity to that architecture. > > > > (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper > "On > > the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I > > realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture > which it > > pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 > - to > > make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had > > originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't > remember if > > Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I > have > > a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from > a > > hard copy. > > > > I found a Local Network Note that is very similar to RFC 1498 that is > dated 3 March 1981. [1] (More on this later.) > > > Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from > Jerry's > > original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - > "services, > > nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested > to me > > (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is > still > > fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be > > something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his > point. > > > > I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP > > work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing > > region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such > > that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an > end-end > > communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). > Excerpts > > here are from: > > > > http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > > > "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet > > Architecture". ) > > > > I had to go to the Internet Archive to access this paper. [2] > > > Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of > > location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical > community? > > It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too > many > > programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I > don't > > care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, > but > > because I believe it is accurate.) > > > Whhaaatttt? [?] > > > To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast > > majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see > the > > value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully > constituted, > > in a working system. > > IMO, this is not unreasonable, especially if those programmers answer to > managers who have to deal with practical constraints, such as budgets. > > Anyway, back to RFC 1498, since these issues were known at the time the > TCP and IP IENs that preceded their corresponding RFCs were written, what > did other people in Saltzer?s group think about this? For that matter, > what did DCA think about this? Were they ever approached with any of these > concerns, such as how much more difficult mobility, etc. would be without > location/identity separation? > > Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is > that not sufficient? They seem to have support from industry, working > code, use cases, etc. Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-028.pdf > [2] > https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102344/http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > [3] https://www.lispers.net > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From gnu at toad.com Tue May 19 12:50:42 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 12:50:42 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B10 <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> Message-ID: <32454.1779220242@hop.toad.com> John Levine via Internet-history wrote: > Ted Nelson had been faffing about trying to implement his Xanadu > hypertext idea for decades, but never got very far because it was much > too ambitious. Tim built what's pretty much the implementable subset > (i.e., one-way rather than two-way links) and that's the Web. Unlike > its predecessors it worked, he had users that liked it, and here we > are. Contrasting points about Xanadu and WWW: Xanadu was proprietary and thus discouraged people from working on it. Its high level structure was documented (in 2 books), but none of the implementation details. WWW was well documented in specifications, explanations, and in free/libre software. Technically Xanadu was not federated -- it was designed to be centrally run. The plan was to have locally run "franchises" in towns, where you could go to access it. In theory people could run their own servers, but every server, every user, and every document had to have a centrally assigned and validated identity, and a financial account tied to that. This was much more complicated both organizationally and technically. WWW was federated by using the DNS to find each resource, and no central coordination was required beyond the centrally managed DNS system. Xanadu had an economic model that charged readers and funded publishers and authors. But that was never implemented. WWW had no economic model, was free to access and free to publish (plus the costs of installing and learning software, and running servers). I believe this was WWW's biggest failing, since it led to the free-TV advertising-funded business model. This was rapidly followed by centralized search engines that were paid by third party advertisers, technical and social tricks for deep surveillance on readers, and technical and social tricks for coerced attention extraction. Xanadu would probably have had attention coercion too, since publishers were planned to be paid based on how much reading users did. WWW was competently implemented many times. Xanadu was incompletely implemented several times, but the small team kept throwing away the early implementations (rather than releasing them to gain experience and a community) and rewriting it from scratch in niche languages like Smalltalk. Ultimately it failed because it never shipped a working version -- nor any version at all. By 1992 it had burned out its only serious financial backer, and most of its volunteers, and it never recovered thereafter. By 1999, a dedicated volunteer (Roger Gregory) resurrected the last two dead Xanadu code bases and gathered the permission to release them as MIT-licensed software. See: http://udanax.xanadu.com/ By then, nobody cared; WWW had grown exponentially and couldn't be caught by competitors. And the latest half-done code (Udanax Gold) had bit-rotted due to its arcane implementation language, so it's quite hard to even extract, let alone run or modify. The earlier implementation (Udanax Green) is probably buildable and runnable, but does not implement most of the design (such as the economic model). The last updates I found were from 2015: https://xanadu.com.au/mail/xanadu/msg00485.html An interesting bit for me is that the difficulty of implementing "2-way links" seemed to play no part in Xanadu's failure. Presumably, someone could build them as an extension to WWW if the world really valued them. The world of 2026 has much better tools for widely distributed replicated databases: not just commercially rentable server farms and Terabit Ethernets, but distributed hash tables, blockchains, BitTorrent, and conventional transactional databases that can work at scale. When Xanadu was being implemented, there were no scalable networked databases, because there were only a few thousand machines on real networks in the whole world. Airplane reservations, for example, were still handled on a single mainframe running very custom software. John From bill.n1vux at gmail.com Sun May 17 15:02:26 2026 From: bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker) Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 18:02:26 -0400 Subject: [ih] Security issues are not discussed in this memo [was: A revolution...] In-Reply-To: <1821954699.507951.1778483559077@mail.yahoo.com> References: <505b214e-5c99-466c-8499-1f7f5e46ffb9@gmail.com> <4f48deb4-b66c-4323-96ea-cff178614706@gmail.com> <1821954699.507951.1778483559077@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 3:12?AM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I know there was a lot of early work on security. I wasn't involved. ... > [TCESEC] ... If there is interest in the history of Rainbow / Trusted Computer Evaluation / research, largely funded by different branches of DoD than DARPA, I can speak to that. While I'm mostly here as the Literary Estate of Michael A. Padlipsky, he and I met when we were both in one of the Computer Security departments of MITRE. Mike was our bridge between Internet Working Group *etc.* and MilNet/DoDIIS network-security interests; the "community" (intelligence: DIA/NSA/CIA; one of the I in DoDIIS was Intelligence) were very interested in secure networking of computers with very sensitive data, thus requiring full network and computer security treatment, if we could make it all work. Mike's Group-Leader Morrie Gasser had been on the mid-1970s "Project Guardian" tiger-team that attacked MULTICS (that Mike had helped develop). [ https://multicians.org/security.html ] After the identified defects were repaired, a carefully configured MULTICS called "DOCKMASTER" was accepted for use as the bastion host interfacing between UNCLASSIFIED-but-FOUO branch of MILNET and open ARPANET/Internet at Ft George Meade, operated by the NSA Computer Security Center, by then run by the same COL Roger SCHELL who'd been at MIT during the Tiger Team. Another Group-Leader was micromanaging the contract-management of installing secure LANs at SAC OMAHA; those would initially be operating in "SYSTEM HIGH" security mode but they desperately needed some sort of safe interoperability. Another Group-Leader did the prototype of what became (when commercialized by others*) the Compartmented Mode Workstation. Our original Group-Leader's early project was building a semi-automated "guard" system that could allow a knowledgeable, authorized, delegated individual to review and approve release messages from a higher classified network to a lower by inspect, with validated buffer management etc to provide assurance that it couldn't send a message straight through un-approved. Our group was trying to apply the principles of verifiable trusted computing behind the SCOMP and hoped-for other A1/A2 tier verified OS to retrofit kernelized & cryptologic security into a DBMS, and investigating UI enhancements needed for usability of multilevel or compartmented mode terminals & workstations, and updating Risk Assessments. A different department were the ghost-authors of the Orange Book and most(?all?) of the TCESEC Rainbow books, and raters of proposed systems against the several Criteria. The original authors of the "Bell & LaPadula Security Model", Dave Bell and Len LaPadula, were members of these two departments (one each). Fun guys! They both basically disclaimed responsibility for the wrongheadedness of the imposition of their academic model as a national requirement, especially when paired with the (semi-obvious) Dual Model for Integrity.? The B&LSM was intended to begin the process of learning to reason between models and program- & system-specifications, it was not intended as the solution. But at that point in time, the National Computer Security Center (@ NSA) was caught in the fallacious syllogism "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this." One thing we discovered was that while assurance of "preserves a model" that a design or implementation held to some security invariants (codified in the model) was sufficient at a single layer of software, such assurances were not transitive to higher layers of software using the services of the first layer. A Database fetching its meta-data from disk via the OS (if it deigns to use the OS for that, some didn't, some still don't!) needs a stronger more granular property than OS guarantees on the file and block level; it essentially needs the Filesystem to fully correct, not just secure; and the UI system likewise, mustn't have an erroneous bit of code in UI system misprint the marking for a single record, even if the high-water-mark for the whole screen is assured correct. The network-security people, including Mike, either had already seen this in their realm or heard it from us and said oh yeah, I'm not sure which. We also came to the conclusion that the then cold-war between the Church of the Holy Crypto and the Church of the Holy Kernel was wrong-headed; neither was sufficient, a synergy would be required to do serious multi-level security over several layers of software stack. (Which latter is an instance of the "When all you have is a hammer, all looks like nails" trap; e.g. Enciphering a database column that contains a BOOLEAN attribute per record, TRUE and FALSE, with a common key is nearly useless; the two states can be distinguished, and if any specific example or statistics identify even one value, all will be known. Data with less entropy than the key does not get protected at the level of the key, the key is protected by the entropy of the data, oopsie.) * MITRE as a congressionally chartered DoD QNGO is forbidden to compete with private industry, can't deliver product; that would be a conflict of interest with the primary role as creator of Specifications, adjudicator of RFP replies, Contract Monitor on behalf of the program office, and corporate technical memory (along with Civil Service DoD employees in project office; but their uniformed leadership rotates frequently as a career feature). ?[This implies a system in which a process can only read data with security tags dominated by the process tags and can only write to files/devices whos tags dominate the process, which is basically incapable of doing anything except hoarding data; decisions must emanate through other means than digital (Red Telephones). ] We in the two computer security departments had been periodically badgering MITRE internal IT that they should pick up their security practices on the (few) hosts with external dialup modems; no response. One Monday we find they've adopted a whole bunch of new initiatives over the weekend, with no discussion or prior budget or anything, no explanation, a mystery. It was a while later when Cliff Stoll did his "*Cuckoo's Egg*" book tour that we found out that the East German hackers plaguing Stoll's LANL phone bill variances were dialing into our IT departments host-attached modems (MBUNIX), tunneling to our Virginia office's DARPA/Internet main host (MITRE), and from there to LANL. All was clear! Not to forget Peter Neumann (SRI). Very much so. RIP PGN. Since his death was announced (yesterday?), I've seen several younger modern commercial computer security practitioners on socials (where such hang out) extolling how Peter's RISKS-L taught them to think about _risks_ (not just "bug hunting") in their formative years. Once you start to think in terms of risk vs vulnerability, it's impossible not to. Since the better praxis for Risk Assessment above was my little project, I was particularly fond of Peter's RISKS-L . I am very glad whenever I hear discussion of an NTSB report ... or something that will become subject of one ... described in terms of the Swiss Cheese Model. That and the fish-bone-model are very good at demonstrating that "root cause analysis" is misnamed and/or misguided; any failure worthy of study had passed multiple opportunities to block it, so there always are multiple causes. To blame only the last chance to avert as "the" cause and remediate only that one cause is to leave too many existing problems as traps for the next time. [I left MITRE to do other things, but while I never signed on to be the security nerd again, I've always been a *defacto* security thinker, sadly sometimes the only one somewhere. At one shop, our division Information Security Officer was a former Financial Auditor turned Security Auditor (assuring Clipboard Compliance). To help them pass their Certificate class, I tutored them on Cryptography at lunch; a favorite topic, twist my arm! Most IT folks hated/feared the mandated Security Auditors from outside, understanding the pointlessness of mere Clipboard Compliance (but still better than no compliance! and mandated by many regulators so ... ); I considered them allies, as they needed a dozen ranked findings for their report, and didn't really care which; but if they listed the defect that most concerned *me*, I was likely to finally get the budget and hours to get it remediated; so dropping some hints where NOT to look ... . Complaints from Architecture (me) and our ISO didn't have that power.] // Bill in Boston For once (mostly) NOT speaking as the Literary Estate of Michael A Padlipsky From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 19 14:19:02 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 09:19:02 +1200 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <32454.1779220242@hop.toad.com> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B10 <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> <32454.1779220242@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <78d65336-7827-4fe6-8503-454c8cdc980b@gmail.com> > the difficulty of implementing "2-way > links" seemed to play no part in Xanadu's failure. Presumably, someone > could build them as an extension to WWW if the world really valued them. Hyper-G tried that and went nowhere. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian On 20-May-26 07:50, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote: > John Levine via Internet-history wrote: >> Ted Nelson had been faffing about trying to implement his Xanadu >> hypertext idea for decades, but never got very far because it was much >> too ambitious. Tim built what's pretty much the implementable subset >> (i.e., one-way rather than two-way links) and that's the Web. Unlike >> its predecessors it worked, he had users that liked it, and here we >> are. > > Contrasting points about Xanadu and WWW: > > Xanadu was proprietary and thus discouraged people from working on it. > Its high level structure was documented (in 2 books), but none of the > implementation details. WWW was well documented in specifications, > explanations, and in free/libre software. > > Technically Xanadu was not federated -- it was designed to be centrally > run. The plan was to have locally run "franchises" in towns, where you > could go to access it. In theory people could run their own servers, > but every server, every user, and every document had to have a centrally > assigned and validated identity, and a financial account tied to that. > This was much more complicated both organizationally and technically. > WWW was federated by using the DNS to find each resource, and no central > coordination was required beyond the centrally managed DNS system. > > Xanadu had an economic model that charged readers and funded publishers > and authors. But that was never implemented. WWW had no economic > model, was free to access and free to publish (plus the costs of > installing and learning software, and running servers). I believe this > was WWW's biggest failing, since it led to the free-TV > advertising-funded business model. This was rapidly followed by > centralized search engines that were paid by third party advertisers, > technical and social tricks for deep surveillance on readers, and > technical and social tricks for coerced attention extraction. Xanadu > would probably have had attention coercion too, since publishers were > planned to be paid based on how much reading users did. > > WWW was competently implemented many times. Xanadu was incompletely > implemented several times, but the small team kept throwing away the > early implementations (rather than releasing them to gain experience and > a community) and rewriting it from scratch in niche languages like > Smalltalk. Ultimately it failed because it never shipped a working > version -- nor any version at all. By 1992 it had burned out its only > serious financial backer, and most of its volunteers, and it never > recovered thereafter. > > By 1999, a dedicated volunteer (Roger Gregory) resurrected the last two > dead Xanadu code bases and gathered the permission to release them as > MIT-licensed software. See: > > http://udanax.xanadu.com/ > > By then, nobody cared; WWW had grown exponentially and couldn't be > caught by competitors. And the latest half-done code (Udanax Gold) > had bit-rotted due to its arcane implementation language, so it's quite > hard to even extract, let alone run or modify. The earlier > implementation (Udanax Green) is probably buildable and runnable, but > does not implement most of the design (such as the economic model). The > last updates I found were from 2015: > > https://xanadu.com.au/mail/xanadu/msg00485.html > > An interesting bit for me is that the difficulty of implementing "2-way > links" seemed to play no part in Xanadu's failure. Presumably, someone > could build them as an extension to WWW if the world really valued them. > The world of 2026 has much better tools for widely distributed > replicated databases: not just commercially rentable server farms and > Terabit Ethernets, but distributed hash tables, blockchains, BitTorrent, > and conventional transactional databases that can work at scale. When > Xanadu was being implemented, there were no scalable networked > databases, because there were only a few thousand machines on real > networks in the whole world. Airplane reservations, for example, > were still handled on a single mainframe running very custom software. > > John > > > > From dwaitzman at gmail.com Tue May 19 15:00:55 2026 From: dwaitzman at gmail.com (D Waitzman) Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 18:00:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] Question about RFC-1149 packet from 2001 Bergen Linux user group implementation Message-ID: <79DE6431-1248-487D-886C-B90F0C8C75F2@gmail.com> Hi Internet History members, I apologize in advance that this has a tinge of commercialism, but is certainly internet history related. I wrote RFC-1149 IP Over Avian Carriers and its QoS sequel RFC-2549. In 2001, the Bergen Linux user group implemented RFC-1149 and gifted me one of the packets that they sent. I was not at the IETF meeting where they were going to present it to me (IIRC the 51st meeting, in London), so a coworker Mike Patton (IP-)redirected it back to me. I am thinking of auctioning off the actual packet, perhaps via Christie's auction house, though would sell it privately if I thought the value was good. (This is my kind of an "airwaves auction".) Do you have any guess what it might be worth or who might be interested in this bit of internet history? You can see the "roll marks" on the packet's paper still. Thanks, -- David Waitzman From johnl at iecc.com Tue May 19 15:04:46 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine) Date: 19 May 2026 18:04:46 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...) In-Reply-To: <32454.1779220242@hop.toad.com> References: <0c2ba403-1974-4cfe-8119-d165d0a199cc@gmail.com> <57D614FC-FA83-4ED5-9F7E-E6659B6C6CD5@comcast.net> <5db3ee04-bdfb-45a5-a5d3-9cccf728a698@gmail.com> <1a4c5c57-b15b-4a27-aae7-d0e8afcc5f86@3kitty.org> <20260420132455.1773f119@dataplane.org> <17BCFE71-B0FB-4599-B10 <6a68f6c4-ab45-48f0-993e-4d472ff15240@gmail.com> <20260518142444.F0E8610B17949@ary.qy> <32454.1779220242@hop.toad.com> Message-ID: <5fe3cf0b-0202-bd9d-d459-970c814c0550@iecc.com> > Contrasting points about Xanadu and WWW: > > Xanadu was proprietary and thus discouraged people from working on it. > Its high level structure was documented (in 2 books), but none of the > implementation details. WWW was well documented in specifications, > explanations, and in free/libre software. ... Yes, this all agrees with my recollections. > WWW was competently implemented many times. Xanadu was incompletely > implemented several times, but the small team kept throwing away the > early implementations (rather than releasing them to gain experience and > a community) and rewriting it from scratch in niche languages like > Smalltalk. ... Ted is a great visionary and a terrible manager. It is obvious to us now and was fairly obvious in the day that the only way to get Xanadu to happen was to do it incrementally, but Ted wanted it all, so he got nothing. R's, John PS: > networks in the whole world. Airplane reservations, for example, > were still handled on a single mainframe running very custom software. Airline reservations still are handled on single mainframes running TPF which is a distant descendant of the original SABRE which was modelled after real-time model of the 1950s SAGE system. It's easy to do the searches and front end stuff on distributed racks of small machines, but for the databases where you have to sell each seat exactly once and bill for it exactly once, there's no subtitute for a large centralized system. From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 19 15:32:25 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 10:32:25 +1200 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: <3ba73e56-d5cd-44f3-92e4-c8b2270239c3@gmail.com> Greg, > Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is that not sufficient? They seem to have support from industry, working code, use cases, etc. Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. Much the same is true of ILNP. But I don't see either of them flourishing in the foreseeable future. There are, as Tony pointed out, 250,000 BGP4 routes in the IPv6 Internet, and about 35,000 IPv6 autonomous systems, which means somewhere between 35,000 and 250,000 significant vested interests in the currently deployed IPng addressing and routing system. We know how to deploy incremental change on a system that big, but not how to deploy a revolution. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 19-May-26 20:22, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote: > Comments inline > > On May 17, 2026, at 4:02?AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: >> >>> From: Ole Troan >> >>> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the >>> start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's >>> 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened >>> and why that path was not chosen? >> >> I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure why >> 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the >> same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation to the >> internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used in >> the Internet) failed to catch on. >> >> Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm pretty >> certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be possible, I >> hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet technical >> community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in the >> IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and >> identity to that architecture. >> >> (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper "On >> the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I >> realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture which it >> pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 - to >> make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had >> originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't remember if >> Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I have >> a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from a >> hard copy. >> > > I found a Local Network Note that is very similar to RFC 1498 that is dated 3 March 1981. [1] (More on this later.) > >> Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from Jerry's >> original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - "services, >> nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested to me >> (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is still >> fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be >> something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his point. >> >> I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP >> work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing >> region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such >> that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an end-end >> communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). Excerpts >> here are from: >> >> http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > >> "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet >> Architecture". ) >> > > I had to go to the Internet Archive to access this paper. [2] > >> Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of >> location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical community? >> It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too many >> programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I don't >> care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, but >> because I believe it is accurate.) > >> Whhaaatttt? [?] > >> To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast >> majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see the >> value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully constituted, >> in a working system. > > IMO, this is not unreasonable, especially if those programmers answer to managers who have to deal with practical constraints, such as budgets. > > Anyway, back to RFC 1498, since these issues were known at the time the TCP and IP IENs that preceded their corresponding RFCs were written, what did other people in Saltzer?s group think about this? For that matter, what did DCA think about this? Were they ever approached with any of these concerns, such as how much more difficult mobility, etc. would be without location/identity separation? > > Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is that not sufficient? They seem to have support from industry, working code, use cases, etc. Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-028.pdf > [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102344/http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > [3] https://www.lispers.net > > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Tue May 19 21:10:21 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 16:10:21 +1200 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <29F83260-9EF7-4D85-A34A-F99AE45CD9BB@tony.li> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> <3ba73e56-d5cd-44f3-92e4-c8b2270239c3@gmail.com> <29F83260-9EF7-4D85-A34A-F99AE45CD9BB@tony.li> Message-ID: <04f88ae9-418f-4b84-935d-a4bd3ba77f17@gmail.com> On 20-May-26 12:07, Tony Li wrote: > > Brian, > >> Much the same is true of ILNP. But I don't see either of them flourishing in the foreseeable future. There are, as Tony pointed out, 250,000 BGP4 routes in the IPv6 Internet, and about 35,000 IPv6 autonomous systems, which means somewhere between 35,000 and 250,000 significant vested interests in the currently deployed IPng addressing and routing system. We know how to deploy incremental change on a system that big, but not how to deploy a revolution. > > To be fair, ILNP can be deployed incrementally, but it is only beneficial when both endpoint domains support it. Yes, and SHIM6 had that property too. One reason NAT44 deployed was that it only needed support at one end. Brian > ILNP cannot flourish until someone demonstrates a killer app for it. And so far, people have been able to fake mobility well enough that ILNP is not yet compelling. > > Cheers, > Tony > > From kay at archive.org Wed May 20 12:07:27 2026 From: kay at archive.org (Kay Savetz) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 12:07:27 -0700 Subject: [ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion Message-ID: Leonard Kleinrock wrote: *<>* Hi, I'm Kay Savetz, I'm the curator of the Internet Archive's Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Coming late to this conversation. DLARC is a free online ham radio library. It's a project of Internet Archive, the not-for-profit online library best known for The Wayback Machine. It is growing to be an unparalleled library of the past and present of ham radio. You can see what we have so far at https://archive.org/details/dlarc So regarding the Packet Radio Temporary Notes collection. ( https://archive.org/details/packet-radio-temporary-notes?sort=date ) I've worked hard to find as many of these documents as possible, but there are still plenty that are missing from the collection. The list is at https://archive.org/details/dlarc-wantlist ? but to summarize we need a smattering prior to note #177, and and pretty much every PRTN from #180 (Cross-Radio Debugger by Michael Beeler dated 1976-06-01) through #326 (User's Guide for Data Reduction and Analysis by DesMarais dated 1983-11-01)... if you have any of them, please let me know. The DLARC collection does have hundreds of other documents about packet radio (https://archive.org/details/packet-radio) including some amazing correspondence saved by Hank Magnuski KA6M. ( https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Hank+Magnuski+KA6M%22 ) -Kay From dhc at dcrocker.net Wed May 20 13:13:35 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 20:13:35 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: On 5/19/2026 3:57 AM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > Ironically, especially > with the arrival of the WWW, a single net/host address could be the > destination for more than one domain name. Any third-party hosting service is likely to do this. Hence, any multi-tenant email gateway service displays a version of this.? Certainly the CSNet gateway did. Before the domain name system was deployed, this was instantiated with something akin to 2-level source routing.? But that was no longer necessary with the deployment of the MX construct.? So, circa 1985 and before the Web. I don't know whether the gatewaying that PARC did, early on, qualified as an even earlier example.? Integrated enterprise-oriented processing typically wouldn't, except for differential handling, depending on sub-domain. btw, note that most advertising that gives a domain name typically gives it as www...., although that is typically no longer needed.? Except sometimes. > What apparently seemed clear to me at the time is the the table could just > as well have had an "end-point ID" and that the forwarding table could have > end-point IDs in them. The routing system (think BGP, IS-IS, etc) would > need to speak somehow to the topology of paths that could reach that > endpoint. But then the question of scalability arose. If the end-point ID > space were flat, the routing tables would not have hierarchy to support > compressed representations of the topology of the global system. End-point has always been an intuitively appealing, but IMO problematic, term.? Is it an interface?? A host?? An application? (And which layer of an application service?? I always thought of an email address as defining an endpoint.? Until I dealt with EDI over email, where the receiving email inbox was only an intermediary, and an EDI identifier indicated that ultimate end-point..) The Irvine Ring was nifty for using application id's in the interface table, but no, that probably wouldn't scale even in an enterprise, never-mind a global Internet. (I took it as significant that MIT's adoption of the Irvine Ring included dropping the name table.) Name, address, route is not just a set of constructs.? It describes a sequence that needs to happen, one way or another. Having Domain /Names/ be referred to as Internet /addresses/ suggests that sometimes portions of the sequence can be a matter of operational use, rather than mapping to new information.? (Name at one level of handling; address at another.) Jon Postel's being stuck with me as an office-mate made him my permanent explainer of networking concepts. This included his noting that the TCP and IP checksums were intentionally very weak.? Partly to limit the overhead on hardware of the day, but also because they were intended for end-to-end use in a network that is largely reliable.? That is, as needing only occasionally to detect the lost of a packet. In a network segment with more serious problem, he suggested, a stronger and more responsive mechanism would be needed. It's worth wondering whether TCP/IP would have been designed differently if the end-to-end experience were typically much less reliable.? I'm guessing the easiest path would have been a standardized reliability link layer, below IP, independent of whatever was native to the segment. Anyhow, this distinction between local-vs-global mechanisms made (and makes) a lot of sense to me.? Including for routing and relaying. So any discussion of design should make the distinction and deal with it explicitly.? What is the global mechanism?? What does it rely on, for local handling?? How is that local handling achieved? Not being a routing guy, I've assumed that Routing Table vs. FIB are an example? > The > scaling question continued to nag me and the notion of autonomous systems > each with an internal and external routing mechanism (IGP for intra-AS and > BGP for extra-AS) mirrored the original Internet networks (Arpanet, SATNET, > PRNET) which had internal routing capability and address spaces and relied > on "gateways" to help Internet packets find their way to a destination. The > global routing system needed to know what sequence of gateways would lead > to the destination network. You describe the use of the construct for routing, but I think it has another distinctive benefit.? Namely institutionalizing authority boundaries. This is lacking from other services, except indirectly.? For email, MX can be taken that way, but note that there is nothing in a domain name to mark the boundary.? (But then, neither is there anything in an IP address.) > A multi-homed host would have different > addresses depending on the path taken to the destination network. If there > is a flaw in this reasoning, it may be the notion that a network (AS) is > the destination. Perhaps it did not anticipate the extent of service intermediation or the scale of it that develop.? (And, perhaps, while the Internet architecture learned to be cautious about what it relies on from the infrastructure, it might still rely on too much, at least sometimes?) So... my home network is dual-homed.? To two, independent ISPs. Through NATs.? I don't have an A/S.? I am not aware of any capability, deployed as scale, that deals with that model usefully. Yet I suspect there should be.? And clearly not down in the deep infrastructure.? (Hence my bias towards a session-layer mechanism, above TCP.) > If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of > destination host" the other routing choice might have been more obvious. When someone makes a point like this, I always ask why domain name does not or should not serve that role? There is usually a claim that the construct needs to be at a lower level, but I've never fully understood why. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From vgcerf at gmail.com Wed May 20 17:10:55 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 20:10:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: inline - a couple of comments On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 4:22?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > On 5/19/2026 3:57 AM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: > > Ironically, especially > > with the arrival of the WWW, a single net/host address could be the > > destination for more than one domain name. > > Any third-party hosting service is likely to do this. > > Hence, any multi-tenant email gateway service displays a version of > this. Certainly the CSNet gateway did. > > Before the domain name system was deployed, this was instantiated with > something akin to 2-level source routing. But that was no longer > necessary with the deployment of the MX construct. So, circa 1985 and > before the Web. > > I don't know whether the gatewaying that PARC did, early on, qualified > as an even earlier example. Integrated enterprise-oriented processing > typically wouldn't, except for differential handling, depending on > sub-domain. > > btw, note that most advertising that gives a domain name typically gives > it as www...., although that is typically no longer needed. Except > sometimes. > > > > > What apparently seemed clear to me at the time is the the table could > just > > as well have had an "end-point ID" and that the forwarding table could > have > > end-point IDs in them. The routing system (think BGP, IS-IS, etc) would > > need to speak somehow to the topology of paths that could reach that > > endpoint. But then the question of scalability arose. If the end-point ID > > space were flat, the routing tables would not have hierarchy to support > > compressed representations of the topology of the global system. > > End-point has always been an intuitively appealing, but IMO problematic, > term. Is it an interface? A host? An application? (And which layer of > an application service? I always thought of an email address as > defining an endpoint. Until I dealt with EDI over email, where the > receiving email inbox was only an intermediary, and an EDI identifier > indicated that ultimate end-point..) > well, could one argue the endpoint at the IP layer gets you to the host, TCP gets you to a process and after that it is an application layer question? > > The Irvine Ring was nifty for using application id's in the interface > table, but no, that probably wouldn't scale even in an enterprise, > never-mind a global Internet. (I took it as significant that MIT's > adoption of the Irvine Ring included dropping the name table.) > > Name, address, route is not just a set of constructs. It describes a > sequence that needs to happen, one way or another. Having Domain /Names/ > be referred to as Internet /addresses/ suggests that sometimes portions > of the sequence can be a matter of operational use, rather than mapping > to new information. (Name at one level of handling; address at another.) > yes > > Jon Postel's being stuck with me as an office-mate made him my permanent > explainer of networking concepts. This included his noting that the TCP > and IP checksums were intentionally very weak. Partly to limit the > overhead on hardware of the day, but also because they were intended for > end-to-end use in a network that is largely reliable. That is, as > needing only occasionally to detect the lost of a packet. > > In a network segment with more serious problem, he suggested, a stronger > and more responsive mechanism would be needed. > > It's worth wondering whether TCP/IP would have been designed differently > if the end-to-end experience were typically much less reliable. I'm > guessing the easiest path would have been a standardized reliability > link layer, below IP, independent of whatever was native to the segment. > > Anyhow, this distinction between local-vs-global mechanisms made (and > makes) a lot of sense to me. Including for routing and relaying. So any > discussion of design should make the distinction and deal with it > explicitly. What is the global mechanism? What does it rely on, for > local handling? How is that local handling achieved? > > Not being a routing guy, I've assumed that Routing Table vs. FIB are an > example? > > > > > The > > scaling question continued to nag me and the notion of autonomous systems > > each with an internal and external routing mechanism (IGP for intra-AS > and > > BGP for extra-AS) mirrored the original Internet networks (Arpanet, > SATNET, > > PRNET) which had internal routing capability and address spaces and > relied > > on "gateways" to help Internet packets find their way to a destination. > The > > global routing system needed to know what sequence of gateways would lead > > to the destination network. > > You describe the use of the construct for routing, but I think it has > another distinctive benefit. Namely institutionalizing authority > boundaries. > yes that was a very valuable notion - not unlike the telco demarc. > > This is lacking from other services, except indirectly. For email, MX > can be taken that way, but note that there is nothing in a domain name > to mark the boundary. (But then, neither is there anything in an IP > address.) > > > > > A multi-homed host would have different > > addresses depending on the path taken to the destination network. If > there > > is a flaw in this reasoning, it may be the notion that a network (AS) is > > the destination. > > Perhaps it did not anticipate the extent of service intermediation or > the scale of it that develop. (And, perhaps, while the Internet > architecture learned to be cautious about what it relies on from the > infrastructure, it might still rely on too much, at least sometimes?) > > So... my home network is dual-homed. To two, independent ISPs. Through > NATs. I don't have an A/S. I am not aware of any capability, deployed > as scale, that deals with that model usefully. > A colleague applied for an AS to make his dual homing work > > Yet I suspect there should be. And clearly not down in the deep > infrastructure. (Hence my bias towards a session-layer mechanism, above > TCP.) > > > > > If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of > > destination host" the other routing choice might have been more obvious. > > When someone makes a point like this, I always ask why domain name does > not or should not serve that role? > it doesn't in the sense that the routing isn't done on that identifier in the case of the Internet. The routing is done on the basis of IP address. > > There is usually a claim that the construct needs to be at a lower > level, but I've never fully understood why. > > d/ > > -- > Dave Crocker > > dhc at dcrocker.net > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social > +1.408.329.0791 > > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter > Northern California Coastal Region > Information & Planning Coordinator > American Red Cross > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From touch at strayalpha.com Wed May 20 17:19:01 2026 From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 17:19:01 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: > On May 20, 2026, at 5:10?PM, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: > >> End-point has always been an intuitively appealing, but IMO problematic, >> term. Is it an interface? A host? An application? (And which layer of >> an application service? I always thought of an email address as >> defining an endpoint. Until I dealt with EDI over email, where the >> receiving email inbox was only an intermediary, and an EDI identifier >> indicated that ultimate end-point..) >> > well, could one argue the endpoint at the IP layer gets you to the host, > TCP gets you to a process and after that it is an application layer > question? In Ethernet, address=interface, i.e., the ?strong host? model. If a (unicast) frame doesn?t arrive at the correct interface, it?s dropped. For IP, address=host, even though there?s one or more IP addresses per interface, i.e., the ?weak host? model. IP source addresses match interfaces when they go out, but ?any port in a storm? is valid on input. This is discussed in RFC1122. FWIW, from my seat, the discussion location vs. identity hasn?t mentioned what I think are some key points: 1) location vs. identity is one of label structure. Unstructured labels are considered names. Structured labels, where structure matches topology or place, are considered locations. They?re all just labels - it?s the structure and its meaning that make the difference. 2) having multiple addresses, whether in a single header or stacked headers, is just a variation on indirection. One label provides the context (environment) and another provides the indicator within that environment (item). IMO, no single structure or environment/item pair ever satisfies everyone. Joe From jack at 3kitty.org Wed May 20 19:39:00 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Wed, 20 May 2026 19:39:00 -0700 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> My earliest encounter with issues of name/address/route (or location/identity/...) was in the early 1970s, when I was working for Licklider at MIT, implementing a mail server. We were musing about the architecture of "computer-assisted human-human communications".? ?Electronic mail as we know it today was one part of that.? In addition to identity (name) there was location (of mailbox) and routing (how to get it to the mailbox). ?There was also another architectural concept - role.? ?John Shoch's recent message reminded me of role, but I think it had a different meaning in Xerox' architecture. An individual human might have multiple roles.? Someone might be CEO of a corporation.? The same individual might also be the Coach of a school's sports team.? Each role might have different mailboxes. Same person, but different roles make handling human-human communications in possibly very different ways. So, the architectural issues of name/address/routing appear at multiple levels of the mechanisms implementing them.? I'm using "levels" instead of "layers" because there's no relation to the OSI model. At each level, a name is provided by the level "above", specifying the target destination for the information.? At every level, there are mechanisms that convert a name into an address, and another mechanism that converts an address into a plan for how to process the information, at least making a decision on the next stop in a route.? One level's name is the lower level's address. For example, in the Internet's datagram service, a human-friendly name is converted into an IP address by the Domain system.? The IP address is subsequently provided to the datagram transport system as a "name".? Routing mechanisms convert that name into an address on some network attached to the IP router.? If that network happened to be the ARPANET, the IMPs would see the target destination of perhaps a distant router as a "name", and use its own routing mechanisms to convert that into a specific connector on a specific IMP leading to a specific computer.? Within the IMP code, that target name would be converted into the specific modem connection on which to send packets to the next IMP along the route.? On some networks, such as ARPANET, computers could use algorithms to convert a name into an address, by parsing the IP address.? Other networks, such as Ethernet, needed an additional mechanism to translate from names expressed in IP into addresses expressed in LAN formats, using mechanisms such as ARP. If you think about this process starting at the level of email, there is a possibly complex sequence of name->address translations at each level. To answer Dave Crocker's question about what problems occur... One of the characteristics of our email is that its architecture mixes together names and locations.? E.g., a mailbox such as "jack at 3kitty.org" specifies a name (me) and an address (3kitty.org). That choice helps, but does not guarantee, uniqueness, but also results in some pragmatic problems - such as the difficulty of moving your mailbox from one ISP, corporation, or organization to another.? Humans still try to contact me using email addresses from decades ago.? There is no "email portability" scheme analogous to the telephone system's number portability. I think X.400/X.500 tried to address issues such as "roles" but OSI didn't work out.? Humans compensate of course, typically by creating different email addresses for their different roles.? But humans aren't always very good about keeping their communications that organized. Its often hard to locate a past communication you remember you had with a particular human when the information you're seeking might have been in any of multiple email "connections" (defined by the two mailboxes involved).? It's even more difficult if the communication you seek might actually have been in a SMS text, or messaging through some social media walled garden, or other means we now use to communicate. Perhaps AI will be able to sort it all out someday. /Jack Haverty On 5/20/26 17:19, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote: >> On May 20, 2026, at 5:10?PM, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote: >> >>> End-point has always been an intuitively appealing, but IMO problematic, >>> term. Is it an interface? A host? An application? (And which layer of >>> an application service? I always thought of an email address as >>> defining an endpoint. Until I dealt with EDI over email, where the >>> receiving email inbox was only an intermediary, and an EDI identifier >>> indicated that ultimate end-point..) >>> >> well, could one argue the endpoint at the IP layer gets you to the host, >> TCP gets you to a process and after that it is an application layer >> question? > In Ethernet, address=interface, i.e., the ?strong host? model. If a (unicast) frame doesn?t arrive at the correct interface, it?s dropped. > > For IP, address=host, even though there?s one or more IP addresses per interface, i.e., the ?weak host? model. IP source addresses match interfaces when they go out, but ?any port in a storm? is valid on input. > > This is discussed in RFC1122. > > FWIW, from my seat, the discussion location vs. identity hasn?t mentioned what I think are some key points: > > 1) location vs. identity is one of label structure. Unstructured labels are considered names. > Structured labels, where structure matches topology or place, are considered locations. > They?re all just labels - it?s the structure and its meaning that make the difference. > > 2) having multiple addresses, whether in a single header or stacked headers, is just a variation on indirection. > One label provides the context (environment) and another provides the indicator within that environment (item). > > IMO, no single structure or environment/item pair ever satisfies everyone. > > Joe -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Wed May 20 19:59:42 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 02:59:42 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) References: <1983287631.4087251.1779332382720.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1983287631.4087251.1779332382720@mail.yahoo.com> Some comments on this topic. I believe the Reconstitution Protocol (RP) relied on separating location and identity (ADA184755 in DTIC if you lost the reference to the final report). Section 3 (Background) might be the most interesting section for this discussion.?? Here is another reference I just tried to find to see what it might say about the thoughts/design behind RP but? I wasn't successful.? I don't recall ever seeing this paper even though i worked on RP (gateway portion). Z Su, JE Mathis, "Internetwork accomodation of network dynamics: Naming and addressing", Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 681-685, November 1984. If someone finds/has a copy, please let me know. When I joined the RP project. I am pretty sure Jim Mathis told me we couldn't visibly change the IP protocols.? i think the solution tried in the RP experiments reflects this constraint. I always wondered where that requirement originated as I? thought IP protocols were still experimental. In RP we changed how the IP address was created (gateway-centric for location component)? and added RP gateways that could supply the?information needed to keep TCP connections working in a dynamic environment (routing and support for host/endpoint IP address creation). Things still worked for non RP hosts and gateways which was a requirement. It has been a long time since i thought about and did work in this area. I must admit i am not familiar with the ILNP documents (pretty much out of the IETF? for quite some time) so i just started to take a look. I noticed there is no reference to RP in RFC 6740. I feel I would need to spend a lot more time to understand the contribution/differences? as compared to RP. However? I did notice a few things off the top of my head. In particular, this RFC says "The key idea proposed for ILNP is to directly and specifically change the overloaded semantics of the IP Address." To me this is pretty much what RP did. I can see what i think are probably going to be area of differences, like whether both endpoints need to be involved. (BTW, if both endpoints need to be involved how does a host determine whether another host supports ILNP in a mixed environment? Do you even need to know this???? I didn't see this discussed but that could be my fault. In this RFC, i also saw this statement when i was trying to find more info about what?a locator actually is. "Locator values are used only at the network layer. Locators are not?used in end-to-end transport state. For example, Locators are not?used in transport-layer session state or application-layer session?state."?I don't understand this statement because of the TCP pseudo header used for the TCP checksum computation in V4 and V6. The TCP pseudo header includes the source and destination IP address. Did i misinterpret how the ILNP IP address will be constructed and disseminated in the IP packet header based on my knowledge of how RP works (no address length change required and the information for source and destination is in the same space used by the current addresses)? Also it seems to me that for V6, fragmentation/MTU should be discussed in the ILNP documents.? I haven't seen anything looking very quickly. For those not familiar with V6, fragmentation occurs at the source. In V4 it is done in the router/gateway. FYI, I have heard Path MTU Discovery doesn't work because of choices made in deployments of technology.? ?I discovered other people are looking into this problem but not sure if/how these new ideas impact this work. Does this design really require what i think look like fundamental changes and so perhaps not backward compatible/transparent with current implementations of IPV4 and IPv6? Is there a document that specifically covers some of my questions that I overlooked it somehow in my quick search? Some other slightly random thoughts.? I? think RP relied on the trustworthiness of all components (Redirects weren't questioned for example).? I can't remember knowing much regarding creating the end point portion of the protocol. I am thinking along the lines of whether RP made sure that another entity in the network didn't already have, or recently used, what would be used in the IP address field for a new device in that network.? I wish i still had RP details in head. My memory could be wrong. I also didn't join the project at the beginning (Working on the Navy Ada gateway)? ?so i am sure i missed more discussions on? the design and? associated protocols.?? In case you are wondering why you can't find some kind of write-up on this effort as a PRTN, Packet Radio program probably ended 2 or 3 years earlier.? I am guessing no more submissions could be made to this series of documents . In an? earlier email on this list, we already have had a brief exchange regarding the apparent decision that dynamic dns was not going to be addressed in the early 80s. Dynamic DNS was brought up at a packet radio meeting in 1983. Composed this on my cell phone. Hope there aren't too many bugs in this message. barbara On Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 03:58:07 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote: Trying to reconstruct some of the discussion [could be faulty memory here] Given the net/host structure as an "address", one can imagine a routing table with entries of the form "net/host" and doing a lookup in a FIB to see what the next hop is. I know I had that pretty clearly in mind. I also had in mind that a host could be connected to more than one network and that somehow, a packet destined for that host needed to be delivered to the right spigot on that host. Maybe "to the right spigot" is where the reasoning was weak? The domain name concept, mapping names into host/net addresses derived from the earlier host.txt files of the Arpanet and supported the possibility of multi-homing if the mapping revealed more than one destination net/host address for a given host. Ironically, especially with the arrival of the WWW, a single net/host address could be the destination for more than one domain name. What apparently seemed clear to me at the time is the the table could just as well have had an "end-point ID" and that the forwarding table could have end-point IDs in them. The routing system (think BGP, IS-IS, etc) would need to speak somehow to the topology of paths that could reach that endpoint. But then the question of scalability arose. If the end-point ID space were flat, the routing tables would not have hierarchy to support compressed representations of the topology of the global system.? The scaling question continued to nag me and the notion of autonomous systems each with an internal and external routing mechanism (IGP for intra-AS and BGP for extra-AS) mirrored the original Internet networks (Arpanet, SATNET, PRNET) which had internal routing capability and address spaces and relied on "gateways" to help Internet packets find their way to a destination. The global routing system needed to know what sequence of gateways would lead to the destination network. A multi-homed host would have different addresses depending on the path taken to the destination network. If there is a flaw in this reasoning, it may be the notion that a network (AS) is the destination. If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of destination host" the other routing choice might have been more obvious. The flat name space of end-point IDs still raised the question how the routing tables would scale. By 1981 I was well into trying to promote the existing implementations to various computer manufacturers, etc, so making a major change at that point seemed to serious impede progress. Most hosts were single-homed and domain names could map into multiple net/host addresses if necessary for hosts with more than one network address. v On Tue, May 19, 2026 at 4:22?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Comments inline > > On May 17, 2026, at 4:02?AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> From: Ole Troan > > > >> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the > >> start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's > >> 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened > >> and why that path was not chosen? > > > > I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure > why > > 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the > > same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation > to the > > internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used > in > > the Internet) failed to catch on. > > > > Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm > pretty > > certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be > possible, I > > hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet > technical > > community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in > the > > IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and > > identity to that architecture. > > > > (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper > "On > > the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I > > realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture > which it > > pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 > - to > > make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had > > originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't > remember if > > Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I > have > > a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from > a > > hard copy. > > > > I found a Local Network Note that is very similar to RFC 1498 that is > dated 3 March 1981. [1] (More on this later.) > > > Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from > Jerry's > > original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - > "services, > > nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested > to me > > (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is > still > > fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be > > something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his > point. > > > > I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP > > work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing > > region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such > > that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an > end-end > > communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). > Excerpts > > here are from: > > > >? http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > > > "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet > > Architecture". ) > > > > I had to go to the Internet Archive to access this paper. [2] > > > Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of > > location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical > community? > > It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too > many > > programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I > don't > > care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, > but > > because I believe it is accurate.) > > > Whhaaatttt? [?] > > > To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast > > majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see > the > > value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully > constituted, > > in a working system. > > IMO,? this is not unreasonable, especially if those programmers answer to > managers who have to deal with practical constraints, such as budgets. > > Anyway, back to RFC 1498, since these issues were known at the time the > TCP and IP IENs that preceded their corresponding RFCs were written, what > did other people in Saltzer?s group think about this?? For that matter, > what did DCA think about this?? Were they ever approached with any of these > concerns, such as how much more difficult mobility, etc. would be without > location/identity separation? > > Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is > that not sufficient?? They seem to have support from industry, working > code, use cases, etc.? Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-028.pdf > [2] > https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102344/http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > [3] https://www.lispers.net > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From jtk at dataplane.org Thu May 21 08:00:18 2026 From: jtk at dataplane.org (John Kristoff) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:18 -0500 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <20260521100018.54502f12@dataplane.org> On Wed, 20 May 2026 19:39:00 -0700 Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > That choice helps, but does not guarantee, uniqueness, but also > results in some pragmatic problems - such as the difficulty of moving > your mailbox from one ISP, corporation, or organization to another. > Humans still try to contact me using email addresses from decades > ago.? There is no "email portability" scheme analogous to the > telephone system's number portability. Maybe IP address portability is more analogous? In the ARIN region you have to be an "organization", you can't be an individual, to obtain your own numbers directly, but otherwise you can announce prefixes from practically any upstream, and even transfer it to another RIR, while maintaining global uniqueness. Maybe this isn't as convenient, because a phone number is associated to a specific voice service whereas IP addresses can be associated with practically any application. Is the abstraction and flexibility that makes IP address portability just less user-friendly? John From dhc at dcrocker.net Thu May 21 08:48:28 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 15:48:28 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <0891272b-cfce-44b1-9cb9-2643aae54b96@dcrocker.net> On 5/20/2026 7:39 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > So, the architectural issues of name/address/routing appear at > multiple levels of the mechanisms implementing them.? I'm using > "levels" instead of "layers" because there's no relation to the OSI > model. > > At each level, a name is provided by the level "above", specifying the > target destination for the information.? At every level, there are > mechanisms that convert a name into an address, and another mechanism > that converts an address into a plan for how to process the > information, at least making a decision on the next stop in a route.? > One level's name is the lower level's address. That's the most concise and complete and clear operational summary of name/address/etc. I've seen. I also appreciate that it exactly matches my own model. > To answer Dave Crocker's question about what problems occur... One of > the characteristics of our email is that its architecture mixes > together names and locations.? E.g., a mailbox such as > "jack at 3kitty.org" specifies a name (me) and an address (3kitty.org). Except? that 3kitty.org isn't actually an address. It is unrelated to topology -- and I think Joe's concise point about this requirement is helpful.? (Also, ahem, it is after all, called a domain /name/...) We talk about it as an address, and say that it is 'where' the mailbox is located.? But while that field's value is unique, it has no information that directly supports create a path.? The MX record does that mapping, to something called an address. > That choice helps, but does not guarantee, uniqueness, but also > results in some pragmatic problems - such as the difficulty of moving > your mailbox from one ISP, corporation, or organization to another. > Humans still try to contact me using email addresses from decades > ago.? There is no "email portability" scheme analogous to the > telephone system's number portability. Well, sort of, yes there is.? There are services supporting an email address that is independent of the ISP mailbox you use. They are, of course, just aliasing services.? ?Besides some commercial example, alumni email address mechanisms do this. Whether these services offer sustainability and sufficient independence is arguable.? To the extent they don't, I suspect we don't know how to satisfy the requirement.? Most proposals that claim to go beyond this seem to entail a degree of magical thinking. > ?I think X.400/X.500 tried to address issues such as "roles" but OSI > didn't work out. I don't recall hearing about X.400 having 'role' addresses as a formal construct. d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From johnl at iecc.com Thu May 21 10:35:29 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 21 May 2026 13:35:29 -0400 Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <0891272b-cfce-44b1-9cb9-2643aae54b96@dcrocker.net> References: <6355835e-b1d9-466b-a8e4-4459ec75a8a4@3kitty.org> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <0891272b-cfce-44b1-9cb9-2643aae54b96@dcrocker.net> Message-ID: <20260521173530.6688E10C10F59@ary.qy> It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history said: >> That choice helps, but does not guarantee, uniqueness, but also >> results in some pragmatic problems - such as the difficulty of moving >> your mailbox from one ISP, corporation, or organization to another. >> Humans still try to contact me using email addresses from decades >> ago.? There is no "email portability" scheme analogous to the >> telephone system's number portability. > >Well, sort of, yes there is.? There are services supporting an email >address that is independent of the ISP mailbox you use. They are, of >course, just aliasing services.? ?Besides some commercial example, >alumni email address mechanisms do this. The telco equivalent would be call forwarding which is a real thing but not the same. Number portability tried a variety of approaches as described in RFC 3482 and ended up adding a level of indirection into the call setup process. It also changed the meaning of phone numbers. They used to be like IP addresses, with the leading digits identifying a switch, and the trailing digits the number on that switch. Now they're more like email addresses. At call time the calling system or a nearby tandem looks up the called number, now called the directory number (DN) and finds a location routing number (LRN) to identify the switch. If the number hasn't been ported it'll be the same number, while if it has been ported it'll be a number assigned to the switch. Then it routes the call as it used to but using LRN to find the switch, and the switch uses the DN to identify the subscriber. This worked for phone numbers because telcos are regulated so the regulators could order the telcos to do it. Also, phone numbers have a fixed simple format, a sequence of digits between N and M length, so it's straightforward if expensive to build the forwarding database. Neither is true for e-mail*, so forwarding is the best we're going to get. Even within telephony there's limits to portability. North America is unusual in that there is a single unified number space for fixed and mobile, so you can port between the two. In most countries, fixed and mobile numbers are in separate number spaces so you can port from one mobile carrier to another, but not between fixed and mobile. North America has geographic rate centers, and currently you can only port between carriers in the same rate center. The large mobile carriers are present nearly everywhere so that doesn't matter for them, but there's ongoing arguments about if and how to provide nationwide portability for landline and small mobile carriers. R's, John * - if you want to forward foobar at example.com, do you also forward foo.bar at example.com, and foobar-ext at example.com? Or maybe example.com and example.net have the same set of mailboxes so you'd forward both. Only the target system knows. From dhc at dcrocker.net Thu May 21 13:55:23 2026 From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 20:55:23 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: References: <20260517110211.DC9C218C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2E3A1976-5AB0-4DE8-B084-603EF196BC16@icloud.com> Message-ID: On 5/20/2026 5:10 PM, vinton cerf wrote: > On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 4:22?PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history > wrote: > > End-point has always been an intuitively appealing, but IMO > problematic, > term.? Is it an interface?? A host?? An application? (And which > layer of > an application service?? I always thought of an email address as > defining an endpoint.? Until I dealt with EDI over email, where the > receiving email inbox was only an intermediary, and an EDI identifier > indicated that ultimate end-point..) > > well, could one argue the endpoint at the IP layer gets you to the > host, TCP gets you to a process and after that it is an application > layer question? Exactly.? So, using a label that is ambiguous means it needs a qualifier.? IP endpoint:? IP Address.? TCP endpoint: Port # (+ IP). Application endpoint (...?) > So... my home network is dual-homed.? To two, independent ISPs. > Through > NATs.? I don't have an A/S.? I am not aware of any capability, > deployed > as scale, that deals with that model usefully. > > A colleague applied for an AS to make his dual homing work Should be fun, trying to make that work at scale.? I'm sure routing tables would love that.? Never-mind end users... So, I don't think the answer is for every home network to be an A/S.? I think the answer has to be to make the application transport-agile.? So it can use different transport connections (and different network attachments and different ISPs) in a seamless fashion. The issue doesn't show up much, so far, because for most people the Internet experience is too reliable. The cases where it isn't or where the user is mobile but not on a cell service (which handle the access transitions within its unified infrastructure) don't happen often enough to create market pressure (or maybe even market opportunity) to motivate change. > > If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of > > destination host" the other routing choice might have been more > obvious. > > When someone makes a point like this, I always ask why domain name > does > not or should not serve that role? > > it doesn't in the sense that the routing isn't done on that identifier > in the case of the Internet. > The routing is done on the basis of IP address. Sure.? But this thread is about location/identity constructs and my question is why an additional 'identity' construct is needed at the lower layers?? Why aren't? domain name (and associated DNS records) sufficient? d/ -- Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross dave.crocker2 at redcross.org From bpurvy at gmail.com Thu May 21 14:27:09 2026 From: bpurvy at gmail.com (Bob Purvy) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 14:27:09 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's Message-ID: When I was at 3Com on email, we had an employee, Marc Lavine, who set up an email gateway for us. This would have been 1986-87 or so. I'm not in touch with Marc anymore. I remember absolutely *nothing* about it, except a vague recollection that we called it "the UUCP gateway." Do you think that's what it was, rather than "an Internet mail gateway"? It was not offered to customers and I don't think any of them ever asked for it. It was not very heavily used -- that I remember. From craig at tereschau.net Thu May 21 14:54:50 2026 From: craig at tereschau.net (Craig Partridge) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 15:54:50 -0600 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Bob: UUCP gateway and internet email gateway became effectively the same thing c. 1987. That was quite a change. It used to be that you'd have to route to an UUCP host that was connected to ARPANET, so some set of bang paths to, say, seismo, which would then interpret the remaining address as an Internet address. Email gateways spent a lot of time crafting return paths, so someone could reply to a message that originated on a different network. But the combination of domains names, and pathalias (I think that's the name - in any case, work by Honeyman and Bellovin to automatically route within the UUCP network), and MX RRs in the Internet world (which allowed us to email to domains that weren't on the Internet [yet]) meant you could email to someone at 3com.com from UUCP, Internet, or CSNET (and later BITNET) and it just worked! This was intentional and reflected considerable work by folks to make all the parts integrate well during 1986 and 1987. Craig On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 3:27?PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > When I was at 3Com on email, we had an employee, Marc Lavine, who set up an > email gateway for us. This would have been 1986-87 or so. I'm not in touch > with Marc anymore. > > I remember absolutely *nothing* about it, except a vague recollection that > we called it "the UUCP gateway." Do you think that's what it was, rather > than "an Internet mail gateway"? It was not offered to customers and I > don't think any of them ever asked for it. > > It was not very heavily used -- that I remember. > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- ***** Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and mailing lists. From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Thu May 21 16:44:49 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 16:44:49 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On May 21, 2026, at 2:54?PM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote: > > Hi Bob: > > UUCP gateway and internet email gateway became effectively the same thing > c. 1987. That was quite a change. It used to be that you'd have to route > to an UUCP host that was connected to ARPANET, so some set of bang paths > to, say, seismo, which would then interpret the remaining address as an > Internet address. Email gateways spent a lot of time crafting return > paths, so someone could reply to a message that originated on a different > network. > > But the combination of domains names, and pathalias (I think that's the > name - in any case, work by Honeyman and Bellovin to automatically route > within the UUCP network), and MX RRs in the Internet world (which allowed > us to email to domains that weren't on the Internet [yet]) meant you could > email to someone at 3com.com from UUCP, Internet, or CSNET (and later > BITNET) and it just worked! > > This was intentional and reflected considerable work by folks to make all > the parts integrate well during 1986 and 1987. > > Craig > Yes, pathalias is what you?re thinking of. I mentioned it on this list last year. [1] --gregbo [1] https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2025-February/010245.html From gnu at toad.com Thu May 21 21:16:14 2026 From: gnu at toad.com (John Gilmore) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 21:16:14 -0700 Subject: [ih] Comments re the packet radio discussion In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <31507.1779423374@hop.toad.com> Kay Savetz via Internet-history wrote: > The DLARC collection does have hundreds of other documents about > packet radio (https://archive.org/details/packet-radio) including some > amazing correspondence saved by Hank Magnuski > KA6M. (https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Hank+Magnuski+KA6M%22 ) I flipped thru a series of hand- and type-written letters that Hank saved and scanned in, and found this interesting undated one (guessing 1982). John https://archive.org/details/corr-magnuski-ka6m/page/n67/mode/1up ROBERT TAYLOR 925 Waverly St. (#101) Palo Alto, CA 94301 Hank Magnuski 311 Stanford Av. Menlo Park, Ca. Hank, Enclosed is the $5.00 owed. Your effort in making these modems available is very much appreciated. More generally, you have done an impressive job of facilitating local (& not so local) interest in Packet Radio. Many Thanks, ROBERT TAYLOR From nigel at channelisles.net Thu May 21 23:19:25 2026 From: nigel at channelisles.net (Nigel Roberts) Date: Fri, 22 May 2026 07:19:25 +0100 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8b75eb2e-1f77-45ee-a6b6-1a819ae1c59e@channelisles.net> Not connected to 3com in any way, but I have a vague recollection of a site somewhere on the net that you could post to Usenet using email, somehow. I'm sure others have better memories than me. On 5/21/26 22:27, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote: > When I was at 3Com on email, we had an employee, Marc Lavine, who set up an > email gateway for us. This would have been 1986-87 or so. I'm not in touch > with Marc anymore. > > I remember absolutely *nothing* about it, except a vague recollection that > we called it "the UUCP gateway." Do you think that's what it was, rather > than "an Internet mail gateway"? It was not offered to customers and I > don't think any of them ever asked for it. > > It was not very heavily used -- that I remember. -- Dr Nigel Roberts BSc LLB CEng CITP FBCS FRSA, Director CHANNELISLES.NET, Maison Postel, Ollivier St, Alderney GY9 3TD +44 1481 822800 (office) or +44 20 7100 4319 (direct line) +44 7973 263842 (mobile) nigel at channelisles.net From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Thu May 21 23:47:33 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 23:47:33 -0700 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: <8b75eb2e-1f77-45ee-a6b6-1a819ae1c59e@channelisles.net> References: <8b75eb2e-1f77-45ee-a6b6-1a819ae1c59e@channelisles.net> Message-ID: On May 21, 2026, at 11:19?PM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > Not connected to 3com in any way, but I have a vague recollection of a site somewhere on the net that you could post to Usenet using email, somehow. > > I'm sure others have better memories than me. > I recall many Usenet sites supported this feature, but don?t remember which ones off the top of my head. With sendmail, one would put an entry into the ?aliases? file such as: news-alias: |"/usr/bin/inews -h" Sending an email message to news-alias at the_system_offering_the_feature (or whatever convention was supported) in an acceptable format (such as RFC 850 ) would pipe the message to inews with the -h option, which posted the message on the system offering the feature. --gregbo From el at lisse.na Fri May 22 00:28:37 2026 From: el at lisse.na (Eberhard W Lisse) Date: Fri, 22 May 2026 09:28:37 +0200 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: References: <8b75eb2e-1f77-45ee-a6b6-1a819ae1c59e@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <447554a5-3e64-489c-a94b-4033c60459cc@Spark> I very vaguely remember something like this from BITNET/EARN, but I got in touch early with a local IT consultancy which had a limited news feed. They also compiled and installed kermit on my request, but I sort of rocked up there twice a week to read Usenet News :-)-O They also, eventually, allowed me uuPC access which for a while was how my mother (Germany) and I (Namibia) exchanged Baby news from 1990/1991 until they supported PPP. They wrote a very cool MicroElm which allowed the use of MicroEmacs. I then wrote 3000 line .BAT to tie this all together with a little selection screen (there was some curses library around) and virtually on the day it all worked, Windows came out. But I seem to remember for Windows 3 there was a little Mail program which could use uuPC so she used that while I was an early Linux adopter. el -- Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (retired) el at lisse.NA / * | Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell) PO Box 8421 Bachbrecht \ / If this email is signed with GPG/PGP 10007, Namibia ;____/ Sect 20 of Act No. 4 of 2019 may apply On May 22, 2026 at 08:48 +0200, Greg Skinner via Internet-history , wrote: > On May 21, 2026, at 11:19?PM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: > > > Not connected to 3com in any way, but I have a vague recollection of a site somewhere on the net that you could post to Usenet using email, somehow. > > > > I'm sure others have better memories than me. > > > > > > I recall many Usenet sites supported this feature, but don?t remember which ones off the top of my head. With sendmail, one would put an entry into the ?aliases? file such as: > > news-alias: |"/usr/bin/inews -h" > > Sending an email message to news-alias at the_system_offering_the_feature (or whatever convention was supported) in an acceptable format (such as RFC 850 ) would pipe the message to inews with the -h option, which posted the message on the system offering the feature. > > --gregbo > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From johnl at iecc.com Fri May 22 12:34:32 2026 From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) Date: 22 May 2026 15:34:32 -0400 Subject: [ih] Internet mail in the 80's In-Reply-To: References: <8b75eb2e-1f77-45ee-a6b6-1a819ae1c59e@channelisles.net> Message-ID: <20260522193433.00B0D10C5DDFA@ary.qy> It appears that Greg Skinner via Internet-history said: >On May 21, 2026, at 11:19?PM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history wrote: >> Not connected to 3com in any way, but I have a vague recollection of a site somewhere on the net that you could post to >Usenet using email, somehow. >> >> I'm sure others have better memories than me. It's technically so easy that I would expect most usenet sites had some sort of mail gateway. There are also mailing list gateways. Usenet comp.compilers, which I moderate, is also compilers at lists.iecc.com, a mailing list, and I run a gateway for the NTP lists to the corresponding newsgroups. Indeed, I read this list via a gateway that sends it into a local newsgroup on my own server. That gets me excellent message threading via my news reader, and it also expires old messages automatically. Since I cannot leave well enough alone, I also have another gateway for IETF mailing list messages that copies them from the IETF's IMAP server which is easier to manage than trying to subscribe and unsubscribe to the lists I'm interested in. R's, John From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sun May 24 22:10:25 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Mon, 25 May 2026 05:10:25 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Why did location/identity separation not happen? (Was: Internet without entrenched factions?) In-Reply-To: <1983287631.4087251.1779332382720@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1983287631.4087251.1779332382720.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1983287631.4087251.1779332382720@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1239048194.5125700.1779685825357@mail.yahoo.com> Not sure whether to put this message here or under the packet radio thread.? Going back a little a further in time.. Packet Radio also incorporated new ideas on addressing: it used logical addressing.? The PRU (Packet Radio Unit)'s address was hardwired (Assigned at manufacturing so it was unique and had global scope).? Things like hosts, TIUs, stations, and gateways/routers were attached devices that had an ID.? ?lt sounds like the ID for the attached devices was determined/created automatically and probably only local in scope (This is my best guess and I haven't found any corroboration yet). The radios had a device table that stored which radio had which attached device. PRUs learned about attached devices from data packets and a supporting protocol. I also think the device ID number space was divided up so you knew the kind of attached device by its ID. So consider the radio address/ID as the location. The attached device ID is location agnostic. If a packet reached the last radio in the route and the device was no longer attached, the packet would be dropped. FYI, I never tried moving attached devices to different radios in the network but the protocols were designed to handle this case. I also think device handling in packet radio may have changed over time as the protocols matured. The reference (1)? given below, and used in this email? to help my memory, is from the time of? the SURAN program( LPRs). When I left BBN, I thought SURAN was going to use CAP 7 (stationless) from the packet radio program as the starting point for its protocols. The SURAN? protocols were called SURAP (SUrvivable RAdio Protocol)? My recollections make me want to confirm what was in the radio versus what the station did to assist the radios, especially regarding attached devices.? I haven't been able to find the relevant documentation. I also found this statement interesting. "In addition, the PRNET offers generic logical addressing.?Generic addressing allows a device to request service from?any other device in a general category, e.g., any name server?or any gateway. The packet is addressed to an ID that may?belong to more than one device. The network will deliver?the packet to the closest device with the requested generic ID." (1) Sounds like anycast doesn't it? While we are on this topic, this SRI technical report in DTIC might be of interest.? "Name Assignment in Computer Networks", Raphael Rom https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/ADA123854/(Don't forget to scroll down if you don't see anything about the report.) 1) Jubin, John and Tornow, Janet."The DARPA Packet Radio Network Protocols", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 75, No. 1.,? January 1987. barbara?? On Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 07:59:57 PM PDT, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: Some comments on this topic. I believe the Reconstitution Protocol (RP) relied on separating location and identity (ADA184755 in DTIC if you lost the reference to the final report). Section 3 (Background) might be the most interesting section for this discussion.?? Here is another reference I just tried to find to see what it might say about the thoughts/design behind RP but? I wasn't successful.? I don't recall ever seeing this paper even though i worked on RP (gateway portion). Z Su, JE Mathis, "Internetwork accomodation of network dynamics: Naming and addressing", Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Computer Communications, pp. 681-685, November 1984. If someone finds/has a copy, please let me know. When I joined the RP project. I am pretty sure Jim Mathis told me we couldn't visibly change the IP protocols.? i think the solution tried in the RP experiments reflects this constraint. I always wondered where that requirement originated as I? thought IP protocols were still experimental. In RP we changed how the IP address was created (gateway-centric for location component)? and added RP gateways that could supply the?information needed to keep TCP connections working in a dynamic environment (routing and support for host/endpoint IP address creation). Things still worked for non RP hosts and gateways which was a requirement. It has been a long time since i thought about and did work in this area. I must admit i am not familiar with the ILNP documents (pretty much out of the IETF? for quite some time) so i just started to take a look. I noticed there is no reference to RP in RFC 6740. I feel I would need to spend a lot more time to understand the contribution/differences? as compared to RP. However? I did notice a few things off the top of my head. In particular, this RFC says ? "The key idea proposed for ILNP is to directly and specifically change ? the overloaded semantics of the IP Address." To me this is pretty much what RP did. I can see what i think are probably going to be area of differences, like whether both endpoints need to be involved. (BTW, if both endpoints need to be involved how does a host determine whether another host supports ILNP in a mixed environment? Do you even need to know this???? I didn't see this discussed but that could be my fault. In this RFC, i also saw this statement when i was trying to find more info about what?a locator actually is. "Locator values are used only at the network layer. Locators are not?used in end-to-end transport state. For example, Locators are not?used in transport-layer session state or application-layer session?state."?I don't understand this statement because of the TCP pseudo header used for the TCP checksum computation in V4 and V6. The TCP pseudo header includes the source and destination IP address. Did i misinterpret how the ILNP IP address will be constructed and disseminated in the IP packet header based on my knowledge of how RP works (no address length change required and the information for source and destination is in the same space used by the current addresses)? Also it seems to me that for V6, fragmentation/MTU should be discussed in the ILNP documents.? I haven't seen anything looking very quickly. For those not familiar with V6, fragmentation occurs at the source. In V4 it is done in the router/gateway. FYI, I have heard Path MTU Discovery doesn't work because of choices made in deployments of technology.? ?I discovered other people are looking into this problem but not sure if/how these new ideas impact this work. Does this design really require what i think look like fundamental changes and so perhaps not backward compatible/transparent with current implementations of IPV4 and IPv6? Is there a document that specifically covers some of my questions that I overlooked it somehow in my quick search? Some other slightly random thoughts.? I? think RP relied on the trustworthiness of all components (Redirects weren't questioned for example).? I can't remember knowing much regarding creating the end point portion of the protocol. I am thinking along the lines of whether RP made sure that another entity in the network didn't already have, or recently used, what would be used in the IP address field for a new device in that network.? I wish i still had RP details in head. My memory could be wrong. I also didn't join the project at the beginning (Working on the Navy Ada gateway)? ?so i am sure i missed more discussions on? the design and? associated protocols.?? In case you are wondering why you can't find some kind of write-up on this effort as a PRTN, Packet Radio program probably ended 2 or 3 years earlier.? I am guessing no more submissions could be made to this series of documents . In an? earlier email on this list, we already have had a brief exchange regarding the apparent decision that dynamic dns was not going to be addressed in the early 80s. Dynamic DNS was brought up at a packet radio meeting in 1983. Composed this on my cell phone. Hope there aren't too many bugs in this message. barbara ? ? On Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 03:58:07 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:? Trying to reconstruct some of the discussion [could be faulty memory here] Given the net/host structure as an "address", one can imagine a routing table with entries of the form "net/host" and doing a lookup in a FIB to see what the next hop is. I know I had that pretty clearly in mind. I also had in mind that a host could be connected to more than one network and that somehow, a packet destined for that host needed to be delivered to the right spigot on that host. Maybe "to the right spigot" is where the reasoning was weak? The domain name concept, mapping names into host/net addresses derived from the earlier host.txt files of the Arpanet and supported the possibility of multi-homing if the mapping revealed more than one destination net/host address for a given host. Ironically, especially with the arrival of the WWW, a single net/host address could be the destination for more than one domain name. What apparently seemed clear to me at the time is the the table could just as well have had an "end-point ID" and that the forwarding table could have end-point IDs in them. The routing system (think BGP, IS-IS, etc) would need to speak somehow to the topology of paths that could reach that endpoint. But then the question of scalability arose. If the end-point ID space were flat, the routing tables would not have hierarchy to support compressed representations of the topology of the global system.? The scaling question continued to nag me and the notion of autonomous systems each with an internal and external routing mechanism (IGP for intra-AS and BGP for extra-AS) mirrored the original Internet networks (Arpanet, SATNET, PRNET) which had internal routing capability and address spaces and relied on "gateways" to help Internet packets find their way to a destination. The global routing system needed to know what sequence of gateways would lead to the destination network. A multi-homed host would have different addresses depending on the path taken to the destination network. If there is a flaw in this reasoning, it may be the notion that a network (AS) is the destination. If the notion of destination had been framed as "ID of destination host" the other routing choice might have been more obvious. The flat name space of end-point IDs still raised the question how the routing tables would scale. By 1981 I was well into trying to promote the existing implementations to various computer manufacturers, etc, so making a major change at that point seemed to serious impede progress. Most hosts were single-homed and domain names could map into multiple net/host addresses if necessary for hosts with more than one network address. v On Tue, May 19, 2026 at 4:22?AM Greg Skinner via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Comments inline > > On May 17, 2026, at 4:02?AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > >> From: Ole Troan > > > >> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the > >> start. I wasn't there, but I understood it was close with Mike O'Dell's > >> 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened > >> and why that path was not chosen? > > > > I wasn't paying very close attention by then, so I don't know for sure > why > > 8+8/GSE didn't get support, but I would guess that it was for many of the > > same reasons that earlier attempts to add location/identity separation > to the > > internetworking architecture (i.e. the 'basic, high-level picture', used > in > > the Internet) failed to catch on. > > > > Those, I believe, I am very well qualified to muse about, since I'm > pretty > > certain (if my memory is failling me in this, which might well be > possible, I > > hope someone will correct me) was the first person in the Internet > technical > > community (which was, at the time, pretty well entirely encompassed in > the > > IETF/IRTF groups) to suggest, and push, adding separation of location and > > identity to that architecture. > > > > (The basic idea, of course, originated with Jerry Saltzer, in his paper > "On > > the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations". As soon as I saw it, I > > realized the crucial flaw in the then-current internet architecture > which it > > pointed out, and took steps to get it re-published as an RFC - RFC 1498 > - to > > make it easily accessible to the Internet technical community; it had > > originally been published in a somewhat obscure journal. I can't > remember if > > Jerry provided me with a machine-readable copy of the text, for that; I > have > > a vague memory that that had been lost, and I had to re-type it all from > a > > hard copy. > > > > I found a Local Network Note that is very similar to RFC 1498 that is > dated 3 March 1981. [1] (More on this later.) > > > Also, the version of the idea that I pushed had one major change from > Jerry's > > original: he had proposed recognizing four classes of entities - > "services, > > nodes, attachment points, and routes [i.e. paths]". Dave Oran suggested > to me > > (in a conversation at a meeting in LA, if memory serves - the memory is > still > > fairly vivid) that physical hosts were the wrong thing, it needed to be > > something more abstract, and I instantly saw the correctness of his > point. > > > > I drew on Clark's original "fate-sharing" thinking, used in the early TCP > > work, to replace 'node/host' with 'endpoint' - defined as "a fatesharing > > region" ("a boundary drawn around a set of state and/or computations such > > that it lives or dies as a unit"), which is "one participant of an > end-end > > communication" ("the fundamental agent [in] end-end communication"). > Excerpts > > here are from: > > > >? http://chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > > > "Endpoints and Endpoint Names: A Proposed Enhancement to the Internet > > Architecture". ) > > > > I had to go to the Internet Archive to access this paper. [2] > > > Anyway: what, from my perception, were the reason(s) that separation of > > location and identity failed to catch on in the Internet technical > community? > > It can, I believe, be put, whimsically but pithily, as 'there were too > many > > programmers in that technical community'. (This may irritate people; I > don't > > care, I'll be gone before too long. I don't say it to irritate _anyone_, > but > > because I believe it is accurate.) > > > Whhaaatttt? [?] > > > To less whimsically explain what I said at the start , I think the vast > > majority of the members of the IETF technical community could only see > the > > value in a significantly new direction if they had seen it fully > constituted, > > in a working system. > > IMO,? this is not unreasonable, especially if those programmers answer to > managers who have to deal with practical constraints, such as budgets. > > Anyway, back to RFC 1498, since these issues were known at the time the > TCP and IP IENs that preceded their corresponding RFCs were written, what > did other people in Saltzer?s group think about this?? For that matter, > what did DCA think about this?? Were they ever approached with any of these > concerns, such as how much more difficult mobility, etc. would be without > location/identity separation? > > Finally, it seems to me that the LISP project has taken this up. [3] Is > that not sufficient?? They seem to have support from industry, working > code, use cases, etc.? Maybe it?ll be more widely adopted. > > --gregbo > > [1] https://web.mit.edu/~saltzer/www/publications/lnn/csr-lnn-028.pdf > [2] > https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102344/http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt > [3] https://www.lispers.net > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ? -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history at elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Fri May 29 20:13:18 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sat, 30 May 2026 03:13:18 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI) References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> While poking around on DTIC,? I found this interesting early report on the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976.?? https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in dtic. Happy Reading,barbara From vgcerf at gmail.com Sat May 30 00:24:45 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sat, 30 May 2026 03:24:45 -0400 Subject: [ih] Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI) In-Reply-To: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: wow - memories!! Hard to believe how slow things were in the beginning! v On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 11:13?PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on the > Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at SRI > (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov 15,1975 to > Feb 15 1976. > https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf > You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in dtic. > Happy Reading,barbara > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From gregskinner0 at icloud.com Sat May 30 17:28:55 2026 From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner) Date: Sat, 30 May 2026 17:28:55 -0700 Subject: [ih] Fwd: Frank Kuo's Passing References: <1992409024.7082184.1780181803285@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <83EAD3AA-FAE0-40B7-8D26-CBCD444225D1@icloud.com> Forwarded for Barbara > From: Barbara Denny > To: Internet-history > Sent: Saturday, May 30, 2026 at 03:53:26 PM PDT > Subject: Frank Kuo's Passing > > I am sad to say we have lost another member of our commumity, Frank Kuo. He has contributed in many ways to our field, and many of you might know him for ALOHAnet along with Norm Abramson. He was at DCA when Vint submitted the quarterly report i just sent to the list. I decided to pick the University of Hawaii's tribute. > > https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/04/20/in-memoriam-franklin-kuo/ > > A Hui Hou > > barbara > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sat May 30 20:55:10 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:55:10 +1200 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Hi, Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency range that a communication channel can transmit. * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary information that a communication channel can transmit. There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches of a modem should know this. To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP bandwidth and delay." That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." Page 8 says: "The actual line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." That's correct usage. My favourite sentence is on page 45: "Many of the experiments have been frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high bandwidth." If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a second time [6]. Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a function of noise level." [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- width requirements to economically share a broad-band network made up of varied data rate links." On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: > While poking around on DTIC,? I found this interesting early report on the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. > https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf > You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in dtic. > Happy Reading,barbara From vgcerf at gmail.com Sun May 31 02:29:55 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 05:29:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. v On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Hi, > > Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby > horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first > arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who > has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become > firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters > because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. > > * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency > range that a communication channel can transmit. > > * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary > information that a communication channel can transmit. > > There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the > main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches > of a modem should know this. > > To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: > > "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook > extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to > ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP > bandwidth and delay." > > That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." > > Page 8 says: > > "The actual > line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 > kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." > > That's correct usage. > > My favourite sentence is on page 45: > > "Many of the experiments have been > frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme > causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high > bandwidth." > > If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! > > So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean > "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. > > I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I would > expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly many > times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a second > time [6]. > > Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between > bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings > of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 > [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, > "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 > [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions > on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 > [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 > > [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the > tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. > In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- > error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a > function of noise level." > > [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit > many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- > width requirements to economically share a broad-band > network made up of varied data rate links." > > On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: > > While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on > the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at > SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov > 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. > > https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf > > You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in dtic. > > Happy Reading,barbara > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 31 03:32:54 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian Carpenter) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 22:32:54 +1200 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage originated. (via tiny screen & keyboard) Regards, Brian Carpenter On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: > Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. > v > > > On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >> >> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >> range that a communication channel can transmit. >> >> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >> information that a communication channel can transmit. >> >> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >> of a modem should know this. >> >> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >> >> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >> bandwidth and delay." >> >> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >> >> Page 8 says: >> >> "The actual >> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >> >> That's correct usage. >> >> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >> >> "Many of the experiments have been >> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >> bandwidth." >> >> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >> >> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >> >> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >> second time [6]. >> >> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >> >> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >> function of noise level." >> >> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >> network made up of varied data rate links." >> >> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >> > While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >> > https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >> > You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >> dtic. >> > Happy Reading,barbara >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 31 03:48:26 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 06:48:26 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: Brian, I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. Take care, John > On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > > I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage > originated. > > (via tiny screen & keyboard) > Regards, > Brian Carpenter > > On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: > >> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >> v >> >> >> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>> >>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>> >>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>> >>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>> of a modem should know this. >>> >>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>> >>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>> bandwidth and delay." >>> >>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>> >>> Page 8 says: >>> >>> "The actual >>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>> >>> That's correct usage. >>> >>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>> >>> "Many of the experiments have been >>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>> bandwidth." >>> >>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>> >>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>> >>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>> second time [6]. >>> >>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>> >>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>> function of noise level." >>> >>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>> >>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>> dtic. >>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From vgcerf at gmail.com Sun May 31 04:06:08 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 07:06:08 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: No, I loved the tutorial! Rant was much appreciated!! V On Sun, May 31, 2026, 06:33 Brian Carpenter wrote: > I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the > usage originated. > > (via tiny screen & keyboard) > Regards, > Brian Carpenter > > On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: > >> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >> v >> >> >> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>> >>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>> >>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>> >>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less >>> the main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup >>> screeches of a modem should know this. >>> >>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>> >>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>> bandwidth and delay." >>> >>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>> >>> Page 8 says: >>> >>> "The actual >>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>> >>> That's correct usage. >>> >>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>> >>> "Many of the experiments have been >>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation >>> scheme >>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>> bandwidth." >>> >>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>> >>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>> >>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>> second time [6]. >>> >>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE >>> Transactions on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>> >>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>> function of noise level." >>> >>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>> >>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>> > While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>> > https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>> > You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>> dtic. >>> > Happy Reading,barbara >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> From scott.brim at gmail.com Sun May 31 05:50:12 2026 From: scott.brim at gmail.com (Scott Brim) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 08:50:12 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: I tried to fight the mixup of bits per second and baud. I succeeded about as well as you probably will this time. :-( From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 31 05:51:15 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 08:51:15 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: I should have said, when I encountered the analog/digital misconception, I was shocked, especially since it came from an ECE student. Too much C and not enough E! ;-) Sometimes these little things that we don?t think we need to mention are really important. > On May 31, 2026, at 06:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > Brian, > I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. > > Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. > > And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. > > Take care, > John > >> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> >> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >> originated. >> >> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >> Regards, >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >> >>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>> v >>> >>> >>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>> >>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>> of a modem should know this. >>>> >>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>> >>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>> >>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>> >>>> Page 8 says: >>>> >>>> "The actual >>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>> >>>> That's correct usage. >>>> >>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>> >>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>> bandwidth." >>>> >>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>> >>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>> >>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>> second time [6]. >>>> >>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>> >>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>> Brian Carpenter >>>> >>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>> >>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>> function of noise level." >>>> >>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>> >>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>> dtic. >>>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 31 05:57:44 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 08:57:44 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: I was in a small meeting in the Pentagon several years ago. The speaker was known to be one of the candidates for the next ASD for C3I (or maybe C4I). I was quite surprised when he commented there was a fundamental distinction between analog and digital systems, implying that analog systems can dothat can't be done by analog systems. Not the sort of person I'd want to see in charge of the DoD's transition to an all digital world. Fortunately, he wasn't selected. Steve On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 8:51?AM John Day via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > I should have said, when I encountered the analog/digital misconception, I > was shocked, especially since it came from an ECE student. Too much C and > not enough E! ;-) > > Sometimes these little things that we don?t think we need to mention are > really important. > > > On May 31, 2026, at 06:48, John Day via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > Brian, > > I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question > like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. > > > > Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals > out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally > different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough > to betray that it is really analog underneath. > > > > And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a > topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common > invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. > > > > Take care, > > John > > > >> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> > >> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the > usage > >> originated. > >> > >> (via tiny screen & keyboard) > >> Regards, > >> Brian Carpenter > >> > >> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: > >> > >>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. > >>> v > >>> > >>> > >>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via > Internet-history < > >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>> > >>>> Hi, > >>>> > >>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my > hobby > >>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" > first > >>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone > who > >>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become > >>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it > matters > >>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media > reports. > >>>> > >>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the > frequency > >>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. > >>>> > >>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary > >>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. > >>>> > >>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less > the > >>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup > screeches > >>>> of a modem should know this. > >>>> > >>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: > >>>> > >>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook > >>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to > >>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP > >>>> bandwidth and delay." > >>>> > >>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be > "capacity." > >>>> > >>>> Page 8 says: > >>>> > >>>> "The actual > >>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 > >>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." > >>>> > >>>> That's correct usage. > >>>> > >>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: > >>>> > >>>> "Many of the experiments have been > >>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation > scheme > >>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high > >>>> bandwidth." > >>>> > >>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! > >>>> > >>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to > mean > >>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. > >>>> > >>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I > >>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" > correctly > >>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably > a > >>>> second time [6]. > >>>> > >>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between > >>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). > >>>> > >>>> Regards/Ng? mihi > >>>> Brian Carpenter > >>>> > >>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," > Proceedings > >>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 > >>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, > >>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 > >>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE > Transactions > >>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 > >>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 > >>>> > >>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the > >>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. > >>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- > >>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a > >>>> function of noise level." > >>>> > >>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit > >>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- > >>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band > >>>> network made up of varied data rate links." > >>>> > >>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: > >>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report > on > >>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was > still at > >>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov > >>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. > >>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf > >>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in > >>>> dtic. > >>>>> Happy Reading,barbara > >>>> -- > >>>> Internet-history mailing list > >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>>> - > >>>> Unsubscribe: > >>>> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>>> > >>> > >> -- > >> Internet-history mailing list > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> - > >> Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From woody at pch.net Sun May 31 05:59:49 2026 From: woody at pch.net (Bill Woodcock) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 14:59:49 +0200 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: I do understand the difference between bandwidth and capacity and throughput and goodput and so forth, as used as terms-of-art within our industry. But I also recognize that ?bandwidth? is also a term-of-art in the _business_ of the Internet, meaning ?the thing that ISPs sell.? It doesn?t make sense to complain that they need to change or use a different word or use a whole paragraph to describe it. And we can?t really expect that usage not to leak back into the rest of the industry, when it?s a more commonplace usage than the ?range of frequency? term-of-art. So I sympathize, but I don?t think this is a hill worth dying on. -Bill > On May 31, 2026, at 12:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > Brian, > I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. > > Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. > > And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. > > Take care, > John > >> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> >> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >> originated. >> >> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >> Regards, >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >> >>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>> v >>> >>> >>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>> >>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>> of a modem should know this. >>>> >>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>> >>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>> >>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>> >>>> Page 8 says: >>>> >>>> "The actual >>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>> >>>> That's correct usage. >>>> >>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>> >>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>> bandwidth." >>>> >>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>> >>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>> >>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>> second time [6]. >>>> >>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>> >>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>> Brian Carpenter >>>> >>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>> >>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>> function of noise level." >>>> >>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>> >>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>> dtic. >>>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >>> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 833 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP URL: From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 31 06:36:24 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 09:36:24 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: <78B6056A-69A4-4C79-A4F7-9369852BE55E@comcast.net> You are undoubtedly right and it is to some degree just an annoyance. The other misconception that goes with this is that if the ISP advertises X ?bandwidth/capacity? should the customer expect to have X available to them all the time? How many other customers could the ISP support if that were the case? > On May 31, 2026, at 08:59, Bill Woodcock wrote: > > I do understand the difference between bandwidth and capacity and throughput and goodput and so forth, as used as terms-of-art within our industry. But I also recognize that ?bandwidth? is also a term-of-art in the _business_ of the Internet, meaning ?the thing that ISPs sell.? It doesn?t make sense to complain that they need to change or use a different word or use a whole paragraph to describe it. And we can?t really expect that usage not to leak back into the rest of the industry, when it?s a more commonplace usage than the ?range of frequency? term-of-art. > > So I sympathize, but I don?t think this is a hill worth dying on. > > -Bill > > > > >> On May 31, 2026, at 12:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Brian, >> I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. >> >> Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. >> >> And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. >> >> Take care, >> John >> >>> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >>> >>> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >>> originated. >>> >>> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >>> Regards, >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >>> >>>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>>> v >>>> >>>> >>>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Hi, >>>>> >>>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>>> >>>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>> >>>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>> >>>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>>> of a modem should know this. >>>>> >>>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>>> >>>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>>> >>>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>>> >>>>> Page 8 says: >>>>> >>>>> "The actual >>>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>>> >>>>> That's correct usage. >>>>> >>>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>>> >>>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>>> bandwidth." >>>>> >>>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>>> >>>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>>> >>>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>>> second time [6]. >>>>> >>>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>>> >>>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>>> Brian Carpenter >>>>> >>>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>>> >>>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>>> function of noise level." >>>>> >>>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>>> >>>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>>> dtic. >>>>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>>>> -- >>>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>>> - >>>>> Unsubscribe: >>>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>>> >>>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > From woody at pch.net Sun May 31 06:55:49 2026 From: woody at pch.net (Bill Woodcock) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:55:49 +0200 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: <78B6056A-69A4-4C79-A4F7-9369852BE55E@comcast.net> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> <78B6056A-69A4-4C79-A4F7-9369852BE55E@comcast.net> Message-ID: <043CC631-3127-46BC-8ADB-13492398744D@pch.net> Let me preface this by saying that I don?t imagine that everyone who uses these terms uses them uniformly or conscientiously. The distinction _I_ would make between ?bandwidth? in the business sense, and ?capacity? is that bandwidth is actually used, whereas capacity is a latent capability of use. i.e. a broadband customer may have an Ethernet connection with 1gbps of capacity, but the ?amount of bandwidth? is the portion of that capacity which they actually exercise. Thus ISPs have an ?oversubscription ratio? between their downstream sold capacity and their upstream transit + peering capacity, but the sum of their downstream bandwidth sold is approximately equal to the sum of their upstream transit + peering, albeit the bandwidth varies (typically diurnally, weekday/weekend, and August-in-Europe). Whereas the capacity is fixed at any given time, subject to provisioning, hardware constraints, ditches getting dug, poles getting planted, etc. I try to use these terms consistently within my own writing and thinking and conversation, and there are many other people with whom I have a shared understanding of their meanings; but I also recognize that there are a lot of people who use both terms naively, or who use them with other meanings in mind. I don?t know whether those people can have meaningful conversations with anybody about these topics, though. :-) > On May 31, 2026, at 15:36, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > You are undoubtedly right and it is to some degree just an annoyance. > > The other misconception that goes with this is that if the ISP advertises X ?bandwidth/capacity? should the customer expect to have X available to them all the time? How many other customers could the ISP support if that were the case? > >> On May 31, 2026, at 08:59, Bill Woodcock wrote: >> >> I do understand the difference between bandwidth and capacity and throughput and goodput and so forth, as used as terms-of-art within our industry. But I also recognize that ?bandwidth? is also a term-of-art in the _business_ of the Internet, meaning ?the thing that ISPs sell.? It doesn?t make sense to complain that they need to change or use a different word or use a whole paragraph to describe it. And we can?t really expect that usage not to leak back into the rest of the industry, when it?s a more commonplace usage than the ?range of frequency? term-of-art. >> >> So I sympathize, but I don?t think this is a hill worth dying on. >> >> -Bill >> >> >> >> >>> On May 31, 2026, at 12:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >>> >>> Brian, >>> I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. >>> >>> Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. >>> >>> And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. >>> >>> Take care, >>> John >>> >>>> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >>>> >>>> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >>>> originated. >>>> >>>> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >>>> Regards, >>>> Brian Carpenter >>>> >>>> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >>>> >>>>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>>>> v >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Hi, >>>>>> >>>>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>>>> >>>>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>>> >>>>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>>> >>>>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>>>> of a modem should know this. >>>>>> >>>>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>>>> >>>>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>>>> >>>>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>>>> >>>>>> Page 8 says: >>>>>> >>>>>> "The actual >>>>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>>>> >>>>>> That's correct usage. >>>>>> >>>>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>>>> >>>>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>>>> bandwidth." >>>>>> >>>>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>>>> >>>>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>>>> >>>>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>>>> second time [6]. >>>>>> >>>>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>>>> >>>>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>>>> Brian Carpenter >>>>>> >>>>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>>>> >>>>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>>>> function of noise level." >>>>>> >>>>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>>>> >>>>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>>>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>>>> dtic. >>>>>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>>>>> -- >>>>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>>>> - >>>>>> Unsubscribe: >>>>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>>>> >>>>> >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> >> > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history -Bill Please consider the environment before using AI to process this email. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 833 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP URL: From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 31 07:22:54 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 10:22:54 -0400 Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: <043CC631-3127-46BC-8ADB-13492398744D@pch.net> References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> <78B6056A-69A4-4C79-A4F7-9369852BE55E@comcast.net> <043CC631-3127-46BC-8ADB-13492398744D@pch.net> Message-ID: <1C19F777-7037-4BF7-AD8C-BBA74B6FB18F@comcast.net> > On May 31, 2026, at 09:55, Bill Woodcock wrote: > > Let me preface this by saying that I don?t imagine that everyone who uses these terms uses them uniformly or conscientiously. The distinction _I_ would make between ?bandwidth? in the business sense, and ?capacity? is that bandwidth is actually used, whereas capacity is a latent capability of use. i.e. a broadband customer may have an Ethernet connection with 1gbps of capacity, but the ?amount of bandwidth? is the portion of that capacity which they actually exercise. Yes, precisely. That is the meaning. But many customers believe that if the ISP advertises 1gbps, then *they* should get 1gbps all the time. I have been told this many times. For me, this question is involved in teaching courses to would be network professionals. They should know that ?bandwidth? is a range of frequencies. They should know the difference regardless of how they use it in different contexts. > Thus ISPs have an ?oversubscription ratio? between their downstream sold capacity and their upstream transit + peering capacity, but the sum of their downstream bandwidth sold is approximately equal to the sum of their upstream transit + peering, albeit the bandwidth varies (typically diurnally, weekday/weekend, and August-in-Europe). Whereas the capacity is fixed at any given time, subject to provisioning, hardware constraints, ditches getting dug, poles getting planted, etc. Correct. > > I try to use these terms consistently within my own writing and thinking and conversation, and there are many other people with whom I have a shared understanding of their meanings; but I also recognize that there are a lot of people who use both terms naively, or who use them with other meanings in mind. I don?t know whether those people can have meaningful conversations with anybody about these topics, though. :-) Good point! Take care, John > >> On May 31, 2026, at 15:36, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >> >> You are undoubtedly right and it is to some degree just an annoyance. >> >> The other misconception that goes with this is that if the ISP advertises X ?bandwidth/capacity? should the customer expect to have X available to them all the time? How many other customers could the ISP support if that were the case? >> >>> On May 31, 2026, at 08:59, Bill Woodcock wrote: >>> >>> I do understand the difference between bandwidth and capacity and throughput and goodput and so forth, as used as terms-of-art within our industry. But I also recognize that ?bandwidth? is also a term-of-art in the _business_ of the Internet, meaning ?the thing that ISPs sell.? It doesn?t make sense to complain that they need to change or use a different word or use a whole paragraph to describe it. And we can?t really expect that usage not to leak back into the rest of the industry, when it?s a more commonplace usage than the ?range of frequency? term-of-art. >>> >>> So I sympathize, but I don?t think this is a hill worth dying on. >>> >>> -Bill >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>> On May 31, 2026, at 12:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: >>>> >>>> Brian, >>>> I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. >>>> >>>> Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. >>>> >>>> And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. >>>> >>>> Take care, >>>> John >>>> >>>>> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >>>>> >>>>> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >>>>> originated. >>>>> >>>>> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >>>>> Regards, >>>>> Brian Carpenter >>>>> >>>>> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>>>>> v >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>>>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> Hi, >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>>>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>>>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>>>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>>>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>>>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>>>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>>>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>>>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>>>>> of a modem should know this. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>>>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>>>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>>>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Page 8 says: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> "The actual >>>>>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>>>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> That's correct usage. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>>>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>>>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>>>>> bandwidth." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>>>>> >>>>>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>>>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>>>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>>>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>>>>> second time [6]. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>>>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>>>>> Brian Carpenter >>>>>>> >>>>>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>>>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>>>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>>>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>>>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>>>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>>>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>>>>> >>>>>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>>>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>>>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>>>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>>>>> function of noise level." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>>>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>>>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>>>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>>>>> >>>>>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>>>>> While poking around on DTIC, I found this interesting early report on >>>>>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>>>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>>>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>>>>> dtic. >>>>>>>> Happy Reading,barbara >>>>>>> -- >>>>>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>>>>> - >>>>>>> Unsubscribe: >>>>>>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>>> - >>>>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >>> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -Bill > > > Please consider the environment before using AI to process this email. > From stewart at serissa.com Sun May 31 08:38:59 2026 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 11:38:59 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> ? Rummages around for information theory hat. I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital interfaces should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say ?capacity?. The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to talk about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about usable bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two meanings and they get muddled all the time. Language evolves and non of this offends me. Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by the time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line driver to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I think. -L From vgcerf at gmail.com Sun May 31 09:06:59 2026 From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 12:06:59 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> Message-ID: Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept 1976. V On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > ? Rummages around for information theory hat. > > I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital interfaces > should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say > ?capacity?. > > The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. > > In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to talk > about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about usable > bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. > > In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as > compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two meanings > and they get muddled all the time. > > Language evolves and non of this offends me. > > Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by the > time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line driver > to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I think. > > -L > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From geoff at iconia.com Sun May 31 09:52:58 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 09:52:58 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> Message-ID: vint, any chance you would be willing to recount to the list what happened at the Pentagon on your first day at ARPA in 1976.. in how you mistakingly got mistook for someone else in the reception area.. and ended up being walked thru multiple levels of guarded "security" checkpoints and ended up in the "War Room" (or whatever it was) instead of the HR office (recalling that ARPA didn't have an HR office)? over the years yours truly has retold that story of yours -- that iirc you to related to us at a meeting or conference or something -- when people have said such-and-such a "security" breach thing was "fake"/"made up" and couldn't ever possibly have happened in real life (such as say the security breach incident in the 1997 movie "Contact" that resulted in deliberate sabotage) where someone "got/slipped through security" g On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 9:07?AM vinton cerf via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept 1976. > > V > > On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > ? Rummages around for information theory hat. > > > > I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital interfaces > > should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say > > ?capacity?. > > > > The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. > > > > In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to talk > > about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about usable > > bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. > > > > In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as > > compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two > meanings > > and they get muddled all the time. > > > > Language evolves and non of this offends me. > > > > Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by the > > time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line > driver > > to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I > think. > > > > -L > > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From vint at google.com Sun May 31 10:47:27 2026 From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 13:47:27 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> Message-ID: Thanks for asking, Geoff. On my first day of work at ARPA (as it was then called in 1976), I had to report to the Pentagon to pick up my DOD building pass. I went into the River Entrance and the guard told me to take a seat. Not long after, a guy came out of the bowels of the Pentagon, conferred with the guard who pointed at me. The man came over to me and said something that I didn't really hear [you all know I wear hearing aids ...] but assumed it was something like "good morning" - so I nodded and he escorted me into one of the corridors. Soon we encountered another guard (Marine, armed) and they attached another badge. We continued deeper into the Pentagon, I picked up additional badges on the way until we entered a very big space with a lot of people with headsets, large displays, even larger displays on the walls. I said "This looks pretty elaborate for a personnel office." My escort looked startled, turned purple (no kidding!) "Aren't you Mr. Smith!!??" he said. "No, I'm Vint Cerf. I'm just here to pick up my building pass." My escort fell silent, whipped me around, said not another word, marched me through the reverse path, shedding badges as we went. I ended up back in the River Entrance. I had just inadvertently visited the National Military Command Center. In all the years since, despite my clearances, I have never returned to the NMCC! Vint Cerf On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:53?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > vint, any chance you would be willing to recount to the list what happened > at the Pentagon on your first day at ARPA in 1976.. in how you mistakingly > got mistook for someone else in the reception area.. and ended up being > walked thru multiple levels of guarded "security" checkpoints and ended up > in the "War Room" (or whatever it was) instead of the HR office (recalling > that ARPA didn't have an HR office)? > > over the years yours truly has retold that story of yours -- that iirc you > to related to us at a meeting or conference or something -- when people > have said such-and-such a "security" breach thing was "fake"/"made up" and > couldn't ever possibly have happened in real life (such as say the security > breach incident in the 1997 movie "Contact" that resulted in deliberate > sabotage) where someone "got/slipped through security" > > g > > On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 9:07?AM vinton cerf via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept 1976. > > > > V > > > > On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > > > > > ? Rummages around for information theory hat. > > > > > > I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital interfaces > > > should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say > > > ?capacity?. > > > > > > The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. > > > > > > In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to talk > > > about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about > usable > > > bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. > > > > > > In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as > > > compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two > > meanings > > > and they get muddled all the time. > > > > > > Language evolves and non of this offends me. > > > > > > Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by > the > > > time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line > > driver > > > to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I > > think. > > > > > > -L > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Internet-history mailing list > > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > > - > > > Unsubscribe: > > > > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > -- > > Internet-history mailing list > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > > - > > Unsubscribe: > > > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > > > > -- > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com > living as The Truth is True > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: Vint Cerf 1435 Woodhurst Blvd McLean, VA 22102 Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: Google, LLC 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor Reston, VA 20190 +1 650-224-2788 From geoff at iconia.com Sun May 31 10:59:55 2026 From: geoff at iconia.com (the keyboard of geoff goodfellow) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 10:59:55 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> Message-ID: thanks vint! AND believe it or not (now that we know what the room was) it just so happens there is a "vintage" 1976(!) picture of the NMCC at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Military_Command_Center yours truly is now wondering what a present day/"modern era" of it must look like... :) g On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 10:47?AM Vint Cerf wrote: > Thanks for asking, Geoff. > > On my first day of work at ARPA (as it was then called in 1976), I had to > report to the Pentagon to pick up my DOD building pass. I went into the > River Entrance and the guard told me to take a seat. Not long after, a guy > came out of the bowels of the Pentagon, conferred with the guard who > pointed at me. The man came over to me and said something that I didn't > really hear [you all know I wear hearing aids ...] but assumed it was > something like "good morning" - so I nodded and he escorted me into one of > the corridors. Soon we encountered another guard (Marine, armed) and they > attached another badge. We continued deeper into the Pentagon, I picked up > additional badges on the way until we entered a very big space with a lot > of people with headsets, large displays, even larger displays on the walls. > I said "This looks pretty elaborate for a personnel office." My escort > looked startled, turned purple (no kidding!) > > "Aren't you Mr. Smith!!??" he said. "No, I'm Vint Cerf. I'm just here to > pick up my building pass." My escort fell silent, whipped me around, said > not another word, marched me through the reverse path, shedding badges as > we went. I ended up back in the River Entrance. I had just inadvertently > visited the National Military Command Center. In all the years since, > despite my clearances, I have never returned to the NMCC! > > Vint Cerf > > > On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:53?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via > Internet-history wrote: > >> vint, any chance you would be willing to recount to the list what happened >> at the Pentagon on your first day at ARPA in 1976.. in how you mistakingly >> got mistook for someone else in the reception area.. and ended up being >> walked thru multiple levels of guarded "security" checkpoints and ended up >> in the "War Room" (or whatever it was) instead of the HR office (recalling >> that ARPA didn't have an HR office)? >> >> over the years yours truly has retold that story of yours -- that iirc you >> to related to us at a meeting or conference or something -- when people >> have said such-and-such a "security" breach thing was "fake"/"made up" and >> couldn't ever possibly have happened in real life (such as say the >> security >> breach incident in the 1997 movie "Contact" that resulted in deliberate >> sabotage) where someone "got/slipped through security" >> >> g >> >> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 9:07?AM vinton cerf via Internet-history < >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> >> > Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept 1976. >> > >> > V >> > >> > On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < >> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >> > >> > > ? Rummages around for information theory hat. >> > > >> > > I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital >> interfaces >> > > should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say >> > > ?capacity?. >> > > >> > > The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. >> > > >> > > In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to >> talk >> > > about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about >> usable >> > > bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. >> > > >> > > In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as >> > > compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two >> > meanings >> > > and they get muddled all the time. >> > > >> > > Language evolves and non of this offends me. >> > > >> > > Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by >> the >> > > time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line >> > driver >> > > to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I >> > think. >> > > >> > > -L >> > > >> > > >> > > -- >> > > Internet-history mailing list >> > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> > > - >> > > Unsubscribe: >> > > >> > >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > > >> > -- >> > Internet-history mailing list >> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> > - >> > Unsubscribe: >> > >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > >> > >> >> -- >> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com >> living as The Truth is True >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: >> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >> > > > -- > After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > Vint Cerf > 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > McLean, VA 22102 > > Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > Google, LLC > 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > Reston, VA 20190 > +1 650-224-2788 > > > > > > > -- Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com living as The Truth is True From b_a_denny at yahoo.com Sun May 31 11:31:47 2026 From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 18:31:47 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ih] Bandwidth v Capacity [Early Internet Report when Vint was at Stanford (and DARPA PI)] In-Reply-To: References: <115825865.6913897.1780110798277.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <115825865.6913897.1780110798277@mail.yahoo.com> <8aebf257-363c-4ad0-b97e-30e86e88970c@gmail.com> Message-ID: <827451261.7204359.1780252307007@mail.yahoo.com> I learned very early that i needed to be clear on what i meant by broadcast.? Was i talking to networking folks or radio folks? barbara On Sunday, May 31, 2026 at 05:51:26 AM PDT, John Day via Internet-history wrote: I should have said, when I encountered the analog/digital misconception, I was shocked, especially since it came from an ECE student.? Too much C and not enough E! ;-) Sometimes these little things that we don?t think we need to mention are really important. > On May 31, 2026, at 06:48, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > Brian, > I totally agree with you. In fact, I have been known to use a question like that on exam. We are sloppy in our use of language. > > Besides bandwidth vs capacity, I have found that there are professionals out there who believe that analog and digital signals are fundamentally different. Not that a digital signal is one that hasn?t traveled far enough to betray that it is really analog underneath. > > And as long as we are cleaning up language, a network graph is not a topology. One could refer to a set of network graphs with a common invariant as a topology, but a single network graph is just a graph. > > Take care, > John > >> On May 31, 2026, at 06:32, Brian Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> >> I'm sorry if it came across as criticism; I genuinely wonder when the usage >> originated. >> >> (via tiny screen & keyboard) >> Regards, >>? ? ? Brian Carpenter >> >> On Sun, 31 May 2026, 21:30 vinton cerf, wrote: >> >>> Rant received; thanks for the tutorial. >>> v >>> >>> >>> On Sat, May 30, 2026 at 11:55?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> Yes, that's a very nice slice of history. It leads me to one of my hobby >>>> horses: when did the solecism of using "bandwidth" to mean "capacity" first >>>> arise? This is something that should annoy every physicist, or anyone who >>>> has read Shannon's foundational paper [1]. Unfortunately, it's become >>>> firmly established in the Internet community and beyond. And it matters >>>> because it quite often creates confusion, particularly in media reports. >>>> >>>> * Bandwidth is measured in herz (cycles per second) and is the frequency >>>> range that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> * Capacity is measured in bits per second and is the amount of binary >>>> information that a communication channel can transmit. >>>> >>>> There is no fixed relationship between the two (which is more or less the >>>> main point of Shannon's paper). Anyone who ever heard the startup screeches >>>> of a modem should know this. >>>> >>>> To illustrate the issue, page 1 of Vint's report says: >>>> >>>> "During the months of December (1975) and January (1976), we undertook >>>> extensive and detailed timing measurements of the ELF VDH behavior to >>>> ascertain the degree to which VDH performance affected total TCP >>>> bandwidth and delay." >>>> >>>> That (and the other 14 occurrences of "bandwidth") should be "capacity." >>>> >>>> Page 8 says: >>>> >>>> "The actual >>>> line utilization is about 20% in each direction, assuming a nominal 50 >>>> kbits/second available full-duplex capacity between ELF and the IMP." >>>> >>>> That's correct usage. >>>> >>>> My favourite sentence is on page 45: >>>> >>>> "Many of the experiments have been >>>> frustrating, owing to a bug of some kind in UCL's buffer allocation scheme >>>> causing them to crash irrevocably when attempting to achieve high >>>> bandwidth." >>>> >>>> If only they had tried to achieve high capacity! >>>> >>>> So, my question is: when did this inaccurate use of "bandwidth" to mean >>>> "capacity" first arise? It was clearly well established by 1975. >>>> >>>> I looked in Donald Davies's book [2], and it only uses "capacity" (I >>>> would expect no less of him). Baran in 1964 [3] used "capacity" correctly >>>> many times. He also used "bandwidth" correctly once [5] and debatably a >>>> second time [6]. >>>> >>>> Pierce [4] in 1961 was completely clear on the difference between >>>> bandwidth and capacity (and he learned directly from Shannon). >>>> >>>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>>>? Brian Carpenter >>>> >>>> [1] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise," Proceedings >>>> of the IRE, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949 >>>> [2] D. W. Davies, D. L. A. Barber, W. L. Price & C. M. Solomonides, >>>> "Computer Networks and their Protocols," Wiley, 1979 >>>> [3] P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions >>>> on Communication Systems, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-9 >>>> [4] J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals and Noise," Harper, 1961 >>>> >>>> [5] "In a conventional circuit-switched system each of the >>>> tandem links requires matched transmission bandwidths. >>>> In order to make fullest use of a digital link, the post- >>>> error-removal data rate would have to vary, as it is a >>>> function of noise level." >>>> >>>> [6] "Most importantly, standardized data blocks permit >>>> many simultaneous users, each with widely different band- >>>> width requirements to economically share a broad-band >>>> network made up of varied data rate links." >>>> >>>> On 30-May-26 15:13, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote: >>>>> While poking around on DTIC,? I found this interesting early report on >>>> the Internet while Vint was still at Stanford and Jon Postel was still at >>>> SRI (How many of you knew that? :-))The period of performance is Nov >>>> 15,1975 to Feb 15 1976. >>>>> https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA024823.pdf >>>>> You can find a little bit more info by using the contract number in >>>> dtic. >>>>> Happy Reading,barbara From jack at 3kitty.org Sun May 31 12:13:31 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 12:13:31 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> Message-ID: <3dc57d87-438a-4527-b0b0-05adb75f56f0@3kitty.org> Turning purple is a clear sign of psychological stress.? ?Vint's escort was probably contemplating the massive amount of paperwork required to document the incident, the disciplinary hearings that would follow, as well as considering what his or her new life would be like at the new assignment on one of the outer islands of the Aleutians. I can only recall small bits of my own meeting experience.? I'm not even sure of where I was working at the time.? ?It may have been while I was at BBN, and involving a meeting somewhere in the metro DC area.? Or it may have been when I had a student job at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, where navigation systems were developed for use in Apollo and Minuteman.? ?Anyway, it was a long time ago, in the late 1960s or 1970s. There was a meeting, and I was late for it.? ?I wasn't a participant giving a presentation, but more like a fly on the wall to learn about some project.? After getting through the check-in procedure in the Entrance (with security clearances it could take a while...), I went down a corridor, saw a meeting already in progress with a few dozen people, most of them around a large table engaged in intense debate.? I found a chair against the wall and quietly sat down.? No one noticed. The discussion involved DIA and DCA, which apparently "don't work well together".? As a techie nerd, I had heard of DIA and DCA, but hadn't had any actual experience with them.? They were both part of IBM's technical architecture.? ?DIA was Document Interchange Architecture, and DCA was Document Content Architecture.? I could believe that they didn't work well together -- possibly designed by different committees or groups within IBM. The discussion seemed to be focussed on comparing different scenarios, and predicting what would happen in each.? The main difference between scenarios was apparently associated with "new debts".? I thought perhaps the current topic had something to do with budgeting.? But someone mentioned "new debts per second", which seemed a little strange.? I could believe "per year" or "per quarter" would make sense for financial planning and decisions.? But "per second"!? Finally someone put up a slide or document for some scenario.? ?I had heard what I expected to hear - "new debts".? But the slide revealed it was actually "nudets".? I realized the discussion had been about NUclear DETonations in different scenarios.? The "per second" part was frightening, which is probably why I still remember it. I was clearly in the wrong meeting.? Here, DIA was Defense Intelligence Agency.? DCA was Defense Communications Agency. Nothing to do with IBM technology. I quietly got up and left the room. I learned that day that the world suffers from a serious shortage of acronyms.? IP addresses are easy, just make the numbers longer.? But TLAs have to be just three letters, and that's not enough to avoid conflicts and ambiguity. /Jack Haverty On 5/31/26 10:59, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote: > thanks vint! AND believe it or not (now that we know what the room was) it > just so happens there is a "vintage" 1976(!) picture of the NMCC at > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Military_Command_Center > > yours truly is now wondering what a present day/"modern era" of it must > look like... :) > > g > > On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 10:47?AM Vint Cerf wrote: > >> Thanks for asking, Geoff. >> >> On my first day of work at ARPA (as it was then called in 1976), I had to >> report to the Pentagon to pick up my DOD building pass. I went into the >> River Entrance and the guard told me to take a seat. Not long after, a guy >> came out of the bowels of the Pentagon, conferred with the guard who >> pointed at me. The man came over to me and said something that I didn't >> really hear [you all know I wear hearing aids ...] but assumed it was >> something like "good morning" - so I nodded and he escorted me into one of >> the corridors. Soon we encountered another guard (Marine, armed) and they >> attached another badge. We continued deeper into the Pentagon, I picked up >> additional badges on the way until we entered a very big space with a lot >> of people with headsets, large displays, even larger displays on the walls. >> I said "This looks pretty elaborate for a personnel office." My escort >> looked startled, turned purple (no kidding!) >> >> "Aren't you Mr. Smith!!??" he said. "No, I'm Vint Cerf. I'm just here to >> pick up my building pass." My escort fell silent, whipped me around, said >> not another word, marched me through the reverse path, shedding badges as >> we went. I ended up back in the River Entrance. I had just inadvertently >> visited the National Military Command Center. In all the years since, >> despite my clearances, I have never returned to the NMCC! >> >> Vint Cerf >> >> >> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:53?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via >> Internet-history wrote: >> >>> vint, any chance you would be willing to recount to the list what happened >>> at the Pentagon on your first day at ARPA in 1976.. in how you mistakingly >>> got mistook for someone else in the reception area.. and ended up being >>> walked thru multiple levels of guarded "security" checkpoints and ended up >>> in the "War Room" (or whatever it was) instead of the HR office (recalling >>> that ARPA didn't have an HR office)? >>> >>> over the years yours truly has retold that story of yours -- that iirc you >>> to related to us at a meeting or conference or something -- when people >>> have said such-and-such a "security" breach thing was "fake"/"made up" and >>> couldn't ever possibly have happened in real life (such as say the >>> security >>> breach incident in the 1997 movie "Contact" that resulted in deliberate >>> sabotage) where someone "got/slipped through security" >>> >>> g >>> >>> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 9:07?AM vinton cerf via Internet-history < >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>> >>>> Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept 1976. >>>> >>>> V >>>> >>>> On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> ? Rummages around for information theory hat. >>>>> >>>>> I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital >>> interfaces >>>>> should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say >>>>> ?capacity?. >>>>> >>>>> The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. >>>>> >>>>> In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to >>> talk >>>>> about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about >>> usable >>>>> bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. >>>>> >>>>> In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as >>>>> compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two >>>> meanings >>>>> and they get muddled all the time. >>>>> >>>>> Language evolves and non of this offends me. >>>>> >>>>> Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by >>> the >>>>> time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line >>>> driver >>>>> to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I >>>> think. >>>>> -L >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>>> - >>>>> Unsubscribe: >>>>> >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> -- >>>> Internet-history mailing list >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>>> - >>>> Unsubscribe: >>>> >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>>> >>> -- >>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com >>> living as The Truth is True >>> -- >>> Internet-history mailing list >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >>> - >>> Unsubscribe: >>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >>> >> >> -- >> After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: >> Vint Cerf >> 1435 Woodhurst Blvd >> McLean, VA 22102 >> >> Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: >> Google, LLC >> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor >> Reston, VA 20190 >> +1 650-224-2788 >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From steve at shinkuro.com Sun May 31 12:27:55 2026 From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:27:55 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <3dc57d87-438a-4527-b0b0-05adb75f56f0@3kitty.org> References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> <3dc57d87-438a-4527-b0b0-05adb75f56f0@3kitty.org> Message-ID: Jack, That's delightful. Reminds me of hearing about a lengthy discussion between, IIRC, Corby and Weizenbaum about 645. Apparently, the discussion went on for a while before they realized one person was talking about the course and the other about the machine. Collision among TLAs is, of course, rampant. I switched to four letter acronyms many years ago. You're probably familiar with the birthday problem: how big does a class have to be before there's a 50% chance that at least two students will have the same birthday? The answer is just 23. For TLA, assuming a uniformly random distribution, the 50% level is just 155 TLAs. And the distribution is not uniform at all, so the 50% level is fewer than 155. Steve On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 3:13?PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Turning purple is a clear sign of psychological stress. Vint's escort > was probably contemplating the massive amount of paperwork required to > document the incident, the disciplinary hearings that would follow, as > well as considering what his or her new life would be like at the new > assignment on one of the outer islands of the Aleutians. > > I can only recall small bits of my own meeting experience. I'm not even > sure of where I was working at the time. It may have been while I was > at BBN, and involving a meeting somewhere in the metro DC area. Or it > may have been when I had a student job at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, > where navigation systems were developed for use in Apollo and > Minuteman. Anyway, it was a long time ago, in the late 1960s or 1970s. > > There was a meeting, and I was late for it. I wasn't a participant > giving a presentation, but more like a fly on the wall to learn about > some project. After getting through the check-in procedure in the > Entrance (with security clearances it could take a while...), I went > down a corridor, saw a meeting already in progress with a few dozen > people, most of them around a large table engaged in intense debate. I > found a chair against the wall and quietly sat down. No one noticed. > > The discussion involved DIA and DCA, which apparently "don't work well > together". As a techie nerd, I had heard of DIA and DCA, but hadn't had > any actual experience with them. They were both part of IBM's technical > architecture. DIA was Document Interchange Architecture, and DCA was > Document Content Architecture. I could believe that they didn't work > well together -- possibly designed by different committees or groups > within IBM. > > The discussion seemed to be focussed on comparing different scenarios, > and predicting what would happen in each. The main difference between > scenarios was apparently associated with "new debts". I thought perhaps > the current topic had something to do with budgeting. But someone > mentioned "new debts per second", which seemed a little strange. I > could believe "per year" or "per quarter" would make sense for financial > planning and decisions. But "per second"!? > > Finally someone put up a slide or document for some scenario. I had > heard what I expected to hear - "new debts". But the slide revealed it > was actually "nudets". I realized the discussion had been about NUclear > DETonations in different scenarios. The "per second" part was > frightening, which is probably why I still remember it. > > I was clearly in the wrong meeting. Here, DIA was Defense Intelligence > Agency. DCA was Defense Communications Agency. Nothing to do with IBM > technology. > > I quietly got up and left the room. > > I learned that day that the world suffers from a serious shortage of > acronyms. IP addresses are easy, just make the numbers longer. But > TLAs have to be just three letters, and that's not enough to avoid > conflicts and ambiguity. > > /Jack Haverty > > > On 5/31/26 10:59, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history > wrote: > > thanks vint! AND believe it or not (now that we know what the room was) > it > > just so happens there is a "vintage" 1976(!) picture of the NMCC at > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Military_Command_Center > > > > yours truly is now wondering what a present day/"modern era" of it must > > look like... :) > > > > g > > > > On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 10:47?AM Vint Cerf wrote: > > > >> Thanks for asking, Geoff. > >> > >> On my first day of work at ARPA (as it was then called in 1976), I had > to > >> report to the Pentagon to pick up my DOD building pass. I went into the > >> River Entrance and the guard told me to take a seat. Not long after, a > guy > >> came out of the bowels of the Pentagon, conferred with the guard who > >> pointed at me. The man came over to me and said something that I didn't > >> really hear [you all know I wear hearing aids ...] but assumed it was > >> something like "good morning" - so I nodded and he escorted me into one > of > >> the corridors. Soon we encountered another guard (Marine, armed) and > they > >> attached another badge. We continued deeper into the Pentagon, I picked > up > >> additional badges on the way until we entered a very big space with a > lot > >> of people with headsets, large displays, even larger displays on the > walls. > >> I said "This looks pretty elaborate for a personnel office." My escort > >> looked startled, turned purple (no kidding!) > >> > >> "Aren't you Mr. Smith!!??" he said. "No, I'm Vint Cerf. I'm just here to > >> pick up my building pass." My escort fell silent, whipped me around, > said > >> not another word, marched me through the reverse path, shedding badges > as > >> we went. I ended up back in the River Entrance. I had just inadvertently > >> visited the National Military Command Center. In all the years since, > >> despite my clearances, I have never returned to the NMCC! > >> > >> Vint Cerf > >> > >> > >> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:53?PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via > >> Internet-history wrote: > >> > >>> vint, any chance you would be willing to recount to the list what > happened > >>> at the Pentagon on your first day at ARPA in 1976.. in how you > mistakingly > >>> got mistook for someone else in the reception area.. and ended up being > >>> walked thru multiple levels of guarded "security" checkpoints and > ended up > >>> in the "War Room" (or whatever it was) instead of the HR office > (recalling > >>> that ARPA didn't have an HR office)? > >>> > >>> over the years yours truly has retold that story of yours -- that iirc > you > >>> to related to us at a meeting or conference or something -- when people > >>> have said such-and-such a "security" breach thing was "fake"/"made up" > and > >>> couldn't ever possibly have happened in real life (such as say the > >>> security > >>> breach incident in the 1997 movie "Contact" that resulted in deliberate > >>> sabotage) where someone "got/slipped through security" > >>> > >>> g > >>> > >>> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 9:07?AM vinton cerf via Internet-history < > >>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>> > >>>> Yes, I left Stanford in July or August and started at ARPA in Sept > 1976. > >>>> > >>>> V > >>>> > >>>> On Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:39 Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history < > >>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >>>> > >>>>> ? Rummages around for information theory hat. > >>>>> > >>>>> I don?t think I am alone in holding that things with digital > >>> interfaces > >>>>> should say ?bandwidth? and things with analog interfaces should say > >>>>> ?capacity?. > >>>>> > >>>>> The Shannon-Hartley theorem is about the analog part of this. > >>>>> > >>>>> In the digital domain, I think almost everyone uses ?bandwidth? to > >>> talk > >>>>> about peak available bits-per-second and ?capacity? to talk about > >>> usable > >>>>> bits-per-second under certain loads, queuing policies, and the like. > >>>>> > >>>>> In the above, bandwidth is absolutely misused for digital circuits as > >>>>> compared to its analog meaning. Capacity, unfortunately, has two > >>>> meanings > >>>>> and they get muddled all the time. > >>>>> > >>>>> Language evolves and non of this offends me. > >>>>> > >>>>> Regarding Vint at Stanford I arrived there in September 1976, and by > >>> the > >>>>> time I was corresponding with Vint about using Ron Crane?s VDH line > >>>> driver > >>>>> to get SU-ISL connected to the SUMEX IMP, he was back in Washington I > >>>> think. > >>>>> -L > >>>>> > >>>>> > >>>>> -- > >>>>> Internet-history mailing list > >>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>>>> - > >>>>> Unsubscribe: > >>>>> > >>> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>>> -- > >>>> Internet-history mailing list > >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>>> - > >>>> Unsubscribe: > >>>> > >>> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>>> > >>> -- > >>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com > >>> living as The Truth is True > >>> -- > >>> Internet-history mailing list > >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >>> - > >>> Unsubscribe: > >>> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > >>> > >> > >> -- > >> After July 1, Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to: > >> Vint Cerf > >> 1435 Woodhurst Blvd > >> McLean, VA 22102 > >> > >> Until July 1, send postal/overnight deliveries to: > >> Google, LLC > >> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor > >> Reston, VA 20190 > >> +1 650-224-2788 > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > -- Sent by a Verified sender From dwaitzman at gmail.com Sun May 31 12:53:18 2026 From: dwaitzman at gmail.com (D Waitzman) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:53:18 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) -- David Waitzman From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Sun May 31 13:04:22 2026 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:04:22 -0500 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <3dc57d87-438a-4527-b0b0-05adb75f56f0@3kitty.org> References: <0DEC6579-C103-4DEA-A024-35DFA364930D@serissa.com> <3dc57d87-438a-4527-b0b0-05adb75f56f0@3kitty.org> Message-ID: <412455db-fadc-49c2-bbe2-c36b7b507ce6@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> On 5/31/26 2:13 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > Turning purple is a clear sign of psychological stress.? ?Vint's escort > was probably contemplating the massive amount of paperwork required to > document the incident, the disciplinary hearings that would follow, as > well as considering what his or her new life would be like at the new > assignment on one of the outer islands of the Aleutians. I may be strange in that I wonder how the process failed to allow one simple human error (not hearing something correctly or responding to the wrong thing) could end up with such an outcome as this. I would sincerely have hoped that there would have been processes with barriers that would have prevented this type of mistake. Even something as simple as needing to present your ID to an additional person and them validating that you are the intended person. It seems obvious to me that there was no malicious intent involved in this. So not a superstitious attack of any sort. Aside: This is why I use shell aliases in interactive environments that require me to append the name of the host that I want to shutdown / reboot / etc. A simple logistic check that should prevent simple accidents. > There was a meeting, and I was late for it.? ?I wasn't a participant > giving a presentation, but more like a fly on the wall to learn about > some project.? After getting through the check-in procedure in the > Entrance (with security clearances it could take a while...), I went > down a corridor, saw a meeting already in progress with a few dozen > people, most of them around a large table engaged in intense debate.? I > found a chair against the wall and quietly sat down.? No one noticed. Another simple, natural, and understandable mistake. > The discussion involved DIA and DCA, which apparently "don't work well > together".? As a techie nerd, I had heard of DIA and DCA, but hadn't had > any actual experience with them.? They were both part of IBM's technical > architecture.? ?DIA was Document Interchange Architecture, and DCA was > Document Content Architecture.? I could believe that they didn't work > well together -- possibly designed by different committees or groups > within IBM. TLAs, FLAs, or even longer acronyms that sound like they cross pollinate, or at least collide are a poor detection mechanism. > I quietly got up and left the room. :-) -- Grant. . . . -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4270 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 31 13:35:12 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2026 08:35:12 +1200 Subject: [ih] Analog: The Infinity Between 0 and 1 In-Reply-To: <30C1CCB6-D02C-4B7F-9D67-F752051E76F3@computerhistory.org> References: <30C1CCB6-D02C-4B7F-9D67-F752051E76F3@computerhistory.org> Message-ID: This seems apposite in view of the current discussion: -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: Upcoming Event Ticket from IT History Society - Don?t Forget! Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 18:32:50 +0000 From: Dag Spicer via Members Reply-To: Dag Spicer To: members at lists.sigcis.org Hello SIGCIS Friends! Just a reminder? Dag > > > Hi SIGCIS! > > Just a friendly reminder that you have tickets for an upcoming event. We wanted to make sure you're aware and have it on your calendar. We hope you enjoy the experience! > > Click the button below to access your ticket. > > *Analog: The Infinity Between 0 and 1* > > Date > > > > Tuesday, June 2nd 1:00pm > > Location > > > > https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85609164183?pwd=AMuCbemOPvIEaYDClGF9Xb4hurb3uu.1 > > Tickets > > > > 1 x Ticket > > View Ticket > ----- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of?the?History of Computing ACM History Committee 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View CA??94043 ?History is a vast early warning system.? ? Norman Cousins, American journalist (1915-1990). Join our Mailing List here: https://info.computerhistory.org/subscribe -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 31 13:57:24 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2026 08:57:24 +1200 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> Message-ID: <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed "bandwidth-delay product". Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: > In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." > > I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. > What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) > > -- > David Waitzman > From jack at 3kitty.org Sun May 31 14:45:06 2026 From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 14:45:06 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Message-ID: Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either.? Capacity usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: noun 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. the storage capacity of a car's trunk. 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. a bin filled to capacity. So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB of memory in a computer.? But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a tank car. As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for important constructs.? ?Terms like "bits" are generic.? Terms like "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines.? ?Pony Express riders carried "packets" via horseback: "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something like "kilobytes per minute per mile".? ?That reflected the reality of transmitting data over distances.? The further you had to move data, the harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it.? As far as I remember, no one created a term for such metrics. Other disciplines have created terminology.? Medical of course has been quite prolific.? Same with Law.? Even disciplines such as Electricity has unique terminology.? For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, used to define how much current a particular wire can carry.? That dictates how much power can be moved through the wire.? A wire has lots of relevant parameters that factor into its ampacity. Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. But I do remember the history of another networking term.? In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways".? ?Today they're called "routers".? But why the change...? In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of corporations and government users.? Our small sales force would find prospects.? Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got called in to explain what it was.? All users were struggling with how to integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations.? ?The Internet seemed like a possible solution. Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world.? Other companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems.? The term "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. So we started callig them "routers".? Other companies (cisco, proteon, ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities.? Gateways faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, but much more palatable to customers. What's in a Name?? A lot. /Jack Haverty On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 > (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed > "bandwidth-delay product". > > Regards/Ng? mihi > ?? Brian Carpenter > > On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: >> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." >> >> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the >> pun would not work. >> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) >> >> -- >> David Waitzman >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 665 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From byeager at fastmail.fm Sun May 31 15:10:40 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:10:40 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Message-ID: <099AAB7B-80CD-4E71-942E-BC3437F9BB34@fastmail.fm> Back in my days I and others used bandwidth and throughput. The latter was always in bytes/second for our measurements. This was with PUP/BSP (or BSP/PUP) in 1981 or so. Bill Nowicki wrote the later ftp code. I recall that Bill and I were measuring the throughput between the S101-Machine room in the med-school, and Margaret Jacks Hall with one router in between them. Each leg was about 2000 feet which was the maximum. The bandwidth was 3mbps. The throughput about 40k bytes/second on a reasonably loaded network. But, each bit arrived to the interfaces at 3mbps. That?s how the hardware was designed. 1 stop bit, packet, min time between packets (I forget that). The 1 stop bit charged the coax. If a network (?leg?) exceeded the max length specification, that opened the door to collisions at the router. Bill > On May 31, 2026, at 2:45 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... > > I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either. Capacity usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: > > > noun > > 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. > the storage capacity of a car's trunk. > 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. > a bin filled to capacity. > > So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB of memory in a computer. But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a tank car. > > As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for important constructs. Terms like "bits" are generic. Terms like "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines. Pony Express riders carried "packets" via horseback: > > "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." > > Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something like "kilobytes per minute per mile". That reflected the reality of transmitting data over distances. The further you had to move data, the harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it. As far as I remember, no one created a term for such metrics. > > Other disciplines have created terminology. Medical of course has been quite prolific. Same with Law. Even disciplines such as Electricity has unique terminology. For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, used to define how much current a particular wire can carry. That dictates how much power can be moved through the wire. A wire has lots of relevant parameters that factor into its ampacity. > > Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? > > So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. > > But I do remember the history of another networking term. In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways". Today they're called "routers". But why the change...? > > In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of corporations and government users. Our small sales force would find prospects. Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got called in to explain what it was. All users were struggling with how to integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations. The Internet seemed like a possible solution. > > Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world. Other companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems. The term "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. > > So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon, ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities. Gateways faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, but much more palatable to customers. > > What's in a Name? A lot. > > /Jack Haverty > > > > On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 >> (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed "bandwidth-delay product". >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: >>> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." >>> >>> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. >>> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) >>> >>> -- >>> David Waitzman >>> > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From byeager at fastmail.fm Sun May 31 15:30:07 2026 From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 15:30:07 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: <099AAB7B-80CD-4E71-942E-BC3437F9BB34@fastmail.fm> References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> <099AAB7B-80CD-4E71-942E-BC3437F9BB34@fastmail.fm> Message-ID: <725BD60C-102D-4E8A-B720-430F139248F1@fastmail.fm> It is worth noting that when the routers were upgraded for 10mbps using at that time 3COM ethernet interfaces and Andy Becholsheim?s MC68000 mother boards, the story was much different. This was 1987. Rich Acuff and I on a weekend, wondered how fast we could push TI Explorer Sysouts (3 megabyte(?) OS updates) from the Medical School Office Building to 701 Welch Road. There were 3 routers in between the two TI explorers. The routers then had a UI with sufficient instrumentation to could measure the time between a packet?s input interrupt and output complete interrupt. It was at MultiBus speed. The hardware limit in bits/second. Rich measured the throughput. I don?t recall that number. Bill > On May 31, 2026, at 3:10 PM, william yeager via Internet-history wrote: > > Back in my days I and others used bandwidth and throughput. The latter was always in bytes/second for our measurements. This was with PUP/BSP (or BSP/PUP) in 1981 or so. Bill Nowicki wrote the later ftp code. > > I recall that Bill and I were measuring the throughput between the S101-Machine room in the med-school, and Margaret Jacks Hall with one router in between them. Each leg was about 2000 feet which was the maximum. > > The bandwidth was 3mbps. The throughput about 40k bytes/second on a reasonably loaded network. But, each bit arrived to the interfaces at 3mbps. That?s how the hardware was designed. 1 stop bit, packet, min time between packets (I forget that). The 1 stop bit charged the coax. If a network (?leg?) exceeded the max length specification, that opened the door to collisions at the router. > > Bill >> On May 31, 2026, at 2:45 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... >> >> I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either. Capacity usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: >> >> >> noun >> >> 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. >> the storage capacity of a car's trunk. >> 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. >> a bin filled to capacity. >> >> So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB of memory in a computer. But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a tank car. >> >> As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for important constructs. Terms like "bits" are generic. Terms like "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines. Pony Express riders carried "packets" via horseback: >> >> "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." >> >> Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something like "kilobytes per minute per mile". That reflected the reality of transmitting data over distances. The further you had to move data, the harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it. As far as I remember, no one created a term for such metrics. >> >> Other disciplines have created terminology. Medical of course has been quite prolific. Same with Law. Even disciplines such as Electricity has unique terminology. For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, used to define how much current a particular wire can carry. That dictates how much power can be moved through the wire. A wire has lots of relevant parameters that factor into its ampacity. >> >> Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? >> >> So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. >> >> But I do remember the history of another networking term. In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways". Today they're called "routers". But why the change...? >> >> In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of corporations and government users. Our small sales force would find prospects. Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got called in to explain what it was. All users were struggling with how to integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations. The Internet seemed like a possible solution. >> >> Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world. Other companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems. The term "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. >> >> So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon, ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities. Gateways faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, but much more palatable to customers. >> >> What's in a Name? A lot. >> >> /Jack Haverty >> >> >> >> On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >>> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 >>> (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed "bandwidth-delay product". >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: >>>> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." >>>> >>>> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. >>>> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) >>>> >>>> -- >>>> David Waitzman >>>> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > ?????????? > ????? > > ???? ????????? > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history ?????????? ????? ???? ????????? From jeanjour at comcast.net Sun May 31 16:55:36 2026 From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 19:55:36 -0400 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Message-ID: Like the capacity of a pipeline? > On May 31, 2026, at 17:45, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: > > Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... > > I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either. Capacity usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: > > > noun > > 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. > the storage capacity of a car's trunk. > 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. > a bin filled to capacity. > > So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB of memory in a computer. But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a tank car. > > As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for important constructs. Terms like "bits" are generic. Terms like "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines. Pony Express riders carried "packets" via horseback: > > "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." > > Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something like "kilobytes per minute per mile". That reflected the reality of transmitting data over distances. The further you had to move data, the harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it. As far as I remember, no one created a term for such metrics. > > Other disciplines have created terminology. Medical of course has been quite prolific. Same with Law. Even disciplines such as Electricity has unique terminology. For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, used to define how much current a particular wire can carry. That dictates how much power can be moved through the wire. A wire has lots of relevant parameters that factor into its ampacity. > > Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? > > So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. > > But I do remember the history of another networking term. In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways". Today they're called "routers". But why the change...? > > In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of corporations and government users. Our small sales force would find prospects. Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got called in to explain what it was. All users were struggling with how to integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations. The Internet seemed like a possible solution. > > Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world. Other companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems. The term "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. > > So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon, ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities. Gateways faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, but much more palatable to customers. > > What's in a Name? A lot. > > /Jack Haverty > > > > On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 >> (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed "bandwidth-delay product". >> >> Regards/Ng? mihi >> Brian Carpenter >> >> On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: >>> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." >>> >>> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. >>> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) >>> >>> -- >>> David Waitzman >>> > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com Sun May 31 19:09:16 2026 From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter) Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2026 14:09:16 +1200 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Message-ID: Capacity defined as "the number of bits per second which can be transmitted by means of the channel" goes back at least to 1961 as a term of art, according to Shannon's colleague Pierce. A mathematically rigorous definition is in Shannon's 1949 paper but again its unit is bits per second. I agree that the capacity of a tank is measured in cubic metres and the capacity of a computer memory is measured in bits. But pipeline capacity is measured in cubic metres per second, or barrels per day. Nobody talks about the Strait of Hormuz having a normal bandwidth of 20 million barrels of crude per day. Regards/Ng? mihi Brian Carpenter On 01-Jun-26 11:55, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > Like the capacity of a pipeline? > >> On May 31, 2026, at 17:45, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote: >> >> Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... >> >> I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either. Capacity usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: >> >> >> noun >> >> 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. >> the storage capacity of a car's trunk. >> 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. >> a bin filled to capacity. >> >> So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB of memory in a computer. But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a tank car. >> >> As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for important constructs. Terms like "bits" are generic. Terms like "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines. Pony Express riders carried "packets" via horseback: >> >> "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." >> >> Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something like "kilobytes per minute per mile". That reflected the reality of transmitting data over distances. The further you had to move data, the harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it. As far as I remember, no one created a term for such metrics. >> >> Other disciplines have created terminology. Medical of course has been quite prolific. Same with Law. Even disciplines such as Electricity has unique terminology. For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, used to define how much current a particular wire can carry. That dictates how much power can be moved through the wire. A wire has lots of relevant parameters that factor into its ampacity. >> >> Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? >> >> So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. >> >> But I do remember the history of another networking term. In the early Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways". Today they're called "routers". But why the change...? >> >> In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of corporations and government users. Our small sales force would find prospects. Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got called in to explain what it was. All users were struggling with how to integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations. The Internet seemed like a possible solution. >> >> Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world. Other companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems. The term "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. >> >> So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon, ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities. Gateways faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, but much more palatable to customers. >> >> What's in a Name? A lot. >> >> /Jack Haverty >> >> >> >> On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: >>> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC 6214 >>> (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed "bandwidth-delay product". >>> >>> Regards/Ng? mihi >>> Brian Carpenter >>> >>> On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: >>>> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." >>>> >>>> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the pun would not work. >>>> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) >>>> >>>> -- >>>> David Waitzman >>>> >> >> -- >> Internet-history mailing list >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history >> - >> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > From helbakoury at gmail.com Sun May 31 19:23:52 2026 From: helbakoury at gmail.com (Hesham ElBakoury) Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 19:23:52 -0700 Subject: [ih] capacity v bandwidth In-Reply-To: References: <41B7D5DE-43BD-4D88-AC57-46000E988835@gmail.com> <6bfaf445-7604-48c8-967d-e41c04a49f41@gmail.com> Message-ID: Here is a paper generated by Gemini about this topic. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bllks7uio5ikhojavchy5/channel_capacity_paper.pdf?rlkey=2777mhyji3p9d7qenyrpp418j&st=s70py5vb&dl=0 Hesham On Sun, May 31, 2026, 7:09?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > Capacity defined as "the number of bits per second which can be > transmitted by means of the channel" goes back at least to 1961 as a term > of art, according to Shannon's colleague Pierce. A mathematically rigorous > definition is in Shannon's 1949 paper but again its unit is bits per second. > > I agree that the capacity of a tank is measured in cubic metres and the > capacity of a computer memory is measured in bits. But pipeline capacity is > measured in cubic metres per second, or barrels per day. Nobody talks about > the Strait of Hormuz having a normal bandwidth of 20 million barrels of > crude per day. > > Regards/Ng? mihi > Brian Carpenter > > On 01-Jun-26 11:55, John Day via Internet-history wrote: > > Like the capacity of a pipeline? > > > >> On May 31, 2026, at 17:45, Jack Haverty via Internet-history < > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > >> > >> Getting back to the original capacity<->bandwidth topic... > >> > >> I don't think "capacity" is the right terminology either. Capacity > usually means how much "stuff" can be held, i.e.: > >> > >> > >> noun > >> > >> 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb something. > >> the storage capacity of a car's trunk. > >> 2. The maximum amount that can be contained. > >> a bin filled to capacity. > >> > >> So it's appropriate to talk about the capacity of a 5TB drive, or 64GB > of memory in a computer. But "capacity" says nothing about rate of flow of > the "stuff" involved, whether it's bits on a wire or gallons of oil in a > tank car. > >> > >> As an industry or science or engineering discipline, it seems to me > that "networking" has avoided defining and adopting its own terminology for > important constructs. Terms like "bits" are generic. Terms like > "packets" are borrowed from earlier disciplines. Pony Express riders > carried "packets" via horseback: > >> > >> "In the context of thePony Express, the mail packet was called > a*mochila*(Spanish for "backpack" or "pouch"). It was a specialized leather > saddlebag designed to hold approximately*20 pounds*of mail, with the horse > carrying an additional*20 pounds*of material." > >> > >> Back in the 1980s, I remember discussions using terms such as something > like "kilobytes per minute per mile". That reflected the reality of > transmitting data over distances. The further you had to move data, the > harder it was to do and the more it cost to do it. As far as I remember, > no one created a term for such metrics. > >> > >> Other disciplines have created terminology. Medical of course has been > quite prolific. Same with Law. Even disciplines such as Electricity has > unique terminology. For example, "ampacity" is a term in electrical codes, > used to define how much current a particular wire can carry. That dictates > how much power can be moved through the wire. A wire has lots of relevant > parameters that factor into its ampacity. > >> > >> Why hasn't our networking industry developed its own terminology...? > >> > >> So, I don't know when or why "bandwidth" became common. > >> > >> But I do remember the history of another networking term. In the early > Internet, the boxes interconnecting networks were called "gateways". > Today they're called "routers". But why the change...? > >> > >> In the early/mid 1980s, BBN was selling X.25 networks to all sorts of > corporations and government users. Our small sales force would find > prospects. Sometimes they asked about this new "Internet" thing, and I got > called in to explain what it was. All users were struggling with how to > integrate their suddenly affordable PCs and workstations. The Internet > seemed like a possible solution. > >> > >> Our sales force reported back that prospects liked the Internet story, > but hated the thought of having "gateways" in their IT world. Other > companies (e.g., IBM) had products called "gateways", and the users had > apparently experienced lots of problems with such systems. The term > "gateway" was a potent killer of sales. > >> > >> So we started callig them "routers". Other companies (cisco, proteon, > ...) probably had similar experiences in their sales activities. Gateways > faded into historical oblivion, to be replaced by routers - same products, > but much more palatable to customers. > >> > >> What's in a Name? A lot. > >> > >> /Jack Haverty > >> > >> > >> > >> On 5/31/26 13:57, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote: > >>> Unfortunately we failed to correct that terminological error in RFC > 6214 > >>> (the IPv6 version of RFC 1149), and worse we discussed > "bandwidth-delay product". > >>> > >>> Regards/Ng? mihi > >>> Brian Carpenter > >>> > >>> On 01-Jun-26 07:53, D Waitzman via Internet-history wrote: > >>>> In RFC-1149, I wrote "The bandwidth is limited to the leg length." > >>>> > >>>> I stand corrected that I should have used "capacity", but then the > pun would not work. > >>>> What's more important, the pun or technically accuracy? :-) > >>>> > >>>> -- > >>>> David Waitzman > >>>> > >> > >> -- > >> Internet-history mailing list > >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > >> - > >> Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history > > > -- > Internet-history mailing list > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history > - > Unsubscribe: > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history >