[ih] TCP adoption in 1984

[Brian E Carpenter]

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/Ngā 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 <gregskinner0 at icloud.com> 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
>>
>>