[ih] TCP adoption in 1984

[Jack Haverty]

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/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
>>>
>>>

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