[ih] TCP adoption in 1984

[Brian E Carpenter]

> 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/Ngā 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/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
>>>>
>>>>
> 
>