[ih] TCP adoption in 1984

[Bob Purvy]

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 <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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/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
>
>
>
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