[ih] TCP/IP routing

[Craig Partridge]

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 <karl at iwl.com>:
> >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
>
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