On 10/20/21 12:38 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I don’t remember hearing about IP for VAX/VMS 2.4, but I was part of a
group at Intel in 1981 looking at ARPAnet for moving designer tools
and design files as an alternate to leased bandwidth from $TELCOs
using DECnet and BiSync HASP. The costs of switching from 56 Kbps to
ARPAnet’s 50 Kbps convinced us to wait. Clearly, private demand drove
the subsequent transition as the TCP/IP stack became effectively free.
I'm not sure how we heard and got a copy of the CMU IP stack, but it was
probably Mark Reinhold who now owns Java. It was definitely after 1981
and definitely before 1985, probably somewhere in the middle. Just the
fact that we could get such a thing was sort of remarkable in those
early days, and especially for VMS which was, I won't say hostile, but
had their own ideas. I don't know when early routing came about but DEC
charged extra for routing for DECNet, so that was yet another reason IP
was interesting is that it took little investment to check it all out.
I miss DECUS, but not DELNIs.
Yeah, I miss DECUS too. I remember one plenary when somebody asked when
the VAX would support the full 4G address space to laughs and guffaws
from panel.
Mike
-
James R. Cutler - [email protected]
GPG keys: hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net
cell 734-673-5462
On Oct 20, 2021, at 3:09 PM, Michael Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:
I think the issuing of rfc 791 was much more important than the flag
day. ARPAnet was a tiny, tiny universe but there were a lot of people
interested in networking at the time wondering what to do with our
neat new DEUNA and DEQNA adapters. There was tons of interest in all
of the various protocols coming out around then because nobody knew
what was going to win, or whether there would be *a* winner at all.
Being able to get a spec to write to was pretty novel at the time
because all of the rest of them were proprietary so you had to
reverse engineer them for the most part. It may be that alone that
pushed IP along well before the public could hook up to the Internet.
We had lots of customers asking for IP protocols in the mid to late
80's and I can guarantee you most weren't part of the Internet. They
were using IP as the interoperating system glue on their own networks.
Also: the flag day was pretty much an example of how not to do a
transition. as in, let's not do that again.
Mike, trying to remember when CMU shipped their first version of
their IP stack for VMS
On 10/20/21 11:47 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Since we seem to be getting pedantic...
There's "The (capital I) Internet" - which, most date to the flag
day, and the "Public Internet" (the Internet after policies changed
and allowed commercial & public use over the NSFnet backbone - in
1992f, as I recall).
Then there's the more general notion of "internetworking" - of which
there was a considerable amount of experimental work going on, in
parallel with TCP/IP. And of (small i) "internets" - essentially
any Catenet style network-of-networks.
Miles Fidelman
Mel Beckman wrote:
Michael,
“Looking into” isn’t “is” :)
-mel
On Oct 20, 2021, at 10:39 AM, Michael Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/20/21 8:26 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
Mark,
As long as we’re being pedantic, January 1, 1983 is considered
the official birthday of the Internet, when TCP/IP first let
different kinds of computers on different networks talk to each
other.
It’s 2021, hence the Internet is /less/ than, not more than, 40
years old. Given your mathematical skills, I put no stock in
your claim that we still can’t “buy an NMS that just works.” :)
Pedantically, IP is 40 years old as of last month. What you're
talking about is the flag day. People including myself were
looking into internet protocols well before the flag day.
Mike
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
