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How the
Internet Came to Be - Page 4
My interest in networking was
strongly influenced by my time at the Network Measurement
Center at UCLA.
Meanwhile, Larry Roberts had gone from Lincoln Labs to DARPA
where he was in charge of the Information Processing Techniques
Office. He was concerned that after building this network,
we could do something with it. So out of UCLA came an initiative
to design protocols for hosts, which Steve Crocker led.
In April 1969, Steve issued the very first Request For Comment.
He observed that we were just graduate students at the time
and so had no authority. So we had to find a way to document
what we were doing without acting like we were imposing anything
on anyone. He came up with the RFC methodology to say, "Please
comment on this, and tell us what you think."
Initially, progress was sluggish in getting the protocols
designed and built and deployed. By 1971 there were about
nineteen nodes in the initially planned ARPANET, with thirty
different university sites that ARPA was funding. Things went
slowly because there was an incredible array of machines that
needed interface hardware and network software. We had Tenex
systems at BBN running on DEC-10s, but there were also PDP8s,
PDP-11s, IBM 360s, Multics, Honeywell... you name it. So you
had to implement the protocols on each of these different
architectures. In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided
that people needed serious motivation to get things going.
In October
1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer
Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize
a public demonstration of the ARPANET.
It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along
to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET. The
idea was that we would install a packet switch and a Terminal
Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington
Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use
the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S. A set
of people who are legendary in networking history were involved
in getting that demonstration set up. Bob Metcalfe was responsible
for the documentation; Ken Pogran who, with David Clark and
Noel Chiappa, was instrumental in developing an early ring-based
local area network and gateway, which became Proteon products,
narrated the slide show; Crocker and Postel were there. Jack
Haverty, who later became chief network architect of Oracle
and was an MIT undergraduate, was there with a holster full
of tools. Frank Heart who led the BBN project; David Walden;
Alex McKenzie; Severo Ornstein; and others from BBN who
had developed the IMP and TIP.
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