How the Internet Came to Be - Page 5

The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work. At that conference a collection of people convened: Donald Davies from the UK, National Physical Laboratory, who had been doing work on packet switching concurrent with DARPA; Remi Despres who was involved with the French Reseau Communication par Paquet (RCP) and later Transpac, their commercial X.25 network; Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler, both of whom later joined and led BBN's Telenet; Gesualdo LeMoli, an Italian network researcher; Kjell Samuelson from the Swedish Royal Institute; John Wedlake from British Telecom; Peter Kirstein from University College London; Louis Pouzin who led the Cyclades/Cigale packet network research program at the Institute Recherche d'Informatique et d'Automatique (IRIA, now INRIA, in France). Roger Scantlebury from NPL with Donald Davies may also have been in attendance. Alex McKenzie from BBN almost certainly was there.

I'm sure I have left out some and possibly misremembered others. There were a lot of other people, at least thirty, all of whom had come to this conference because of a serious academic or business interest in networking.

At the conference we formed the International Network Working Group or INWG. Stephen Crocker, who by now was at DARPA after leaving UCLA, didn't think he had time to organize the INWG, so he proposed that I do it.

I organized and chaired INWG for the first four years, at which time it was affiliated with the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). Alex Curran, who was president of BNR, Inc., a research laboratory of Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto, California, was the U.S. representative to IFIP Technical Committee 6. He shepherded the transformation of the INWG into the first working group of 6, working group 6.1 (IFIP WG 6.1).

In November 1972, I took up an assistant professorship post in computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. I was one of the first Stanford acquisitions who had an interest in computer networking. Shortly after I got to Stanford, Bob Kahn told me about a project he had going with SRI International, BBN, and Collins Radio, a packet radio project. This was to get a mobile networking environment going. There was also work on a packet satellite system, which was a consequence of work that had been done at the University of Hawaii, based on the ALOHA-Net, done by Norman Abramson, Frank Kuo, and Richard Binder. It was one of the first uses of multiaccess channels. Bob Metcalfe used that idea in designing Ethernet before founding 3COM to commercialize it.

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