How the Internet Came to Be - Page 6

The birth of the Internet

Bob Kahn described the packet radio and satellite systems, and the internet problem, which was to get host computers to communicate across multiple packet networks without knowing the network technology underneath. As a way of informally exploring this problem, I ran a series of seminars at Stanford attended by students and visitors. The students included Carl Sunshine, who is now at Aerospace Corporation running a laboratory and specializing in the area of protocol proof of correctness; Richard Karp, who wrote the first TCP code and is now president of ISDN technologies in Palo Alto. There was Judy Estrin, a founder of Bridge Communications, which merged with 3COM, and is now an officer at Network Computing Devices (NCD), which makes X display terminals. Yogen Dalal, who edited the December 1974 first TCP specification, did his thesis work with this group, and went on to work at PARC where he was one of the key designers of the Xerox Protocols. Jim Mathis, who was involved in the software of the small-scale LSI-11 implementations of the Internet protocols, went on to SRI International and then to Apple where he did MacTCP. Darryl Rubin went on to become one of the vice presidents of Microsoft. Ron Crane handled hardware in my Stanford lab and went on to key positions at Apple. John Shoch went on to become assistant to the president of Xerox and later ran their System Development Division. Bob Metcalfe attended some of the seminars as well. Gerard Lelann was visiting from IRIA and the Cyclades/Cigale project, and has gone on to do work in distributed computing. We had Dag Belsnes from University of Oslo who did work on the correctness of protocol design; Kuninobu Tanno (from Tohoku University); and Jim Warren, who went on to found the West Coast Computer Faire. Thinking about computer networking problems has had a powerful influence on careers; many of these people have gone on to make major contributions.

The very earliest work on the TCP protocols was done at three places. The initial design work was done in my lab at Stanford. The first draft came out in the fall of 1973 for review by INWG at a meeting at University of Sussex (Septemer 1973). A paper by Bob Kahn and me appeared in May 1974 in IEEE Transactions on Communications and the first specification of the TCP protocol was published as an Internet Experiment Note in December 1974. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning. In July 1975, the ARPANET was transferred by DARPA to the Defense Communications Agency (now the Defense Information Systems Agency) as an operational network.

About this time, military security concerns became more critical and this brought Steve Kent from BBN and Ray McFarland from DoD more deeply into the picture, along with Steve Walker, then at DARPA.

At BBN there were two other people: William Plummer and Ray Tomlinson. It was Ray who discovered that our first design lacked and needed a three-way handshake in order to distinguish the start of a new TCP connection from old random duplicate packets that showed up later from an earlier exchange. At University College London, the person in charge was Peter Kirstein. Peter had a lot of graduate and undergraduate students working in the area, using a PDP-9 machine to do the early work. They were at the far end of a satellite link to England.

Even at the beginning of this work we were faced with using satellite communications technology as well as ARPANET and packet radio. We went through four iterations of the TCP suite, the last of which came out in 1978.

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