Re: What is at stake?

At 08:38 AM 1/24/2002 -0500, vint cerf wrote:
> actually DCA had only responsibility for the ARPANET
> and MILNET, officially. The rest were the responsibility
> of the network operators - usually schools and research labs.
> In 1981 the CSNET project brought up non-DoD components
> including PhoneNet and the X.25 extension of Internet
> developed by Univ Wisconsin. This was an NSF-funded initiative.
>
> The first NSFNET backbone came up in 1986 (Dave Mills' fuzzballs).
Folks,

1.  The historical significance of NSFNet on Internet technology and 
operations is often missed.  As I recall, it broke the single-backbone 
routing model that existed and required a fundamental change to the 
exterior routing protocol, to support multiple backbones.  This was a key 
technical enhancement for permitting the current open, competitive 
backbone.  Steve Wolff, then at NSF and now at Cisco, deserves particular 
credit for driving this basic improvement to Internet design and operation 
choices.
2.  Oddly enough, Steve characterizes CSNet as having turned out to be a 
kind of market research effort for the later NSFnet project.
3.  An oddity to Vint's wording might lead one to think that Univ. of Wisc. 
did the Phonenet work.  Harumph!  Vint knows differently but others might 
not.  (Vint gave Univ. of Delaware an ARPA contract for doing an NCP/TCP 
email gateway contract for the transition to TCP/IP in 1983.)  Anyhow, 
Phonenet was done entirely at Univ. of Delaware.  Dave Farber  was the 
PI.  I did the development and operations, except that another grad 
student, Ed Szurkowski, did the telephone link-level protocol, which had 
interesting flexibility compared with equivalent telephone data link 
protocols of the day.
Phonenet was the link protocol.  MMDF was the email relay software.  The 
project began with Army funding and later got CSNet funding.  The service 
was email relay between Arpanet (and later Internet) email hosts and host 
accessible only over dialup.  Hence this broadened the Internet email 
community dramatically, since getting on the Arpanet/Internet was quite 
constrained by policy and cost.
d/

d/


----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
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