IP: from cyhst digest via rand Alumni mailing -- SOME ARPANET HISTORY

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date:    Thu, 25 Mar 1999 14:33:36 -0500
> From:    "Willis H. Ware" <willis () RAND ORG>
> Subject: Arpanet history
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
>
> I want to comment on ARPANET, MILNET, et al history.  I had direct
> experience with all of those events because of my position at RAND, my
> involvement with DoD advisory committees, and the ongoing personal
> interaction with the individuals in question. The following discussion
> comes from my direct knowledge, plus conversations with the parties
> concerned.
>
> 1.  Distributed Communications -- it was the name that Paul Baran coined
> and used before Donald Davies (of the UK) later introduced the term "packet
> switching".  At the time, Paul was in the Computer Science Department of
> RAND; the department contained both a computer-science R&D program and the
> corporate computer-services organization.  He worked directly for Keith
> Uncapher [well known for his founding of the USC/ISI, his long term support
> of (D)ARPA, contributions to the professional societies of our field] and
> in turn, I was the department head.  The genesis of Paul's work was a
> concern expressed by the USAF to RAND's president Frank Collbohm that
> command-control communications would not survive a major nuclear attack.
> Frank's thought was to use the AM radio stations as back-up, largely
> because of their wide spread presence throughout the country.
>
> Frank passed the project to Paul and eventually the Distributed
> Communications concept arose.  The work is documented in a series of 12
> Research Memoranda which are online at:
>
>    http://www.rand.org/publications/classics
>
> They discuss routing strategy (one of which was called the "hot potato
> algorithm" at the time), implementation, network survival under attack,
> survival as a function of network topology and redundancy, costs... in
> short a complete and thorough analysis of the construct.
>
> It is not clear how this work got coupled into DOD/ARPA interests.  The
> reports were widely distributed and briefed; Uncapher was already at that
> time in contact with ARPA.  Paul had many conversations with the industry,
> notably AT&T and Bell Labs, and some interaction with ARPA.  There was
> also networking interests at MIT and Lincoln Labs although the motivation
> there was not driven by military interests but by computer system
> networking.  Roberts, Lickleider, Kleinrock, Kahn and others were
> colleagues; several of them later moved to ARPA.
>
> In any event, eventually Larry Roberts, Lick Lickleider, Bob Kahn and others
> at ARPA set out to build (what by then was called) a packet network to
> inter-connect computer systems.  The clearly expressed belief at the time
> was that such an interconnect would lead to sharing of computer capabilities
> across the network, and in particular, make available specialized resources
> to users nationwide. Some of the motivation was expressed in terms of making
> super-computers available to the scientific R&D community without having to
> own one directly.  The history of the early days of ARPANET is well
> documented; no need to go into it here.
>
> 2. DDN.  The shortfalls of the DOD major message-communication network,
> AUTODIN, had become well known and there were various proposals for
> modernizing it.  One was to simply replace the aging computers; another was
> to replace the entire system with modern technology, notably packet
> switching.  The final proposal and project for AUTODIN-2 was (as I recall)
> a mixture of packet-switching and circuit switching; the contractor, I
> believe, was Western Union.  ARPANET was clearly an operational entity by
> that time; and hence, the technical contest was (in essence) a fully
> packetized network vs. a partially packetized one.
>
> In any event, a review of the AUTODIN-2 proposal vs. piggybacking on
> ARPANET technology was organized by Steve Walker (the founder later of
> Trusted Information Systems) who was in OSD at the time.  I was a member of
> his Defense Science Board committee, and one of the issues before us was
> the contest between X.25 and TCP/IP protocols.  The DOD had, via the
> ARPANET, adopted TCP/IP; the commercial world was signaling that it
> intended to adopt X.25.  The National Research Council did a study of the
> matter and recommended that DOD systems support both protocols.
>
> The committee position and report was to cancel the AUTODIN-2 project,
> instead to sequester that part of the ARPANET that even then had military
> sites on it, and eventually to use it as the foundation for the DDN, the
> Defense Data Network.
>
> I recall the name Heidi Heiden (who was, contrary to the name, a male Army
> colonel) as the action officer on the DOD side. I could possibly find a copy
> of the report in my historical holdings.
>
> Steve Walker, now active as a venture capitalist, would know more precisely
> the details of the AUTODIN-2 caper, the politics of its cancellation, etc.
> Perhaps he can be solicited to add his views.
>
>                                        Willis H. Ware
>                                        RAND Santa Monica, CA