Re: ucla on internet conference

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Christian Huitema <huitema () microsoft com>
Date: October 16, 2009 10:07:36 AM PDT
To: "dave () farber net" <dave () farber net>
Subject: RE: [IP] ucla on internet conference

David Reed wrote:

The Internet work was begun as a way to unify and interconnect  
networks that were not part of the Internet.  In particular, the  
Packet Radio project, Satellite networking projects, a variety of  
Local Area Networking projects (including the one at MIT called  
LCSNET, where I was based) each were part of the Internet development  
activity, and had operational systems that had nothing to do with the  
Internet, well before the Internet was the primary mode of using the  
ARPANET.  The Internet began with the Transmission Control Protocol  
(TCP) designed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

The more I hear this discussion, the more I compare it to finding the  
source of the river. There are cases where the source is a big lake  
somewhere, and the matter can be resolved un ambiguously. But there  
are many more cases where the river starts as a tiny brook on the hill  
of a mountain, that is then joined by many other tiny brooks, becomes  
a small stream, etc. The Internet grew very much like this river.  
There was accretion over time of many streams, Arpanet and Cyclades,  
NSFNet and CSNET, the many research networks that were growing up  
around the world, UUCP and Usenet, Bitnet, and many more. Some streams  
contributed some technology, other contributed user communities, yet  
other contributed applications.

There were indeed key inventions and refinement, such as packet  
switching, understanding of queues, datagrams, layered transport  
stacks, distributed routing protocols, address formats, separation  
between IGP and BGP, domain names, e-mail standards, http, VoIP, SIP,  
etc. Each of those brought the technology to a next level, and allowed  
the Internet river to grow. The researchers and engineers who  
developed these technology certainly need to be recognized.

But looking for a single source and a single stream ? This would be  
way too simple!


-- Christian Huitema





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