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IP: from cyhst digest via rand Alumni mailing -- SOME ARPANET HISTORY
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 15:29:36 -0500
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
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- IP: from cyhst digest via rand Alumni mailing -- SOME ARPANET HISTORY Dave Farber (Mar 26)