Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: August 19, 2008 12:11:03 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, jim () netgate com
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:    NSF and the Birth of the Internet

David Farber wrote:

> From: Jim Thompson <jim () netgate com>

Thanks for the nice summary of things gone past.

There was at least one other branch of internet development, but one  
that tended to occur in the shadows.  See for instance http://www.fas.org/irp/program/security/blacker.htm

From about 1972 to 1980 I was part of a group at System Development  
Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica that worked on network security and  
secure operating systems.  Our fearless leaders were Clark Weismann  
and Jerry Cole and the core of our group was Frank Heinrich, David  
Kaufman, and myself.  Vint Cerf was a consultant to our group and we  
worked with a lot of the UCLA crew (particularly when we turned UCLA  
Data Secure Unix into a real-time partially verified network  
communications engine.)

Take a look at the following URL for a photo of a a blackboard when  
Vint and I worked late into the evening of Dec 31, 1974 on the  
insertion of an encrypting security layer between IP and TCP - http://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/photos/tcpip.gif 
 (I really do need to do a better re-scan that 35mm slide.)

We did a lot of stuff that has never really been seen - Very early TCP  
implementations with security layers between IP and TCP, key  
distribution protocols, security controllers to moderate network  
connectivity, proof-of-correctness of limited aspects of operating  
systems and protocols.

Much of our work was done for certain government agencies, both in the  
US and UK; some reports were published under the auspices of the US  
Nat'l Bureau of Standards some by the UK's RSRE.  But since those were  
days of paper not much of that material has found its way online and  
has thus become some of the lost pre-history (written about by Vernor  
Vinge in Rainbows End.)

Another branch is the creation of the software that made using the net  
possible - BSD Unix at UC Berkeley and PC/IP by Romkey and Bridgham at  
MIT being two examples.

And the Interop trade shows, started by Dan Lynch as technical  
conferences in 1987 - http://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/Interop/ace-87.gif 
 - created a very rich place where a prodigious amount of practical  
interoperability testing happened.  Those shows created a metronome  
that forced a lot of technology to come out of the labs so that it  
could be deployed in the growing network.

And before the IETF one of the main gathering points for discussion of  
network ideas were the ACM SIGComm meetings.  I still remember the  
amazed sounds that came out at a meeting in Mexico City when Yogan  
Dalal explained that Ethernet would have a 48-bit address.

We tend to dismiss the ISO/OSI work.  However, a lot of good brains  
put a lot of good ideas into those seven layers.  (There is a lot of  
gold yet to be mined from the ideas of ISO/OSI.)  In addition, it  
created a competitive environment that forced the IP based world to  
become more professional and product oriented.

                --karl--




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