Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dan Lynch <dan () lynch com>
Date: August 19, 2008 5:52:54 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Chris Kantarjiev <cak () dimebank com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:        NSF and the Birth of the Internet

It is mighty interesting to see history rewritten by some folks who  
were not
there "then".  I was there for most of the ride (from 73 on) and  
happened to
be the one at USC-ISI that ran the flag day story for ISI where our
Tenex/Tops20 systems and our Vaxen did just fine as did the machines  
at ITS
from MIT.  It was pretty scary on New Year's Eve to throw that switch  
(and
reboot all the machines) and see "who was there" after the magic  
moment when
BBN (who was running the code for the Arpanet/Internet IMPs) was  
programmed
to no longer run the Arpanet NCP protocols (except for those from a  
certain
anonymous 3 letter agency...

It took a few days for it to settle down, but the Internet was born that
first week of January in 1983 after almost 8 years of coding and  
debugging.

NSF was no where to be seen in those days.  But after the baby  
Internet took
off DARPA quickly looked around for people to take over the O&M part  
of it
all and NSF stepped up to the table for sure.

Failure is a bastard -- success has a million fathers and mothers.

Dan


On 8/19/08 11:57 AM, "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Chris Kantarjiev <cak () dimebank com>
> Date: August 19, 2008 2:57:00 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet
>
> David Farber wrote:
>
> > Note that MIT's ITS machines were online under TCP on the flag day,
> > which was NOT true of berkeley unix, though they got the bugs out of
> > their implementation pretty quickly.
>
> Eh? I'm fairly certain that both of our VAXen at Purdue-CS were online
> before and during flag day; one running 4.1c and one running Rob
> Gurwitz's 4.1 TCP... and both were running my in-host gateway, so our
> proNET and 10mbps ethernet were connected as well.
>
> Maybe the VAXen at Berkeley had problems, but that's a different
> issue :-)
>
>
>
>
>
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