Cybertelecom Federal Internet Law & Policy An Educational Project

ARPANET 1970s

UCLA operates the ARPANet NOC

1970

March: ARPANet connects from West Coast to East Coast at BBN. [Roberts, Net Chronology]

March: Lawrence Roberts and Barry Wessler, "Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing".

ARPA's contract with BBN to build IMPs is extended. [Nerds p 100]

Network Working Group (NWG), Steve Crocker leading, releases the Network Control Protocol (NCP), the initial host-to-host protocol. [ISOC] [Roberts, Net Chronology] This will become the Internet Configuration Control Board.

"NCP relied on ARPANET to provide end-to-end reliability. If any packets were lost, the protocol (and presumably any applications it supported) would come to a grinding halt. In this model NCP had no end-end host error control, since the ARPANET was to be the only network in existence and it would be so reliable that no error control would be required on the part of the hosts." [ISOC]

Xerox PARC established

July: ALOHANet built, using DARPA and NAVY funding. [Nerds 2.0.1] ARPA provides a Terminal Interface Processor to AlohaNet [Nerds p 103] [Roberts, Net Chronology]

1971

19 nodes on ARPANet

A Bhushan, RFC 114, A File Transfer Protocol (April 16, 1971)

Steve Crocker joins IPTO as a program manager. Crocker initiates the Network Working Group, the forerunner of the IETF. NWG meets in Atlanta [Padlipsky] [Salus p 29]

Larry Roberts wants to avoid DoD owning and operating the Internet. Therefore Roberts approaches AT&T offering it to them. "AT&T could have owned the network as a monopoly service, but in the end declined." "They finally concluded that the packet technology was incompatible with the AT&T network," Roberts said."

"Bob Taylor also tried to talk to AT&T about the venture. "When I asked AT&T to participate in the ARPANet, they assured me that packet switching wouldn't work. So that didn't go very far." " [Nerds2.0 p 74]

Larry Roberts said, "They wouldn't buy it when we were done. We had decided that it was best if industry ran it, because the government had done its experiment and didn't need to run it anymore. I went to AT&T and I made an official offer to them to buy the network from us and take it over. We'd give it to them basically. Let them take it over and they could continue to expand it commercially and sell the service back to the government. So they would have a huge contract to buy service back. And they had a huge meeting and they went through Bell Labs and they made a serious decision and they said it was incompatible with their network. They couldn't possibly consider it. It was not something they could use. Or sell." [Nerds p 109] [See also Vanity Fair (quoting Baran " The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it.")]

• See Western Union's Decision not to buy the Bell telephone patents 1876.

Stephen Lukasik becomes Chief of ARPA. He was a major proponent of network research of of electronic mail. Would become FCC Chief Scientist in 1979.

1972

Robert Kahn leaves BBN, joins IPTO. [Kahn][Nerds p 109][Vanity Fair]

Steward Brand, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums, Rolling Stone (Dec. 7, 1972) (includes good description of ARPANet)

ARPA conducts Public demonstration of ARPANet at the IEEE International Computer Communications Conference (the ARPANet's coming out party) [Babbage 25] [Nerds p 107] Demonstration to AT&T reportedly failed but the demonstration to everyone else was successful and persusasive. [Vanity Fair quoting Metcalfe (" And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bête noire, because I realized in that moment that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.")]

Last Apollo flight to the moon [Apollo]

ARPA rechartered as DARPA, removing ARPA from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. [Hauber]

Ray Tomlinson invents network email and adopts the "@" sign.

1973

CYCLADES network is demonstrated in France.

Oct: Larry Roberts leaves IPTO to become CEO of Telenet (first public commercial packet-switched network). Robert Kahn becomes head of IPTO. [Kahn] [Roberts, Net Chronology]

1974

Licklider returns as head of IPTO.

Steve Crocker leaves IPTO and returns to UCLA. [Salus p 29]

ARPANet in 1973 (image in NIH)

Ethernet Will Never Work - 1974 Xerox PARC memo...., Broadband Reports 6/13/2007

Larry Roberts, Data by the Packet, IEEE Spectrum Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 46-51 (Feb. 1974)

Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dala, Carl Sunshine, RFC 675 - Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (Dec. 1974) (2 8 host addresses / 2 4 net addresses)

1975

Richard Barber, The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958-1974 (Defense Technical Information Center Dec 1975) (PDF)

"This historical evaluation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as an R&D management institution was commissioned by ARPA in recognition of the fact that remarkably little in the way of an official recordor institutional memory had been established during its seventeen year lifetime. From Agency Directors to program managers, the turnover in its leadership has been rapid by most bureaucratic standards, thus eroding first hand knowledge of ARPA's role and activities rather quickly. Conceived as a unique management organization chartered to concentrate on advanced research within the Department of Defense, this very uniqueness has frequently been questioned. Virtually every ARPA Director, and most ARPA personnel at all levels, have encountered friendly and not-so-friendly why ARPA? and what is ARPA? questions throughout its history. This report seeks to explain some of the whys and whats. For the most part, the study ends in 1972 when ARPA was designated a Defense Agency. This date was arbitrarily chosen. In instances where events or programs started in earlier periods extend beyond 1972, they have been pursued a bit further for sake of completeness, but not past 1974."

SATNET initiated. First satellite network on the Internet. SATNET was DARPA-Sponsored. [RFC 2555] Connected US, England and Norway. INTELSAT. Would be a part of a TCP/IP interconnectivity demonstration with ARPANET in 1977.

Telenet begins offering public packet-switched network service. [Nerds p. 115]

DECNet released [DECNet, CISCO]

"By mid-1975, DARPA had concluded that the ARPANET was stable and should be turned over to a separate agency for operational management. Responsibility was therefore transferred to the Defense Communications Agency (now known as the Defense Information Systems Agency)." [Cerf Com Com Nets] [Roberts, Net Chronology]

Stephen Lukasik leaves his position as Chief of ARPA.

1976

Licklider leaves ARPA again, succeeded by Col David Russell.

Queen of England sends email to her subjects celebrating the 25th anniversary of her coronation [Nerds p 113] (where Pres. Bush Jr when he came to office in 2000 indicated that he would refuse to use email) .

Cerf joins ARPA. [Nerds p 114] [Roberts, Net Chronology]

MERIT interconnects with Telenet. [Merit History]

1977

OSI Subcommittee established. [Salus p 39]

Cerf and Kahn demonstrate interconnection of networks using IP by interconnecting ARPANet, SatNet, Ethernet, and PRNET. Gateways supplied by BBN.. [Nerds p 113] [Cerf Com Com Nets]

1978

First BBS

IPv3 splits TCP and IP.

NTIA Dept of Commerce releases ARPANET Host to Host access and disengagement measurements , 78-3 May 1978

1979

Robert Kahn succeeded David Russell as head of IPTO

Vint Cerf at DARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board (forerunner of the IETF; previously had been the Network Working Group). David Clark at MIT was named chair. [Great Moments] [Kessler] [Salus p 205] [Cerf 1160] [Kahn, Role of Govt]

USENet

USG announces OSI as a layered computing standard.

MUDs Multi User Dungeons

FCC Chair Ferris recruits S. J. Lukasik to be FCC Chief Scientist in the Office of Science & Technology (currently the Office of Engineering and Technology); Lukasik had been Chief of ARPA from 1971 to 1975. [M Marcus 2008] [Lukasik 1982]

EMail

TCP/IP

It was clear that the Network Control Protocol would need to be revised in order to enable the ARPANet to interconnect with other networks. Cerf explained, "In defense settings, circumstances often prevented detailed planning for communication system deployment, and a dynamic, packet-oriented, multiple-network design provided the basis for a highly robust and flexible network to support command-and-control applications." In 1972, Vint Cerf (Stanford; DARPA funding; Cerf had worked on the original NCP) and Bob Kahn (ARPA) released their paper on TCP, A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection (distributed in 1973, published IEEE Transactions of Communications Technology 1974) [See also Vanity Fair]

TCP would be broken into TCP/IP. That facilitated real time voice applications. TCP's error control protocols which caused packets to be resent was both unnecessary for real time voice and in fact got in the way. By separating TCP and IP, this allowed different errxor control protocols such as UDP which, if the packet is not delivered on time, just drops and does not retransmit the packet. [Vint Cerf, How the Internet Came to Be, NetValley Nov 20, 2006] "IP would be responsible for routing packets across multiple networks and TCP for converting messages into streams of packets and reassembling them into messages with few errors despite loss of packets the underlying network." [Denning 4] [Vint Cerf, TCP/IP Co Designer, Living Internet] [ISOC] [Roberts, Net Chronology] The phrase "Internet" was first used in RFC 675. [Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine, Specifications of Internet Transmission Control Protocol NWG RFC 675 (Dec. 1974)] [Roberts History s 6]

Further development of TCP/IP was funded by DARPA, with three contracts to Stanford, BBN, and UCL. [ISOC] Vint Cerf and others went through several versions of TCP/IP until, in 1978, they settled on IPversion4.

TCP/IP was successfully used in 1977 to link together 4 networks.

IP as originally designed had an eight bit networking field which would be sufficient for at maximum 256 networks - it was believed at the time that this would be more than enough. [Nerds2.0 p 112] [Netvalley]

R. Kahn, Communications Principles for Operating Systems. Internal BBN memorandum, Jan. 1972.

IP Designed Neutrality

Visionaries at US Department of Defense DARPA realized the value to the research community if computer networks could talk to each other - sharing resources and sharing research. In 1969, the DARPA funded ARPANet went online. Meanwhile, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn set to work on developing a new protocol that would allow incompatible networks to talk with each other. This new protocol would be DUMB - it would just transmit data - you could run any application over it - you could layer it on top of any physical network. It would be a middle kludge that would hold everything together. In 1972, they release their paper on the Internet Protocol. In 1983, ARPANet formally migrated to IP and morphed into "The Internet."

The Internet technically the name of one network, which is the interconnected network which use the Internet protocol and have one common IP addressing scheme. The Internet is a subnetwork of routers that just route packets. Computing processing power was scarce; in order to maximize throughput, computer processing at the router would be as limited as possible. Routers dont process packets. They dont care if they are email packets, WWW packets, or the latest innovation's packets. They dont care if the packets came over cable, DSL, or fiber. They do not discriminate. Routers just route.

"Four ground rules were critical to Kahn's early thinking:

• "Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
• "Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
• "Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
• "There would be no global control at the operations level." [ISOC]

Bob Kahn: "The idea of the Internet was that you would have multiple networks all under autonomous control. By putting this box in the middle, which we eventually called a gateway, it would allow for the federation of arbitrary numbers of networks without the need for any change made to any particular network. So if BBN had one network and AT&T had another, it would be possible to just plug the two together with a [gateway] box in the middle, and they wouldn't have to do anything to make that work other than to agree to let their networks be plugged in." [Nerds p 111]

See also End to End design.