lars@ACC.ARPA (12/17/85)
In the hope of seeing the faces that go with the names familiar to readers of the INFO-VAX bulletin board, I called a BOF session at DECUS, titled "ARPAnet User's Forum". Probably the title was misleading, for none of the people I had expected to see showed up; instead there were a number of people interested in the politics of ARPAnet, foremost among these Dr Dennis Perry from Los Alamos Natl Labs, who is the head of DARPA/IPTO, and thus chief of ARPAnet. Dr Perry gave a very interesting overview of the questions facing DARPA, including the following (this is typed from my personal notes; my apologies for any inaccuracies and misunderstandings): - how long will the core gateways survive politically ? - how long will the core gateways survive technically, and how can the technical problems be resolved (Domain-severs for IP routing, anyone ?) ? - if ARPAnet were gone tomorrow, would anyone miss it ? (the current net is no longer a "research net" but a production network; the days when you could take the network down for a day to test a new routing algorithm are long gone). The issues in the net today are engineering problems, not research problems. - if we could provide giga-bit links, could anyone think of something useful to do with them, other than slice them into smaller pieces ? Discussions are underway about merging the various research networks into a new joint administration, encompassing DARPA, NASA, NSF etc. It is hoped that this can raise 20 million dollars of new funding. - - - Next year, it would be interesting to have three different sessions: - one like this one - one for TCP-IP readers - and the INFO-VAX one. / Lars Poulsen Advanced Computer Communications <Lars @ ACC.ARPA> ------