pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) (10/14/90)
I was wondering if any knowledgeable person out there could inform me about a couple of things: (1) when was Internet created and by whom? and, (2) what was the oiginal intended purpose of the network? The reason I ask is that I recently read that the administration of Internet was going to be taken over by IBM and another company who's name I forget at the moment. I beleive that this adminstrative change was due to some investigations, by the Houston Chronicle, into the misuse of Internet. BTW, does anyone know whether this is true or not? Scooter -- |pefsnsr@nmtsun.nmt.edu | Quote: "Premenstrual Syndrome: Just |"Pardon me for using up oxygen!" | before their periods women behave the | --L. Long _Time_Enough_For_Love_ | way men do all the time." --RAH | | _The_Cat_Who_Walks_Through_Walls_
gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) (10/15/90)
In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes:
#I beleive that this adminstrative change was due to
#some investigations, by the Houston Chronicle, into the misuse of Internet.
#BTW, does anyone know whether this is true or not?
It is true that the same person who wrote the (factually innaccurate)
Houston Chronicle article also claims that the change in
administration is due to his article.
I think that he overestimates his importance.
--
-Greg Hennessy, University of Virginia
USPS Mail: Astronomy Department, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475 USA
Internet: gsh7w@virginia.edu
UUCP: ...!uunet!virginia!gsh7wsigma@pawl.rpi.edu (Kevin J Martin) (10/15/90)
gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes: >In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes: >#I beleive that this adminstrative change was due to >#some investigations, by the Houston Chronicle, into the misuse of Internet. >#BTW, does anyone know whether this is true or not? >It is true that the same person who wrote the (factually innaccurate) >Houston Chronicle article also claims that the change in >administration is due to his article. >I think that he overestimates his importance. I think he's worth thumbing our collective noses at. He can be the one who IBM sends to the hundreds/thousands of universities and a wide variety of private institutions to inform them of how IBM is going to commandeer their Internet. As for origins, I've heard some vague gospel about Duke University in North Carolina. And of course ARPAnet has been around a while, right? Someone let us know - it's definitely folklore. -- Kevin Martin sigma@rpi.edu
ralphs%halcyon.uucp@seattleu.edu (10/16/90)
gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes: > It is true that the same person who wrote the (factually innaccurate) > Houston Chronicle article also claims that the change in > administration is due to his article. The only thing they could possibly administrate is the content--methinks the distribution scheme and the transport protocols are beyond their comprehension. Besides, where will they get the funding :-) . > I think that he overestimates his importance. Never underestimate the power of a journalist.
eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene Miya) (10/17/90)
In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes: > (1) when was Internet created and by whom? > >and, (2) what was the oiginal intended purpose of the network? No one answered the question. (The answer being 42). Well, it kind of depends on how you regard its origins (Official: early 1980s or when many pieces were in place). Far better experts are out there than me. It sort of began before the ARPAnet. You can read a couple of good papers in Sieworiek, Bell, and Newell's old book on computer architecture on the ARPAnet and Kuo's ALOHAnet (U. Hawaii). It was an effort to connect different kinds of computers together back when a school or company had only one (that's 1) computer. The first configuration of the ARPAnet had only 4 computers, I had luckily selected school at one of those 4 sites: UCLA/Rand Corp, UCSB (us), SRI, and the U of Utah. Who? The US DOD: Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was the sugar daddy of computer science. Some very bright people were given some money, freedom, and had a lot of vision. It not only started computer networks, but also computer graphics, computer flight simulation, head mounted displays, parallel processing, queuing models, VLSI, and a host of other ideas. Far from being evil warmongers, some neat work was done. Why? Lots of reasons: intellectual curosity, the need to have different machines communicate, study fault tolerance of communications systems in event of nuclear war, share and connect expensive resources, very soft ideas to very hard ideas. I wish some of the audio ideas had gone further, VMS phone and Unix talk are kinda stupid, your terminal or workstation should do audio (like a NeXT or an Etherphone). [You get into areas where society isn't ready for computers here: poltiical or social structure.] I first saw the term "internetwork" in paper by folk from Xerox PARC (another ARPAnet host). The issue was one of interconnecting Ethernets (which had the ~256 [slightly less] host limitation). Schoch's CACM worm program paper is a good one. I learned much of this with the help of the NIC (Network Information Center). This does not mean the Internet is like this today. I think the early ARPAnet was kind of a wonderous neat place, sort of a golden era. You could get into other people's machines with a minimum of hassle (someone else paid the bills). No more. There were commercial developments: IBM had some stuff, but they had fairly homogeneous machines (DEC, too), then there is Telenet [GTE] and Tymnet [McD-D], and other services. --e.n. miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov {uunet,mailrus,most gateways}!ames!eugene Where did I fit in? I was a frosh nuclear engineering major hacker (2 AM-4 AM, some times on Fridays and weekends rather than doing student things: studying or dating, etc.) who was learning rather than implementing things (well I did do an interactive SPSS and learned a lot playing chess on an MIT[-MC] DEC-10 from an IBM-360). Think of the problems: 32-bit versus 36-bit, different character set [remember I started with EBCDIC], FTP then is largely FTP now, has changed very little. We didn't have text editors available to students on the IBM (yes you could use the ARPAnet via card decks). Learned a lot. I wish I had hacked more.
malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) (10/17/90)
In article <*QY%WN#@rpi.edu> sigma@pawl.rpi.edu (Kevin J Martin) writes: >gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes: >>In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes: >>[Internet to be administered by IBM, possibly due to Houston Chronicle >> trash?] Is this confirmed? Where did the original information appear? >I think he's worth thumbing our collective noses at. He can be the one who >IBM sends to the hundreds/thousands of universities and a wide variety of >private institutions to inform them of how IBM is going to commandeer their >Internet. Last time I heard, IBM barely had a USENET feed at all, and the trickle they did have was regarded by them with the deepest suspicion. Wonder if we can expect them to "clean things up real good" ? And does it mean that email and file transfer will now be based on the 80-column computer card model as is the case on BITNET? :-D Seriously, I wonder about the wisdom of handing over a (highly successful) network whose nature is nonproprietary over to a large and powerful entity who has, and will probably continue to have, a sizeable interest in its own proprietary networking strategies. Indeed, send the bozo around to explain to everyone. I'm sure the various sites will be able to come up with some suitable "welcomes" for him. The ARPANET has been around in some form since at least the very early 1970's. Conversion to the TCP/IP protocols, which the Internet uses today, began in 1980 or so, with TCP/IP becoming the only accepted protocol on the ARPANET in 1983. At about the same time, DARPA funded BBN (Bolt, Baranek, and Newman) to implement the Internet protocols under Unix, and funded Berkeley to integrate them into BSD, as part of an effort by DARPA to make an implemen- tation of the protocols available at low cost. Right about that time, lots o' computer science departments were using BSD, and were also picking up second and third Unix boxes for the first time, and connecting them using local area networks. As a result of this timing, and of the particulary useful way that Berkeley built their internetworking utilities, such as rcp, to use the protocols, TCP/IP usage took off in a big way, within a relatively short period of time. Douglas Comer's book "Internetworking with TCP/IP", from which I've plagiarized much of the above paragraph, talks further about the history of the Internet (and need for an Internet), and in greater detail. It was the USENET which was begun at Duke, rather than the Internet. I think they started in the mid 70's or so, using two machines, a 1200 baud line (classic!) and UUCP. Later, of course, USENET traffic started to get carried on the Internet, even eventually getting its own special protocol (NNTP) for the purpose. That's a whole 'nother story, however. There are others who will undoubtedly be able to come up with far more Internet folklore than I have here. Malcolm L. Carlock Internet: malc@unrvax.unr.edu UUCP: uunet!unrvax!malc
bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (10/17/90)
In article <4775@tahoe.unr.edu> malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) writes: In article <*QY%WN#@rpi.edu> sigma@pawl.rpi.edu (Kevin J Martin) writes: gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes: In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes: [Internet to be administered by IBM, possibly due to Houston Chronicle trash?] Is this confirmed? Where did the original information appear? See The New York Times, Monday, July 16, 1990, pps. D1 and D4, for a copyrighted article by John Markoff entitled "High-Speed Data System Is Discussed" about plans by ANS, a nonprofit formed by IBM, MCI, and MERIT. MERIT's response (clarification? co-press release?) was issued the same day, and should be available from them. Don't flatter yourselves, it had nothing to do with the Chronicle flap, except in that Usenet has contributed to the traffic growth they're trying to manage.
swb@chumley.tn.cornell.edu (Scott Brim) (10/17/90)
In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes:
The reason I ask is that I recently read that the administration of
Internet was going to be taken over by IBM and another company who's name I
forget at the moment.
Since nobody else has answered to this rumor, I will. I can't think of
any source for it except the formation of ANS. Until last month NSFNET
(a significant part of the Internet backbone, but by no means all of it)
was managed and operated by Merit, with funding from NSF and with IBM
and MCI as its partners. There is now a non-profit company called ANS
(Advanced Network Systems -- might be "Networking") which is held
jointly by the three of them, and NSF has agreed to have Merit
subcontract to ANS for NSFNET management and operation. Merit is Merit
Computer Network, Inc., which got its start as the Michigan state
educational network, back in about 1972. By the way, in response to
someone else's posting: IBM is very well-connected into the Internet at
at least three of its sites. One of the connections is (experimentally)
at 45Mbps.
Scott
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott W. Brim swb@devvax.tn.cornell.edu
Manager, Networking Program voice: +1-607-254-8766
624 Engineering & Theory Center Bldg
Cornell University Theory Center
Ithaca, NY, USA 14853-3801brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (10/18/90)
There's a lot of misunderstanding here. "The Internet" is a somewhat amorphous structure, consisting of tons of different tcp/ip networks. The NIC assigns network numbers and domains, but that is about the only true central authority. (NIC = Network Information Center at SRI) The networks start small, at companies, schools and labs. They are often hooked into regionals. The primary national interconnector, however, is the NSFnet, paid for by the tax dollars of the NSF. It provides raw bandwidth, services, etc., mostly to regionals. The education-based regionals also follow NSFnet's lead in making policy, but some, like NYSERNET (now part of the commercial PSInet) do not. The NSF didn't run the InterNet itself. It contracted to the MERIT consortium to run it. Now MERIT has subcontracted to a new firm called Advanced Networking & Services (ANS) to provide the actual services. ANS is a non-profit corp created with 10 megabucks from IBM and MCI. (Guess which carrier provides the data paths?) ANS has grander plans, however, and will get in (eventually -- there is some question of how this relates to their non-profit charter) to commercial networking whole hog, providing not just NSFnet services, but their own commercial net, competing with outfits like PSI and UUNet Technologies. (UUNet Technologies, which runs a TCP network called Alternet, is the the for-profit parallel company to the non-profit UUNet communications, which runs the uunet relay machine.) There. It starts to get interesting now. We all get to wait and see. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
dboyes@titan.rice.edu (David Boyes) (10/22/90)
In article <4775@tahoe.unr.edu> malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) writes: >>>In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes: >>>[Internet to be administered by IBM, possibly due to Houston Chronicle >>> trash?] >>I think he's worth thumbing our collective noses at. He can be the one who >>IBM sends to the hundreds/thousands of universities and a wide variety of >>private institutions to inform them of how IBM is going to commandeer their >>Internet. Excuse me, but let's keep our folklore straight. Merit, the current babysitter of this fine collection of high-speed toys we call the NSFnet does a quite good job. It might surprise you that Merit is a joint venture between IBM and MCI. The article on the national network managment was in error, and they corrected it the next day. >Seriously, I wonder about the wisdom of handing over a (highly successful) >network whose nature is nonproprietary over to a large and powerful entity >who has, and will probably continue to have, a sizeable interest in its own >proprietary networking strategies. Sigh. See above. If anything, the association with the NSFnet has prompted IBM to *open* up their networking strategies. NetView now groks SNMP -- something unheard of in the traditional IBM way of doing things. The current NSFnet NSS switching units are controlled by NetView. Instead of bashing IBM, lets encourage them to keep up the network glasnost. >Douglas Comer's book "Internetworking with TCP/IP", from which I've plagiarized >much of the above paragraph, talks further about the history of the Internet >(and need for an Internet), and in greater detail. Another good source are the early RFCs, eg. 1-about 350-400. nic.ddn.mil no longer keeps them all on line, but you can get them restored by asking very nicely. >Malcolm L. Carlock Internet: malc@unrvax.unr.edu -- David Boyes (dboyes@rice.edu) "Reason not the need!" -- _King Lear_
emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (10/22/90)
In article <1990Oct21.221104.11211@rice.edu> dboyes@titan.rice.edu (David Boyes) writes:
Excuse me, but let's keep our folklore straight. Merit, the current
babysitter of this fine collection of high-speed toys we call the
NSFnet does a quite good job. It might surprise you that Merit is a
joint venture between IBM and MCI.
It might surprise Merit too. They have been around for a number of
years doing networking around the state of Michigan.
Obdisclaimer: I don't work for Merit.
--Ed
Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu>
moderator, comp.archives
PDP-11's foreverDrsc@merit.edu (Richard Conto) (10/22/90)
In article <1990Oct21.221104.11211@rice.edu> dboyes@titan.rice.edu (David Boyes) writes: >In article <4775@tahoe.unr.edu> malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) writes: >Excuse me, but let's keep our folklore straight. Merit, the current babysitter >of this fine collection of high-speed toys we call the NSFnet does a quite >good job. It might surprise you that Merit is a joint venture between IBM and >MCI. Inasmuch as the Merit Computer Network is a joint venture, it is a joint venture of various state supported universities (in the State of Michigan.) But it is involved in a joint venture with MCI and IBM, that being the NSFnet. Merit's been around a while as a regional network. Long before the style in naming networks was XXXXnet... (but now it's considering calling it's Michigan operations MichNet. Sigh.) >Sigh. See above. If anything, the association with the NSFnet has prompted >IBM to *open* up their networking strategies. NetView now groks SNMP -- >something unheard of in the traditional IBM way of doing things. The current >NSFnet NSS switching units are controlled by NetView. Instead of bashing IBM, >lets encourage them to keep up the network glasnost. I wish I could comment on the above paragraph, but I'm involved in other parts of Merit's business, so I really don't know about NSS control by NetView. --- Richard
jon@cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) (10/23/90)
Some of this "folklore" has been researched and written down:
@incollection{bushnell89,
author="David S. Bushnell and Victoria B. Elder",
title="Computers in the Public Interest: The Promise and Reality
of ARPANET",
booktitle="Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, Vol. 1",
editor="Jonathan P. Jacky and Douglas Schuler",
publisher="Ablex Publishing Corp.",
year="1989",
pages="33--50"}
This paper tells the early history of the Arpanet, as well as other early
experiments in wide-area networks. It is partly based on interviews with
some of the people involved. It also has a good list of references to
the contemporary papers and to the other histories that have been written.
- Jon Jacky, University of Washington, Seattle jon@gaffer.rad.washington.edu
zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) (10/28/90)
In article <EMV.90Oct22005206@picasso.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: >In article <1990Oct21.221104.11211@rice.edu> dboyes@titan.rice.edu (David Boyes) writes: > > Excuse me, but let's keep our folklore straight. Merit, the current > babysitter of this fine collection of high-speed toys we call the > NSFnet does a quite good job. It might surprise you that Merit is a > joint venture between IBM and MCI. > >It might surprise Merit too. They have been around for a number of >years doing networking around the state of Michigan. > >Obdisclaimer: I don't work for Merit. > >--Ed > >Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu> >moderator, comp.archives >PDP-11's foreverD It might surprise the holder of the Merit trademark on Cigarettes. :-) Bill Smith pur-ee!mdbs!zed