rbj@DSYS.ICST.NBS.GOV (Root Boy Jim) (05/17/89)
Gentle{,wo}men,
I am writing a paper on various distributed facilities. I am
interested in the impact that Berkeley UNIX has made on the Internet
and the ARM. It is obviously a great one, and I am well aware of the
fact that UCB was funded by DARPA to develop a TCP/IP suite. I am
also dimly aware of the fact that there used to be something called
NCP that was floating around in the Version 6 days and presumably
had some relation to BBN. I also know that DEC 10's and 20's were
a big part of the (D)ARPANET. Please fill me in on some of the details
before Berkeley entered the scene. Now is the time to wax prolific!
Thank you.
Root Boy Jim is what I am
Are you what you are or what?mckenzie@bbn.com (Alex McKenzie) (05/18/89)
Dear Root Boy Jim:
I'm writing in response to your message to the tcp-ip list titled
"Impact of BSD on the Internet".
1. There was indeed a thing called NCP around in the early days of the
ARPANET. NCP was the acronym for Network Control Protocol, and it
was the official host-to-host protocol from 1970 through 1982 (the
official cutover data from NCP to TCP was January 1, 1983). NCP had
nothing to do with BBN; it was developed by a committee of network
host organizations called the Network Working Group (NWG), the first
chairman of which was Stephen Crocker of UCLA. I believe the first
mention of NCP in the public literature was a paper by Stephen Carr,
Stephen Crocker, and Vinton Cerf at the 1970 Spring Joint Computer
Conference titled "Host-Host Communication Protocol in the ARPA
Network."
2. The first TCP/IP implementation for UNIX was written by BBN with
Defense Communications Agency (DCA) funding. It was written for
UNIX Version 6 by Michael Wingfield and was completed by March 15,
1979 (see IEN 93*). Another early TCP implementation for UNIX
Version 6 was written by Digital Technology Incorporated at about
the same time.
BBN also wrote the first TCP for Berkeley UNIX, with DARPA funding.
The project was led by Rob Gurwitz and is described in IEN 168
(January 1981) as being "designed for the VAX, running VM/UNIX, the
modified version of UNIX 32/V developed at the University of
California, Berkeley." As might be expected in a TCP project carried
out by BBN, performance was optimized for the characteristics of
wide-area networks. The folks who were both starting SUN
Microsystems and also directing the development of Berkeley UNIX
wanted a TCP implementation optimized for LANs, and were successful
in having the BBN TCP implementation removed from BSD releases and
replaced with their own implementation which was so optimized.
3. TENEX was a paged, virtual memory, time sharing system for the DEC
PDP-10 computer which was developed by BBN to support AI research.
It used paging hardware designed and built by BBN. The development
was funded by ARPA and TENEX became operational in early 1969. It
is described in a paper by Bobrow, Burchfiel, Murphy, and Tomlinson
in Communications of the ACM, Volume 15, Number 3 (March 1972).
TENEX served as the basis for DEC's TOPS-20 operating system.
DEC PDP-10s generally, and TENEX specifically, were by far the
single most popular "server" computers during the first several
years of the ARPANET. (In those days ARPANET hosts were commonly
characterized as "users" or "servers"; a server provided file
storage and cycles, while a user system primarily provided access to
the network.) For example, in December 1970, according to a quick
count I just made, 10 of the 20 ARPANET servers were PDP-10s and in
June 1975, 23 of 47 servers were PDP-10s. Although I do not have a
breakdown of operating systems in use on these PDP-10s, I believe
that over 3/4 of the DEC-10s on the ARPANET at any time were running
TENEX. Other popular operating systems for the PDP-10 were DEC's
10/50 system and MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS).
I hope this information is helpful.
Alex McKenzie
* IENs are available online from the ARPANET Network Information Center
at SRI-NIC.ARPA
CERF@A.ISI.EDU (05/23/89)
Dear Root Boy Jim: Alex McKenzie has done his usual thorough job of describing some of the early history of the ARPANET. My recollection is that the BSD work was specifically supported by Duane Adams, then a member of the staff at DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. His interests were less networking than operating system development, though having such systems work in a networked environment was high on the priority list. The BSD implementation for UNIX, coupled with its easy availability and the proliferation of UNIX-supporting hardware as well as LANs, sparked the rapid growth of the Internet Protocols. Initially, Digital VAX equipment dominated the Internet - the PDP-10's had largely been supplanted by the KL-20's and the Tenex operating system replaced by TOPS-20, which incorporated a lot of what BBN had done with Tenex and the Internet protocols. [You might say that the network vaxed prolific in those days - late 1970's early 1980's]. Since then, new UNIX engines have emerged (e.g. SUN, PC versions on the 386 series machines, supercomputer versions) which adopted the Internet protocols because they are both widely available and used. Vint Cerf