[ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP

[Barbara Denny]

Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe.  I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be).  I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time).  I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box  (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.

barbara



From: "internet-history-***@postel.org" <internet-history-***@postel.org>
To: internet-***@postel.org
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 12:00 PM
Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5

Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
    internet-***@postel.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
    http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
    internet-history-***@postel.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
    internet-history-***@postel.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."


Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <***@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
To: internet-***@postel.org
Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-***@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
suitable for serious business roll-out.
Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
installing more was a pain.
Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.

So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
think this is very interesting nevertheless (written in 1995):
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html

  Brian

UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
(We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)
--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

------------------------------

_______________________________________________
internet-history mailing list
internet-***@postel.org
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Contact list-***@postel.org for assistance.


End of internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
************************************************

[Brian E Carpenter]

Barbara,

1. Your messages to the list are consistently filed to 'junk' by Gmail, since Yahoo
persists in using the DMARC heresy.

2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
CERN was often an early adopter.

Brian

Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe. I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be). I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time). I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.
barbara
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 12:00 PM
Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
You can reach the person managing the list at
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."
1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
suitable for serious business roll-out.
Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
load of other stuff round about. And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
installing more was a pain.
Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile. We had our techs
crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
plumbing, and so on. It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.
So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html
Brian

UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that. It was easy to install, much
more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office. Our hub site
rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage. Install
and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
(We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires. But that's another story...)
--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5 B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

------------------------------
_______________________________________________
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
End of internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
************************************************
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

[Dave Crocker]

Post by Brian E Carpenter
2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
CERN was often an early adopter.

I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?

They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
assume they had a router product (but not from me).

d/

[Brian E Carpenter]

Post by Dave Crocker

Post by Brian E Carpenter
2. That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
CERN was often an early adopter.

I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
assume they had a router product (but not from me).

There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

Rgds
Brian

[Dave Crocker]

Post by Brian E Carpenter
I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

ITU was/is quite a different animal from ISO, of course.

d/

[John Day]

No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.

Post by Dave Crocker

Post by Brian E Carpenter
I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

ITU was/is quite a different animal from ISO, of course.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

[Jack Haverty]

Post by John Day
No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.

In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet
who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international
projects. E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK
Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted
Internet meetings during that era.

IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related
governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint
research. I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what
the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was
funding what. Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European
organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European
government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have
authority to be on the Internet.

Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
work. It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.

At least some of the work was US DoD funded, e.g., in Norway:

www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010

It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing
what back then on the early Internet.

I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s,
when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also
the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative),
and a plethora of related projects. IMHO, most of the funding for The
Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and
had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for
the entire population.

The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we
know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made
to make the technology open. Otherwise we might still be struggling
with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....

/Jack

[Vint Cerf]

while we had agreements and the Norwegians, Italians and Germans were part
of the International Connection board, I am not sure how much equipment was
online there. NDRE had a host and Paal Spilling worked on getting it hooked
up. Peter Kirstein at UCL had an elaborate set up with many systems on the
UK side going through the SATNET. Bob Kahn and I tried to figure out if
anything was on the SATNET other than UCL and NDRE - sketchy information.

v

Post by John Day

Post by John Day
No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s.

Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.
In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet
who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international
projects. E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK
Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted
Internet meetings during that era.
IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related
governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint
research. I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what
the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was
funding what. Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European
organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European
government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have
authority to be on the Internet.
Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
work. It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.
www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010
It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing
what back then on the early Internet.
I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s,
when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also
the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative),
and a plethora of related projects. IMHO, most of the funding for The
Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and
had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for
the entire population.
The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we
know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made
to make the technology open. Otherwise we might still be struggling
with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....
/Jack
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

[Jack Haverty]

My recollection also is that there wasn't much equipment online in
Europe in the early 1980s. At BBN we were responsible for operating the
SATNET gateways, and likely would have noticed traffic from additional
IP addresses.

I was interpreting the term "on the Internet" more broadly than physical
connection of machines sending IP packets. If you look it as as
meaning "using the Internet", it's a situation analogous to the 70s with
the ARPANET.

Being "on the ARPANET" meant you were authorized to use the net, e.g.,
by dialing in or somehow connecting to a machine which had an IMP port
from which you could utilize the net. OTOH, if your machine had an IMP
port, but you were not working on an approved project, you were not
supposed to be "on the ARPANET", and your machine administrators were
supposed to somehow enforce such restrictions.

So, in that broad interpretation of "being on the Internet", I can
imagine that there might have been similar "backdoor" connections from
one of those few TCP-capable machines to other groups at other
organizations working on joint projects. I have no reason to believe
there were any, but no reason to believe there weren't either...

It would be historically interesting to hear what happened back then,
and how the technology spread, if at all, from the research environment
to operational systems. We know at least parts of the US story, with
Internet, DDN, etc., but I've never heard much about other countries.

/Jack

Post by Vint Cerf
while we had agreements and the Norwegians, Italians and Germans were
part of the International Connection board, I am not sure how much
equipment was online there. NDRE had a host and Paal Spilling worked on
getting it hooked up. Peter Kirstein at UCL had an elaborate set up with
many systems on the UK side going through the SATNET. Bob Kahn and I
tried to figure out if anything was on the SATNET other than UCL and
NDRE - sketchy information.
v

Post by John Day
No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.

In the 1980s there were several European organizations on the Internet
who (as I understood at the time) were part of joint international
projects. E.g., I remember UCL (London), RSRE (somewhere in the UK
Cotswolds), NDRE (Norway), and DFVLR (Germany), all of which hosted
Internet meetings during that era.
IIRC, these organizations were all somehow associated with their related
governments who had some kind of MOU in place with the US for joint
research. I suspect you'd have to find those ancient MOUs to see what
the restrictions were on who could be online from where, and who was
funding what. Even if they didn't have direct US DoD funds, a European
organization involved in a project might have been funded by a European
government arm, which in turn was working with the US, and would have
authority to be on the Internet.
Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
work. It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.
www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010
<http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0691010>
It would be fascinating to see a comprehensive list of who was doing
what back then on the early Internet.
I think it's important for historians to remember that the early 1980s,
when much of the basic machinery of the Internet was created, was also
the time of the Cold War, Star Wars (aka Strategic Defense Initiative),
and a plethora of related projects. IMHO, most of the funding for The
Internet in those early days came from military needs and desires, and
had nothing to do with building a world-wide communications system for
the entire population.
The serendipitous adoption of the technology to create the Internet we
know today was enabled by that landmark decision that Vint and Bob made
to make the technology open. Otherwise we might still be struggling
with dozens of incompatible and competing walled gardens....
/Jack
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
<http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
assistance.
--
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190

[Dave Crocker]

Post by Jack Haverty
I was interpreting the term "on the Internet" more broadly than physical
connection of machines sending IP packets.

I can't resist:

To Be "On" the Internet

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1775
March, 1995

d/

[Johan Helsingius]

Post by Jack Haverty
Our focus at the time was on just getting transatlantic Internet to
work. It would be interesting to see a historical account of what those
organizations were doing, why they had joined in to the Internet
research, and how they fared in the ITU/CCITT/ISO presence in Europe.

I guess the first, fully open-to-everybody transatlantic link
was in 1988 - between CWI (EUnet) and seismo. The NORDUnet US
connection came only a few days later.

Loading Image...

RIPE was formed in May 1989 to coordinate the European IP activities.

Julf

[Dave Crocker]

Post by John Day
No reason either one should have been on the Internet in the 1980s. Neither one was a DoD contractor or had grant money from DoD.

Adding to Jack's posting:


There are some factual problems with the above view.

First, the DoD requirement was removed, at least by the /early/ 1980s,
such as with NSF's CSnet effort starting in 1981. (I don't know the
start dates for The Little Garden, but The World is listed as 1989 in
Wikipedia.)

While I was at DEC in the late 80s (doing tech transfer, because DEC
finally realized they needed to support TCP/IP across the company's
product efforts) my support was from the Field Engineering folks and
there was a critical moment when they decided it was a competitive
requirement to be able to support regular customers across the Internet;
one of their arguments was that their competitors were already doing it.
Getting around the AUP was a task, not a showstopper. Again, this was
pre-1990.

Then there's the difference between 'the Internet' and "TCP/IP
products", where enterprises had gotten the interoperability bug --
mostly thanks to OSI marketing efforts -- and found that only TCP/IP
could solve it...

d/

[Tony Finch]

Post by Brian E Carpenter

Post by Dave Crocker
I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
assume they had a router product (but not from me).

There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

I seem to remember one of the criticisms of OSI around that time was that
it was so unready for production that even ISO used TCP/IP.

e.g. this account of Carl Malamud's visit in 1991 mentions this fact
towards the end - http://museum.media.org/eti/Prologue01.html

Tony.

[Brian E Carpenter]

Post by Tony Finch

Post by Brian E Carpenter

Post by Dave Crocker
I assume that ISO would not count as civilian?
They are one of my solid European customers in the latter 1980s, so I
assume they had a router product (but not from me).

There were quite a few Proteons about, but although I may well have known at
the time, I've no idea what ISO had. I suppose they were mainly an X.400/X.25 shop
at that time? (To my knowledge, the ITU's first contact with the Internet was when
CERN gave Guy Girardet an email account in 1991, so I'm sure they had no IP in the
1980's.)

I seem to remember one of the criticisms of OSI around that time was that
it was so unready for production that even ISO used TCP/IP.
e.g. this account of Carl Malamud's visit in 1991 mentions this fact
towards the end - http://museum.media.org/eti/Prologue01.html

The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.

Brian

Post by Tony Finch
Tony.

[Dave Crocker]

Post by Brian E Carpenter
The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.

That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as
being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over
some years before that.

I think I've noted this already, but around 1987 my department was
developing both various TCP/IP stacks as well as an OSI stack. As work
progressed, we started asking our customer base about the kind of
products they might need to assist in the transition from using Internet
technologies to using OSI.

We were unprepared for how consistent the response was. They had
serious interest only in going from OSI to TCP. There was zero interest
in the other direction.

In my view, that was a game-over moment.

d/

[Brian E Carpenter]

Post by Dave Crocker

Post by Brian E Carpenter
The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The ITU didn't
really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.

That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as
being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over
some years before that.

It depended who you were and where you sat. For me the moment was when I
presented a talk called "Is OSI too late?" at the RARE* conference in May
1989 - although the talk gave a mixed answer to that qustion, the audience
reaction was conclusively "Yes". In January 1990, a committee of three and
a half (B.Carpenter, L.Backstrom, G.Pujolle, assisted by P.Kirstein)
reported to the RARE Council of Administration recommending that
"RARE recognises TCP/IP as complementary to OSI and preferable to
proprietary protocols for immediate use ... RARE recognises RIPE as an
appropriate body for current TCP/IP coordination activities..."
and basically that's what happened. OSI efforts dragged on for a while,
however.

*The Europe-wide association of research networks at that time.

Brian

Post by Dave Crocker
I think I've noted this already, but around 1987 my department was
developing both various TCP/IP stacks as well as an OSI stack. As work
progressed, we started asking our customer base about the kind of
products they might need to assist in the transition from using Internet
technologies to using OSI.
We were unprepared for how consistent the response was. They had
serious interest only in going from OSI to TCP. There was zero interest
in the other direction.
In my view, that was a game-over moment.
d/

[Craig Partridge]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 8:20 PM, Brian E Carpenter <

Post by Brian E Carpenter

Post by Dave Crocker

Post by Brian E Carpenter
The game was over by 1991, although not everybody had realised it. The

ITU didn't

Post by Dave Crocker

Post by Brian E Carpenter
really fold until 1995, but ISO certainly got there sooner.

That's probably a reasonable date to cite for declaring its failure as
being clearly and publicly visible, but I'd claim it was undeniably over
some years before that.

It depended who you were and where you sat. For me the moment was when I
presented a talk called "Is OSI too late?" at the RARE* conference in May
1989 - although the talk gave a mixed answer to that qustion, the audience
reaction was conclusively "Yes". In January 1990, a committee of three and
a half (B.Carpenter, L.Backstrom, G.Pujolle, assisted by P.Kirstein)
reported to the RARE Council of Administration recommending that
"RARE recognises TCP/IP as complementary to OSI and preferable to
proprietary protocols for immediate use ... RARE recognises RIPE as an
appropriate body for current TCP/IP coordination activities..."
and basically that's what happened. OSI efforts dragged on for a while,
however.
*The Europe-wide association of research networks at that time.

Brian's experience matches my recollection and what I found in sources when
I
went back and looked at this for the paper just published in Internet
Annals.
Different people date their realization that OSI was dead to different
dates,
generally between 1988 and 1992. My sense is the closer you were to
operating
a network, the earlier the realization came.

Thanks!

Craig

[Greg Skinner]

The system that Barbara described was called UTACCS (USAREUR Tactical Automated Command and Control System). SRI’s involvement began sometime around the late summer of 1987. The system (including the cisco routers) was maintained at USAREUR in Heidelberg, and used in several field exercises in Europe over the next few years. Eventually, it evolved into the STACCS (Standard Theater Army Command and Control System) <http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a250861.pdf>.

—gregbo

Post by Brian E Carpenter
That's the sort of minor detail in Ben's account that I take issue with. (As for
why CERN had an OSI policy until about 1989, I covered that in my book.) However,
Ben might be right that this was the first *civilian* deployment in Europe.
CERN was often an early adopter.
Brian

Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe. I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be). I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time). I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.
barbara
From: "internet-history-request at postel.org" <internet-history-request at postel.org>
To: internet-history at postel.org
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 12:00 PM
Subject: internet-history Digest, Vol 106, Issue 5
Send internet-history mailing list submissions to
internet-history at postel.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
internet-history-request at postel.org
You can reach the person managing the list at
internet-history-owner at postel.org
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of internet-history digest..."
1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
To: internet-history at postel.org
Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-b5b16dc5895d at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
suitable for serious business roll-out.
Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
load of other stuff round about. And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
installing more was a pain.
Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile. We had our techs
crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
plumbing, and so on. It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.
So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html
Brian

[Johan Helsingius]

Post by Barbara Denny
Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up
also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in
Europe. I am glad it has a question mark after it.

Right. I think the DataNet service (developed by by Juha Heinänen) in
Finland went into pilot slightly later, but was, from what I heard,
"the deal that saved Cisco in the early days").

Julf

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

Right. I think the DataNet service (developed by by Juha Hein�nen) in
Finland went into pilot slightly later, but was, from what I heard,
"the deal that saved Cisco in the early days").

I do think that we had one or two of the first models at the CWI
(better known as mcvax) at the time. Daniel Karrenberg should know
this for sure.

jaap