> From: Larry McVoy
{Moving this to COFF, as it's not UNIX-related. I'll have another reply there
as well, about the social media point.}
> The amazing thing, to me, is I was a CS student in very early 1980's
> and I had no idea of the history behind the arpanet.
I don't think that was that uncommon; at MIT (slightly earlier, I think -
-'74-'77 for me) the undergrad's weren't learning anything about networking
there either, then.
I can say ditto for CMU - although the EE Dept's Real-Time System's course that I took we made an "ethernet" between an 11/20, 11/03 and some KIM-1's as a term project (much slower and not as good -- but it worked to a point). So the ideas were being talk about and we knew it was important. Which is how I got asked to be part of the distributed front-end development - which was were I got to read the proposals as RFC's would later lead to what we think of as IPv4 and TCPv4.
I think the reason is that there wasn't much to teach - in part because we
did not then know much about networking, and in part because it was not yet
crystal clear how important it would become (more below on that).
Right there was not a networking course. There was a real-time course and used networking to demonstrate ideas from RT course (co-routines, constraint based processing, etc,.).
....
Which never really happened; it fairly became clear to me that data
networking was going to have an enormous impact on the world, and at that
point it was also technically interesting, so I quickly got sucked into that
stuff.
You and me both. But I suspect only the most nieve people would not have seen it. As you say, the hand writing was on the wall. Processors were becoming extremely economical, so using multiple ot them pretty obvious. Lots of people we already sending things down RS-232 wires, but anyone that had experienced anything like ethernet, knew the speeds had to and would get better.
....
(Speaking of which, at that level, the difference between the ARPANET and the
Internet was not very significant - it was only the internals, invisible to
the people who did 'application' protocols, that were completely different.
HTTP would probably run just fine on top of NCP, for instance.)
Anything past that, the start of the internet work, that, I picked up by i)
direct osmosis from other people in CSR who were starting to think about
networks - principally Dave Clark and Dave Reed - and then ii) from documents
prepared as part of the TCP/IP effort, which were distributed electronically.
Shout out to Dave - the unsung internetworking hero and does not get enough credit. The idea is that each of us has our own locally controlled network, but we could make a new (larger) network from lots of smaller ones in a hierarchy of some type without needing any real type of "central control." I like to call it 'Clark's Observation' - why did a screw-up at CMU cause the MIT IMP and a couple of hosts to have to be rebooted?
I remember seeing that comment as being really profound and I think it was when I really started to appreciate Parnes' "Information hiding" ideas that were being drilled into our heads. Really good (and simple) interfaces -- the UNIX concept of doing "one job well" started to hit home. When we had done the work for the RT course, that code was pretty sloppy in retrospect. I learned a lot, but other than we made it work on a couple of different processors, it was really nothing to be proud.
...
I hate to think about trying to do all that work on internets, and the
Internet, without the ARPANE there, as a tool.
Amen.