5 Dec
2019
5 Dec
'19
6:08 a.m.
The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know their names?);
at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977 (and
I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe that
perhaps there were only three left by then...
Hmmm... According to my notes, the nodes were UCSB, UCLA, SRI, and Utah.
-- Dave
5 Dec
5 Dec
10:19 a.m.
I'd love to know the order of nodes joining and how that was scored.
I've been told that UW-Madison "was the 11th IMP on the arpanet" but
I'm
pretty sure that is not true. My guess is that there are the original
IMPs that were arpanet, then there was an expansion to educational sites
and Madison was 11 on that. Or something like that.
Anyone know?
On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 11:08:47AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969
(anyone know their
names?); at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected
in 1977 (and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can
believe that perhaps there were only three left by then...
Hmmm... According to my notes, the nodes were UCSB, UCLA, SRI, and Utah.
-- Dave
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Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
2:01 p.m.
Larry McVoy wrote:
I'd love to know the order of nodes joining and
how that was scored.
Some early RFC describe nodes being connected.
For example, RFC 254 says "The MIT PDP-10(AI) system uses the ITS
operating system and is similar to the MIT PDP-10(DMCG) system. At
present the host is not connected to the ARPANET." RFC 342 has it as a
"network user", and in RFC 344 it's updated to a server.
Are the IMP numbers any indication which order they were connected?
6:37 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 3:01 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
Larry McVoy wrote:
It was always my understanding the numbers were the order they were
activated by bbn
I'd love to know the order of nodes joining
and how that was scored.
Are the IMP numbers any indication which order they were connected?
______________________________________________
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
6 Dec
6 Dec
12:20 a.m.
On 12/4/2019 8:19 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
I'd love to know the order of nodes joining and
how that was scored.
There are a number of sites that contain fragments of the history of
sites/nodes joining the ARPAnet. Wikipedia's entry for ARPAnet has some
of that along with several logical maps of the network (though these
stopped including host #'s pretty early on.) One decent concise
accounting is at https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
A collection of maps of the ARPAnet over time is available from the
Computer History Museum at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646704
As others have noted the numbers were assigned chronologically starting
at UCLA's Sigma-7 system (1) such that the first 4 were:
1: UCLA: Sigma-7
2: SRI: SDS-940
3: UCSB: IBM 360/75
4: Utah: PDP-10
I know Case-10 was node 13 (more colloquially referenced as 15, in
octal, which was how we saw the numbers and updated the host table).
I've forgotten at this point whether the assignments were documented in
RFCs or other assigned numbers documents from the Network Information
Center (NIC).
I've been told that UW-Madison "was the 11th
IMP on the arpanet" but I'm
pretty sure that is not true.
You're correct that it's not true. Not sure when/if UW-Madison was on
the ARPAnet. Hosts did get decommissioned and I think the numbers were
eventually recycled so it's possible a later site got a lower number but
now it's my turn not to be sure.
My guess is that there are the original
IMPs that were arpanet, then there was an expansion to educational sites
and Madison was 11 on that. Or something like that.
ARPAnet "vs." educational sites isn't a distinction that existed. The
first 4 nodes consisted of 3 educational institutions and a
university-affiliated research organization (SRI). In 1971 when there
were 23 hosts and 15 IMPs more than half of the organizations were
universities though contractors and labs started appearing pretty
rapidly. IMPs apart from ARPAnet weren't a thing really.
There's a podcast, "50 Things that Made the Modern Economy" that had a
fairly recent episode about IMPs that was pretty interesting. Had a
economic, Adam Smith-like spin on the emergence of IMPs as an example of
specialization in an ecosystem which was a big part of "why IMPs": the
network was kept homogeneous among the IMPs and whatever weirdness was
associated with the different hosts (mostly) contained to the host-IMP
interface.
Those first 4 nodes were all pretty different systems. Some differences
percolated up to the applications protocols, TELNET's options set was
complicated by the heterogeneity of the hosts in a protocol architecture
pre-dating things like "presentation layers" in network models.
If you peruse the maps at the Computer History museum site you can see
some real diversity in the systems. For instance in April 1971 Burroughs
had an IMP and a B6500 front-ending the under-construction ILLIAC-IV
(later moved to Ames and front-ended by a couple of PDP-10s). PARC's
MAXC appears in the mid-1970s. One of the goals in creating the ARPAnet
was to provide access to unique resources to a wider research community
and you can certainly see a lot of unique systems in those early maps.
12:33 a.m.
Rob Gingell wrote:
1: UCLA: Sigma-7
2: SRI: SDS-940
3: UCSB: IBM 360/75
4: Utah: PDP-10
[...]
If you peruse the maps at the Computer History museum
site you can see
some real diversity in the systems. For instance in April 1971
Burroughs had an IMP and a B6500 front-ending the under-construction
ILLIAC-IV (later moved to Ames and front-ended by a couple of
PDP-10s). PARC's MAXC appears in the mid-1970s.
Maybe this is a good time to ask if anyone knows whether any of those
diverse systems has software preserved? Specifically, the
implementation of the NCP and 1822 Host-to-IMP protocols?
1:05 a.m.
On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 10:20:06AM -0800, Rob Gingell wrote:
On 12/4/2019 8:19 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
That seems to list the 1st 4 and then none? Or did I miss it?
I'd love to know the order of nodes joining
and how that was scored.
There are a number of sites that contain fragments of the history of
sites/nodes joining the ARPAnet. Wikipedia's entry for ARPAnet has some of
that along with several logical maps of the network (though these stopped
including host #'s pretty early on.) One decent concise accounting is at
https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ A collection of maps of the ARPAnet over time is
available from the Computer
History Museum at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646704
Too blurry to read the names.
2:41 a.m.
On 12/5/2019 11:05 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
Admittedly a couple of the maps are hard to process even with zooming in
but a lot of them are very readable even to my old eyes. And yeah, they
don't answer the history question except by inference through visual
comparison. Just couldn't find anything better.
On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 10:20:06AM -0800, Rob Gingell
wrote:
There's another list of the membership (but not the addresses) under
1971 but the descriptions peter out after that.
I was doing some digging for old HOSTS.TXT files, one of which would
give a roughly chronological order, and a sequence of which would allow
for reconstructing the history, but didn't come up with anything.
Well, I did find one file from 1973 that seemed to have the information
but the trouble is that file was a document scan that stopped after the
first page.
Once internetworking experiments started there were sequences of
"assigned number" RFCs that showed the evolution of internetworking and
component networks but I came up empty looking for just the plain old
HOSTS.TXT files.
One decent concise accounting is at
https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
That seems to list the 1st 4 and then none? Or did I miss it? A collection
of maps of the ARPAnet over time is available from the Computer
History Museum at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646704
Too blurry to read the names. 
7:19 a.m.
Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff gathered together will help:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
-----Original Message-----
From: COFF <coff-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org> On Behalf Of Rob Gingell
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 3:41 PM
To: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes
On 12/5/2019 11:05 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
Admittedly a couple of the maps are hard to process even with zooming in
but a lot of them are very readable even to my old eyes. And yeah, they
don't answer the history question except by inference through visual
comparison. Just couldn't find anything better.
_______________________________________________
COFF mailing list
COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 10:20:06AM -0800, Rob Gingell
wrote:
There's another list of the membership (but not the addresses) under
1971 but the descriptions peter out after that.
I was doing some digging for old HOSTS.TXT files, one of which would
give a roughly chronological order, and a sequence of which would allow
for reconstructing the history, but didn't come up with anything.
Well, I did find one file from 1973 that seemed to have the information
but the trouble is that file was a document scan that stopped after the
first page.
Once internetworking experiments started there were sequences of
"assigned number" RFCs that showed the evolution of internetworking and
component networks but I came up empty looking for just the plain old
HOSTS.TXT files.
One decent concise accounting is at
https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
That seems to list the 1st 4 and then none? Or did I miss it? A collection
of maps of the ARPAnet over time is available from the Computer
History Museum at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646704
Too blurry to read the names.
9:25 a.m.
On 12/5/19 5:19 PM, amp1ron(a)gmail.com wrote:
Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff
gathered together will help:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
Thanks for the pointer. I had come across those. The trouble is, for the
NCP era, there's only one host file in the collection. The rest are all
from the post-Internet transition (and thus the numbers can't be
inferred to convey a probable chronological sequence.)
And for the one from the NCP era, it's the one that only has the first
page and so it's missing a bunch of stuff. (It's not really a HOSTS.TXT
file but a prettified annotated edition with other information, and so
the file in the repository is a PDF of a scanned physical printout.)
Still even that one page adds some information. From the information
exchanged previously we had hosts 1 through 4, and then host 13. And the
likely matches for about two dozen numbers. And the fragment from the
one page in the repository adds 5 (though it's clear from the comments
that it was a recycled number), 9, 12, confirms 13, 14, 15, 16, and then
a smattering of others up to 232.
Some of the liaison names are tickling memories of long ago acquaintances!
I had thought that once upon a time there was an archive of a mid-1970s
TENEX distribution, like 1.33 or 1.34. The distribution might have
embedded a stale HOSTS.TXT file that would have been complete for the
time. But I haven't managed to find it again.
Still none of this really answers Larry's query in a satisfying way. I
imagine somewhere there's just a ledger that has the answer to the
question I thought he posed about who showed up when with what on the
ARPAnet. The collected papers of someone like Jon Postel might have
something of that nature (but a brief search doesn't reveal an archive
literally like that) but then substantial body of his work lives on in
the RFC library.
10:19 a.m.
I see there's a LOT of hosts files in at least several different formats archived on
saildart. A duck duck go search for "site:saildart.org hst.net filedate 197"
found me lots of files dated in the 1970s. In the first few pages of search results
there's this 1974-04-04 file https://www.saildart.org/NAMES%5BNET,SYS%5D3 . At least
that's in the mid-70s date range you're looking for. And maybe there are even
older files on saildart. I've pulled out the entries from that file with the lowest
20 numbers and ordered them by number. Between number 1 and 23 in that 1974-04-04 file
hosts 17, 20, and 22 are missing. So even if hosts hadn't yet been renumbered, by
1974-04-04 it appears some hosts were dropped from at least this file NET.SYS .
; Here we define the names (long and short) of the sites and their numbers
X <UCLA-NMC>,NMC,1,0
X <SRI-ARC>,NIC,2,noslf!noelf
X UCSB,UCSB,3,0
X UTAH,UTAH,4,noslf!noelf
X <BBN-NCC>,NCC,5,noslf!noelf
X <MIT-MLTX>,MLTX,6,0
X <RAND-65>,RAND,7,0
X SDC,SDC,8,0
X <HARV-10>,HARV,9,0
X <LL-67>,LL67,10,0
X <SU-AI>,SAIL,11,noelf
X <ILL-11>,ILL11,12,0
X CASE,CASE,13,0
X <CMU-10B>,CMU,14,0
X <NASA-AMES>,AMES,15,noslf!noelf
X <AMES-67>,AME67,16,0
X RADC,RADC,18,0
X NBS,NBS,19,0
X TINKER,OCAF,21,0
X USC,USC,23,0
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Gingell <gingell(a)gmail.com> On Behalf Of Rob Gingell
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 10:26 PM
To: amp1ron(a)gmail.com; 'Larry McVoy' <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes
On 12/5/19 5:19 PM, amp1ron(a)gmail.com wrote:
Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff
gathered together will help:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
Thanks for the pointer. I had come across those. The trouble is, for the
NCP era, there's only one host file in the collection. The rest are all
from the post-Internet transition (and thus the numbers can't be
inferred to convey a probable chronological sequence.)
And for the one from the NCP era, it's the one that only has the first
page and so it's missing a bunch of stuff. (It's not really a HOSTS.TXT
file but a prettified annotated edition with other information, and so
the file in the repository is a PDF of a scanned physical printout.)
Still even that one page adds some information. From the information
exchanged previously we had hosts 1 through 4, and then host 13. And the
likely matches for about two dozen numbers. And the fragment from the
one page in the repository adds 5 (though it's clear from the comments
that it was a recycled number), 9, 12, confirms 13, 14, 15, 16, and then
a smattering of others up to 232.
Some of the liaison names are tickling memories of long ago acquaintances!
I had thought that once upon a time there was an archive of a mid-1970s
TENEX distribution, like 1.33 or 1.34. The distribution might have
embedded a stale HOSTS.TXT file that would have been complete for the
time. But I haven't managed to find it again.
Still none of this really answers Larry's query in a satisfying way. I
imagine somewhere there's just a ledger that has the answer to the
question I thought he posed about who showed up when with what on the
ARPAnet. The collected papers of someone like Jon Postel might have
something of that nature (but a brief search doesn't reveal an archive
literally like that) but then substantial body of his work lives on in
the RFC library.
10:43 a.m.
I searched for files on saildart that include the text SRI-ARC . The oldest one I can
find is file NET.SYS dated 1973-04-08: https://www.saildart.org/NAMES[NET,SYS]4
It appears to be an older version of the 1974-04-04 file I mentioned in my previous
message.
My apologies for top-posting. I'll stop posting now as I don’t have any ideas for
finding hosts files older than that one.
-----Original Message-----
From: amp1ron(a)gmail.com <amp1ron(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 11:19 PM
To: 'Rob Gingell' <gingell(a)computer.org>; 'Larry McVoy'
<lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: RE: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes
I see there's a LOT of hosts files in at least several different formats archived on
saildart. A duck duck go search for "site:saildart.org hst.net filedate 197"
found me lots of files dated in the 1970s. In the first few pages of search results
there's this 1974-04-04 file https://www.saildart.org/NAMES%5BNET,SYS%5D3 . At least
that's in the mid-70s date range you're looking for. And maybe there are even
older files on saildart. I've pulled out the entries from that file with the lowest
20 numbers and ordered them by number. Between number 1 and 23 in that 1974-04-04 file
hosts 17, 20, and 22 are missing. So even if hosts hadn't yet been renumbered, by
1974-04-04 it appears some hosts were dropped from at least this file NET.SYS .
; Here we define the names (long and short) of the sites and their numbers
X <UCLA-NMC>,NMC,1,0
X <SRI-ARC>,NIC,2,noslf!noelf
X UCSB,UCSB,3,0
X UTAH,UTAH,4,noslf!noelf
X <BBN-NCC>,NCC,5,noslf!noelf
X <MIT-MLTX>,MLTX,6,0
X <RAND-65>,RAND,7,0
X SDC,SDC,8,0
X <HARV-10>,HARV,9,0
X <LL-67>,LL67,10,0
X <SU-AI>,SAIL,11,noelf
X <ILL-11>,ILL11,12,0
X CASE,CASE,13,0
X <CMU-10B>,CMU,14,0
X <NASA-AMES>,AMES,15,noslf!noelf
X <AMES-67>,AME67,16,0
X RADC,RADC,18,0
X NBS,NBS,19,0
X TINKER,OCAF,21,0
X USC,USC,23,0
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Gingell <gingell(a)gmail.com> On Behalf Of Rob Gingell
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 10:26 PM
To: amp1ron(a)gmail.com; 'Larry McVoy' <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
Cc: coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes
On 12/5/19 5:19 PM, amp1ron(a)gmail.com wrote:
Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff
gathered together will help:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt
Thanks for the pointer. I had come across those. The trouble is, for the
NCP era, there's only one host file in the collection. The rest are all
from the post-Internet transition (and thus the numbers can't be
inferred to convey a probable chronological sequence.)
And for the one from the NCP era, it's the one that only has the first
page and so it's missing a bunch of stuff. (It's not really a HOSTS.TXT
file but a prettified annotated edition with other information, and so
the file in the repository is a PDF of a scanned physical printout.)
Still even that one page adds some information. From the information
exchanged previously we had hosts 1 through 4, and then host 13. And the
likely matches for about two dozen numbers. And the fragment from the
one page in the repository adds 5 (though it's clear from the comments
that it was a recycled number), 9, 12, confirms 13, 14, 15, 16, and then
a smattering of others up to 232.
Some of the liaison names are tickling memories of long ago acquaintances!
I had thought that once upon a time there was an archive of a mid-1970s
TENEX distribution, like 1.33 or 1.34. The distribution might have
embedded a stale HOSTS.TXT file that would have been complete for the
time. But I haven't managed to find it again.
Still none of this really answers Larry's query in a satisfying way. I
imagine somewhere there's just a ledger that has the answer to the
question I thought he posed about who showed up when with what on the
ARPAnet. The collected papers of someone like Jon Postel might have
something of that nature (but a brief search doesn't reveal an archive
literally like that) but then substantial body of his work lives on in
the RFC library.
1843
days inactive
1844
days old
11 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
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amp1ron＠gmail.com -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Larry McVoy -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Rob Gingell