Re: [TUHS] Early Internet work (Was: History of select(2)) - TUHS

16 Jan 2017

On 2017-01-16 03:00, jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:
...
   From: Johnny
Billquist 
  Like I pointed out, RFC760 lacks ICMP. 
 So? TCP will work without ICMP. 
True. However, IP and UDP will have issues.

...
   Which also
makes one question how anyone would have known about IPv4 in
 1978. 
 Well, I can assure you that _I_ knew about it in 1978! (The decision on the v4
 packet formats was taken in the 5th floor conference room at 545 Tech Sq,
 about 10 doors down from my office!)

 But everyone working on TCP/IP heard about Version 4 shortly after the June,
 1978 meeting. 
Over a year before any documents said anything about it. This is where I 
have problems. :-)

...
   Also, first
definition of TCP shows up in RFC 761 
 If you're speaking of TCPv4 (one needs to be precise - there were also of
 course TCP's 1, 2, 2.5 and 3, going back to 1974), please see IEN-44. (Ignore
 IEN's -40 and -41; those were proposals for v4 that got left by the wayside.)

That is a very good point. I've been talking v4 all the time (both for 
IP and TCP). Like I said, I'm sure people were doing networking 
protocols and stuff earlier, but it wasn't the TCP/IP we know and talk 
about today, and you just reaffirmed this.

And yes, the TCP/IP we know today did not come out of a blue sky. Of 
course it is based on earlier work. (Just do you don't have to go on 
about that again.)

...
   So yes, I
still have problems with claims that they had it all running
 in 1978. 
 I never said we had it "all" running in 1978 - and I explicitly referenced
 areas (congestion, addressing/routing) we were still working on over 10 years
 later.

 But there were working implementations (as in, they could exchange data with
 other implementations) of TCP/IPv4 by January 1979 - see IEN 77. 
But not TCP4 then. And thus, not interoperable with an implementation 
today, and interoperable in general being a rather floating and moving 
target, as you had several imvompatible TCP versions, using different 
protocol numbers, and several incompatible IP versions.

...
  (I'll never forget that weekend - we were in at
ISI on Saturday, when it was
 normally closed, and IIRC we couldn't figure out how to turn the hallway
 lights on, so people were going from office to office in the gloom...) 
Fun times, I bet.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol