[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

[Noel Chiappa]

    > 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 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).

There was research going on in the area, but even at MIT one doesn't teach
(or didn't then; I don't know about now) on-going research subjects to
undergrads. MIT _did_ have, even then, a formal UROP ('undergrad research
opportunities') program, which allowed undergrads to be part of research
groups - a sheer genius idea - which in some fast-moving fields, like CS, was
an inestimable benefit to more forward undergrads in those fields.


I joined the CSR group at LCS in '77 because I had some operating system
ideas I wanted to work on; I had no idea at that point that they were doing
anything with networks. They took me on as the result of the sheerest chance;
they had just gotten some money from DARPA to build a LAN, and the interface
was going to be built for a UNIBUS PDP-11, and they needed diagnostics, etc
written; and they were all Multicians. I, by chance, knew PDP-11 assembler -
which none of them did - the MIT CS introductory course at that point taught
it. So the deal was that I'd help them with that, and I could use the machine
to explore my OS ideas in return.

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. (I actually have a written document hiding in a file drawer somewhere
from 1978 or so, which makes it plain that that I'm not suffering 20-20
hindsight here, in talking about foreseeing the impact; I should dig it up.)

The future impact actually wasn't hard to foresee: looking at what printed
books had done to the world, and then telgraphs/telephones, and what
computers had already started to do at that point, it was clear that
combining them all was going to have an incredible impact (and we're still
adapting to it).


Learning about networking at the time was tricky. The ARPANET - well, NCP and
below - was pretty well documented in a couple of AFIPS papers (linked to at
the bottom here:

  https://gunkies.org/wiki/ARPANET

which I have a very vague memory I photocopied at the time out of the bound
AFIPS proceedings in the LCS library). The applications were only documented
in the RFC's.

(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.

Which is an interesting point; the ARPANET was a key tool in the internet
work. The most important aspect was email; non-stop discussion between the
widely separated groups who were part of the project. It also made document
distribution really easy (which had also been true of the latter stages of
the ARPANET project, with the RFC's). And of course it was also a long-haul
network that we used to tie the small internets at all the various sites
(BBN, SRI, ISI - and eventually MIT) into the larger Internet.

I hate to think about trying to do all that work on internets, and the
Internet, without the ARPANE there, as a tool.

	Noel

[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: Berkeley CSRG Building

[Clem Cole]

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First, Noel - thank you.  Get commentary.  Some thoughts below...

On Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 2:26 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > 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.
ᐧ

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