From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2017 18:43:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] History of select(2) Message-ID: <20170114234356.28A8F18C079@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Johnny Billquist > And RFC791 is dated September 1981. Yes, but it had pretty much only editorial changes from RFC-760, dated January 1980 (almost two years before), and from a number of IEN's dated even earlier than that (which I'm too lazy to paw through). > So I have this problem with people who say that they implemented TC/IP > in 1978 for some reason. If you look at IEN-44, June 1978 (issued shortly after the fateful June 15-16 meeting, where the awful 32-bit address decision was taken), you will see that the packet format as of that date was pretty much what we have today (the format of addresses kept changing for many years, but I'll put that aside for now). > Especially if they say ... it was working well in heterogeneous > networks. TCP/IP didn't work "well" for a long time after 1981 - until we got the congestion control stuff worked out in the late 80's. And IIRC the routing/ addressing stuff took even longer. > I don't think it's correct to say that it was TCP/IP, as we know it > today. Why not? A box implementing the June '78 spec would probably talk to a current one (as long as suitable addresses were used on each end). > It was either some other protocol (like NCP) or some other version of > IP, which was not even published as an RFC. Nope. And don't put too much weight on the RFC part - TCP/IP stuff didn't start getting published as RFC's until it was _done_ (i.e. ready for the ARPANet to convert from NCP to TCP/IP - which happened January 1, 1983). All work prior to TCP/IP being declared 'done' is documented in IEN's (very similar documents to RFC's, distributed by the exact same person - Jon Postel). Noel