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

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Johnny Billquist

    > Like I pointed out, RFC760 lacks ICMP.

So? TCP will work without ICMP.

    > 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.

    > 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.)

    > 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.

(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...)

    Noel