[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>

    > the ARPAnet got converted from NCP to TCP/IP in 1983; ... have a more
    > precise date?

No, it was Jan 1.

It wasn't so much a 'conversion', as that was the date on which, except for a
few sites which got special _temporary_ dispensation to finish their
preparations, support for NCP was turned off for most ARPANET hosts. Prior to
that date, most hosts on the ARPANET had been running both, and after that,
only TCP worked. (Non-ARPANET hosts on the then-nascent Internet had always
only been using TCP before that date, of course.)

	Noel

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> > the ARPAnet got converted from NCP to TCP/IP in 1983; ... have a more 
> > precise date?
>
> No, it was Jan 1.

aneurin% date
Mon Jan  1 10:14:58 EST 2018

What timezone did you say you were in again?  This is the problem when 
expressing historical events...

> It wasn't so much a 'conversion', as that was the date on which, except 
> for a few sites which got special _temporary_ dispensation to finish 
> their preparations, support for NCP was turned off for most ARPANET 
> hosts. Prior to that date, most hosts on the ARPANET had been running 
> both, and after that, only TCP worked. (Non-ARPANET hosts on the 
> then-nascent Internet had always only been using TCP before that date, 
> of course.)

Thanks; I'll amend my notes accordingly.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Kurt H Maier]

On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 10:22:02AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> 
> > > the ARPAnet got converted from NCP to TCP/IP in 1983; ... have a more 
> > > precise date?
> >
> > No, it was Jan 1.
> 
> aneurin% date
> Mon Jan  1 10:14:58 EST 2018
> 
> What timezone did you say you were in again?  This is the problem when 
> expressing historical events...

I am confident ARPANET did not pin time to AEDT.  Even if you go by   
UTC you've still got about fifteen minutes to wait for 1 JAN 2018.

khm

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Kurt H Maier wrote:

> I am confident ARPANET did not pin time to AEDT.  Even if you go by UTC 
> you've still got about fifteen minutes to wait for 1 JAN 2018.

So am I, but what reference *am* I supposed to use, FFS?  The USA is 
several zones behind UTC[*], and almost a whole day behind Australia 
(where I live).

My "on this day" policy is to use the local time if it can be narrowed to 
a particular zone where the event happened (and if it makes sense); if it 
was universal e.g. moon landings then I'll use UTC; otherwise I'll use the 
commonly-observed date e.g. the start/end of the world wars.

I'm open to suggestions (including FOAD, in which case I'll simply find 
something better to do).

[*]
A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to 
when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT 
boxes in here in Australia.  At installation time, we had to express the 
time offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief 
that Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it 
saved an entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Kurt H Maier]

On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 11:15:19AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
> My "on this day" policy is to use the local time if it can be narrowed to 
> a particular zone where the event happened (and if it makes sense); if it 
> was universal e.g. moon landings then I'll use UTC; otherwise I'll use the 
> commonly-observed date e.g. the start/end of the world wars.

I support your policy, but I'd say the ARPA in ARPANET makes it at least
feasible to stick with Zulu time for related milestones.

> I'm open to suggestions (including FOAD, in which case I'll simply find 
> something better to do).

Personally, I've enjoyed your posts marking anniversaries of these
events.  

> A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to 

The older I get, the more convinced I am that the "two hard things in
Computer Science" quote came from someone who never had to accurately
report the ages of events predating epoch time.

And I can say as a patriotic American, I did not truly understand the
desperate plight of being a foreigner until I was in Cape Town during
the Super Bowl.  After that I limited international travel to extremely
profitable endeavors; otherwise the ROI just isn't there.

khm 

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 7:59 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

> it was _planned_ to happen at "00:01 (EST) 1 Jan 1983". Whether it did
> happen
> at that moment, or if in reality there was some variance, I don't know


​I don't remember it as being a huge event.   As Noel said most people had
cut over to TCP by then​.

People were much more spooked by Y2K a few years later.

Clem
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[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Ron Natalie]

Heidi Heiden...now there's a name I've not heard in many a year, Noel.

I don't know if it got shut off right at midnight on Jan 1, but it certainly
was pretty close to that time.    Oddly enough as time went on we started to
get link 0 messages again.     We didn't have anything set up to process
them, but we did print a message when it happened.

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > What timezone did you say you were in again?

Ah; didn't realize you wanted the exact time, not just a date! :-)

Well, according to this:

  http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/museum/ddn-news/ddn-news.n19.1

it was _planned_ to happen at "00:01 (EST) 1 Jan 1983". Whether it did happen
at that moment, or if in reality there was some variance, I don't know (IIRC,
I was off sailing in the Caribbean when it actually happened :-).

	Noel

[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

[Dave Horsfall]

Some interesting historical stuff today...

We lost Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper USN (Retd) in 1992; there's not much 
more than can be said about her, but I will mention that she received 
(posthumously) the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2016.

As every Unix geek knows, today is the anniversary of The Epoch[tm] back 
in 1970, and at least one nosey web site thinks that that is my birthdate 
too...

And according to my notes, the ARPAnet got converted from NCP to TCP/IP in 
1983; do any greybeards here have a more precise date?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."