1

Introduction

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing
before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage
for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide
broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium
for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without
regard for geographic location.

The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of
sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information
infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government,
industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new
technology. Today, terms like "bleiner@computer.org" and "http://www.acm.org" trip
lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. 1

This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much

material currently exists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A
trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet. 2

In this paper, 3 several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet
share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves around four distinct
aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet
switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research
continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such
as scale, performance, and higher level functionality. There is the operations and
management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the
social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to
create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting
in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and
available information infrastructure.

The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of

what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its
history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and
community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer
communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online
tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community
operations.

Origins of the Internet

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through
networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962
discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected
set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs
from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider
was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October
1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob
2

Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this

networking concept.

Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July
1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the
theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was
a major step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was to
make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas
Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with
a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area
computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the
time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving
data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone
system was totally inadequate for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for
packet switching was confirmed.

In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and
quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the
conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network
concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury
told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND.
The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice
in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND
(1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the
researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the
work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was
upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. 5

In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the
overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by
DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called
Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a
group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team
worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET
architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and
optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis
Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team
at UCLA. 6

Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on
analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was
selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September
1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was
connected. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which
included NLS, an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by
Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host
name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when
SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from
Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and
3

University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization

projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for
display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of
refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating
methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host
computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding
Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the
networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on
how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.

Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and
work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and
other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG)
working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called
the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed
implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could
begin to develop applications.

In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the

ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This
was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It
was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In
March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software,
motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination
mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility
program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there
email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a
harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the
enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic.

The Initial Internetting Concepts

The original ARPANET grew into the Internet. Internet was based on the idea that
there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning
with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include
packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks.
The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely
that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual
network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather
could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks
through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture". Up until that time there was
only one general method for federating networks. This was the traditional circuit
switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level, passing
individual bits on a synchronous basis along a portion of an end-to-end circuit
between a pair of end locations. Recall that Kleinrock had shown in 1961 that packet
switching was a more efficient switching method. Along with packet switching,
special purpose interconnection arrangements between networks were another
possibility. While there were other limited ways to interconnect different networks,
they required that one be used as a component of the other, rather than acting as a
peer of the other in offering end-to-end service.
4

In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be separately designed

and developed and each may have its own unique interface which it may offer to users
and/or other providers. including other Internet providers. Each network can be
designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that
network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be
included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will
dictate what makes sense to offer.

The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after
having arrived at DARPA in 1972. This work was originally part of the packet radio
program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right. At the time,
the program was called "Internetting". Key to making the packet radio system work
was a reliable end-end protocol that could maintain effective communication in the
face of jamming and other radio interference, or withstand intermittent blackout such
as caused by being in a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain. Kahn first contemplated
developing a protocol local only to the packet radio network, since that would avoid
having to deal with the multitude of different operating systems, and continuing to use
NCP.

However, NCP did not have the ability to address networks (and machines) further
downstream than a destination IMP on the ARPANET and thus some change to NCP
would also be required. (The assumption was that the ARPANET was not changeable
in this regard). NCP relied on ARPANET to provide end-to-end reliability. If any
packets were lost, the protocol (and presumably any applications it supported) would
come to a grinding halt. In this model NCP had no end-end host error control, since
the ARPANET was to be the only network in existence and it would be so reliable that
no error control would be required on the part of the hosts.

Thus, Kahn decided to develop a new version of the protocol which could meet the
needs of an open-architecture network environment. This protocol would eventually
be called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). While NCP
tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol would be more like a
communications protocol.

Four ground rules were critical to Kahn's early thinking:

• Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes
could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
• Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to
the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
• Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be
called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the
gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby
keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from
various failure modes.
• There would be no global control at the operations level.

Other key issues that needed to be addressed were:

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• Algorithms to prevent lost packets from permanently disabling

communications and enabling them to be successfully retransmitted from the
source.
• Providing for host to host "pipelining" so that multiple packets could be
enroute from source to destination at the discretion of the participating hosts,
if the intermediate networks allowed it.
• Gateway functions to allow it to forward packets appropriately. This included
interpreting IP headers for routing, handling interfaces, breaking packets into
smaller pieces if necessary, etc.
• The need for end-end checksums, reassembly of packets from fragments and
detection of duplicates, if any.
• The need for global addressing
• Techniques for host to host flow control.
• Interfacing with the various operating systems
• There were also other concerns, such as implementation efficiency,
internetwork performance, but these were secondary considerations at first.

Kahn began work on a communications-oriented set of operating system principles

while at BBN and documented some of his early thoughts in an internal BBN
memorandum entitled "Communications Principles for Operating Systems". At this
point he realized it would be necessary to learn the implementation details of each
operating system to have a chance to embed any new protocols in an efficient way.
Thus, in the spring of 1973, after starting the internetting effort, he asked Vint Cerf
(then at Stanford) to work with him on the detailed design of the protocol. Cerf had
been intimately involved in the original NCP design and development and already had
the knowledge about interfacing to existing operating systems. So armed with Kahn's
architectural approach to the communications side and with Cerf's NCP experience,
they teamed up to spell out the details of what became TCP/IP.

The give and take was highly productive and the first written version 7 of the resulting
approach was distributed at a special meeting of the International Network Working
Group (INWG) which had been set up at a conference at Sussex University in
September 1973. Cerf had been invited to chair this group and used the occasion to
hold a meeting of INWG members who were heavily represented at the Sussex
Conference.

Some basic approaches emerged from this collaboration between Kahn and Cerf:

• Communication between two processes would logically consist of a very long

stream of bytes (they called them octets). The position of any octet in the
stream would be used to identify it.
• Flow control would be done by using sliding windows and acknowledgments
(acks). The destination could select when to acknowledge and each ack
returned would be cumulative for all packets received to that point.
• It was left open as to exactly how the source and destination would agree on
the parameters of the windowing to be used. Defaults were used initially.
• Although Ethernet was under development at Xerox PARC at that time, the
proliferation of LANs were not envisioned at the time, much less PCs and
workstations. The original model was national level networks like ARPANET
of which only a relatively small number were expected to exist. Thus a 32 bit
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IP address was used of which the first 8 bits signified the network and the
remaining 24 bits designated the host on that network. This assumption, that
256 networks would be sufficient for the foreseeable future, was clearly in
need of reconsideration when LANs began to appear in the late 1970s.

The original Cerf/Kahn paper on the Internet described one protocol, called TCP,
which provided all the transport and forwarding services in the Internet. Kahn had
intended that the TCP protocol support a range of transport services, from the totally
reliable sequenced delivery of data (virtual circuit model) to a datagram service in
which the application made direct use of the underlying network service, which might
imply occasional lost, corrupted or reordered packets.

However, the initial effort to implement TCP resulted in a version that only allowed
for virtual circuits. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login
applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications, in
particular packet voice in the 1970s, made clear that in some cases packet losses
should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with. This
led to a reorganization of the original TCP into two protocols, the simple IP which
provided only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and the separate
TCP, which was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery
from lost packets. For those applications that did not want the services of TCP, an
alternative called the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was added in order to provide
direct access to the basic service of IP.

A major initial motivation for both the ARPANET and the Internet was resource
sharing - for example allowing users on the packet radio networks to access the time
sharing systems attached to the ARPANET. Connecting the two together was far more
economical that duplicating these very expensive computers. However, while file
transfer and remote login (Telnet) were very important applications, electronic mail
has probably had the most significant impact of the innovations from that era. Email
provided a new model of how people could communicate with each other, and
changed the nature of collaboration, first in the building of the Internet itself (as is
discussed below) and later for much of society.

There were other applications proposed in the early days of the Internet, including
packet based voice communication (the precursor of Internet telephony), various
models of file and disk sharing, and early "worm" programs that showed the concept
of agents (and, of course, viruses). A key concept of the Internet is that it was not
designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new
applications could be conceived, as illustrated later by the emergence of the World
Wide Web. It is the general purpose nature of the service provided by TCP and IP that
makes this possible.

Proving the Ideas

DARPA let three contracts to Stanford (Cerf), BBN (Ray Tomlinson) and UCL (Peter
Kirstein) to implement TCP/IP (it was simply called TCP in the Cerf/Kahn paper but
contained both components). The Stanford team, led by Cerf, produced the detailed
specification and within about a year there were three independent implementations of
TCP that could interoperate.
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This was the beginning of long term experimentation and development to evolve and
mature the Internet concepts and technology. Beginning with the first three networks
(ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite) and their initial research
communities, the experimental environment has grown to incorporate essentially
every form of network and a very broad-based research and development community.
[REK78] With each expansion has come new challenges.

The early implementations of TCP were done for large time sharing systems such as
Tenex and TOPS 20. When desktop computers first appeared, it was thought by some
that TCP was too big and complex to run on a personal computer. David Clark and his
research group at MIT set out to show that a compact and simple implementation of
TCP was possible. They produced an implementation, first for the Xerox Alto (the
early personal workstation developed at Xerox PARC) and then for the IBM PC. That
implementation was fully interoperable with other TCPs, but was tailored to the
application suite and performance objectives of the personal computer, and showed
that workstations, as well as large time-sharing systems, could be a part of the
Internet. In 1976, Kleinrock published the first book on the ARPANET. It included an
emphasis on the complexity of protocols and the pitfalls they often introduce. This
book was influential in spreading the lore of packet switching networks to a very wide
community.

Widespread development of LANS, PCs and workstations in the 1980s allowed the
nascent Internet to flourish. Ethernet technology, developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox
PARC in 1973, is now probably the dominant network technology in the Internet and
PCs and workstations the dominant computers. This change from having a few
networks with a modest number of time-shared hosts (the original ARPANET model)
to having many networks has resulted in a number of new concepts and changes to the
underlying technology. First, it resulted in the definition of three network classes (A,
B, and C) to accommodate the range of networks. Class A represented large national
scale networks (small number of networks with large numbers of hosts); Class B
represented regional scale networks; and Class C represented local area networks
(large number of networks with relatively few hosts).

A major shift occurred as a result of the increase in scale of the Internet and its
associated management issues. To make it easy for people to use the network, hosts
were assigned names, so that it was not necessary to remember the numeric addresses.
Originally, there were a fairly limited number of hosts, so it was feasible to maintain a
single table of all the hosts and their associated names and addresses. The shift to
having a large number of independently managed networks (e.g., LANs) meant that
having a single table of hosts was no longer feasible, and the Domain Name System
(DNS) was invented by Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI. The DNS permitted a scalable
distributed mechanism for resolving hierarchical host names (e.g. www.acm.org) into
an Internet address.

The increase in the size of the Internet also challenged the capabilities of the routers.
Originally, there was a single distributed algorithm for routing that was implemented
uniformly by all the routers in the Internet. As the number of networks in the Internet
exploded, this initial design could not expand as necessary, so it was replaced by a
hierarchical model of routing, with an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) used inside
each region of the Internet, and an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) used to tie the
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regions together. This design permitted different regions to use a different IGP, so that
different requirements for cost, rapid reconfiguration, robustness and scale could be
accommodated. Not only the routing algorithm, but the size of the addressing tables,
stressed the capacity of the routers. New approaches for address aggregation, in
particular classless inter-domain routing (CIDR), have recently been introduced to
control the size of router tables.

As the Internet evolved, one of the major challenges was how to propagate the
changes to the software, particularly the host software. DARPA supported UC
Berkeley to investigate modifications to the Unix operating system, including
incorporating TCP/IP developed at BBN. Although Berkeley later rewrote the BBN
code to more efficiently fit into the Unix system and kernel, the incorporation of
TCP/IP into the Unix BSD system releases proved to be a critical element in
dispersion of the protocols to the research community. Much of the CS research
community began to use Unix BSD for their day-to-day computing environment.
Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported
operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the
successful widespread adoption of the Internet.

One of the more interesting challenges was the transition of the ARPANET host
protocol from NCP to TCP/IP as of January 1, 1983. This was a "flag-day" style
transition, requiring all hosts to convert simultaneously or be left having to
communicate via rather ad-hoc mechanisms. This transition was carefully planned
within the community over several years before it actually took place and went
surprisingly smoothly (but resulted in a distribution of buttons saying "I survived the
TCP/IP transition").

TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard three years earlier in 1980. This enabled
defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to
the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities. By 1983,
ARPANET was being used by a significant number of defense R&D and operational
organizations. The transition of ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP permitted it to be
split into a MILNET supporting operational requirements and an ARPANET
supporting research needs.

Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a

broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by
other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being
used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but
interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad
based electronic communications between people.

Transition to Widespread Infrastructure

At the same time that the Internet technology was being experimentally validated and
widely used amongst a subset of computer science researchers, other networks and
networking technologies were being pursued. The usefulness of computer networking
- especially electronic mail - demonstrated by DARPA and Department of Defense
contractors on the ARPANET was not lost on other communities and disciplines, so
that by the mid-1970s computer networks had begun to spring up wherever funding
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could be found for the purpose. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) established
MFENet for its researchers in Magnetic Fusion Energy, whereupon DoE's High
Energy Physicists responded by building HEPNet. NASA Space Physicists followed
with SPAN, and Rick Adrion, David Farber, and Larry Landweber established
CSNET for the (academic and industrial) Computer Science community with an
initial grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). AT&T's free-wheeling
dissemination of the UNIX computer operating system spawned USENET, based on
UNIX' built-in UUCP communication protocols, and in 1981 Ira Fuchs and Greydon
Freeman devised BITNET, which linked academic mainframe computers in an "email
as card images" paradigm.

With the exception of BITNET and USENET, these early networks (including
ARPANET) were purpose-built - i.e., they were intended for, and largely restricted to,
closed communities of scholars; there was hence little pressure for the individual
networks to be compatible and, indeed, they largely were not. In addition, alternate
technologies were being pursued in the commercial sector, including XNS from
Xerox, DECNet, and IBM's SNA. 8 It remained for the British JANET (1984) and
U.S. NSFNET (1985) programs to explicitly announce their intent to serve the entire
higher education community, regardless of discipline. Indeed, a condition for a U.S.
university to receive NSF funding for an Internet connection was that "... the
connection must be made available to ALL qualified users on campus."

In 1985, Dennis Jennings came from Ireland to spend a year at NSF leading the
NSFNET program. He worked with the community to help NSF make a critical
decision - that TCP/IP would be mandatory for the NSFNET program. When Steve
Wolff took over the NSFNET program in 1986, he recognized the need for a wide
area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research
community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such
infrastructure on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding. Policies and
strategies were adopted (see below) to achieve that end.

NSF also elected to support DARPA's existing Internet organizational infrastructure,

hierarchically arranged under the (then) Internet Activities Board (IAB). The public
declaration of this choice was the joint authorship by the IAB's Internet Engineering
and Architecture Task Forces and by NSF's Network Technical Advisory Group of
RFC 985 (Requirements for Internet Gateways ), which formally ensured
interoperability of DARPA's and NSF's pieces of the Internet.

In addition to the selection of TCP/IP for the NSFNET program, Federal agencies
made and implemented several other policy decisions which shaped the Internet of
today.

• Federal agencies shared the cost of common infrastructure, such as trans-

oceanic circuits. They also jointly supported "managed interconnection points"
for interagency traffic; the Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX-E and FIX-W)
built for this purpose served as models for the Network Access Points and
"*IX" facilities that are prominent features of today's Internet architecture.
• To coordinate this sharing, the Federal Networking Council 9 was formed. The
FNC also cooperated with other international organizations, such as RARE in
Europe, through the Coordinating Committee on Intercontinental Research
10

Networking, CCIRN, to coordinate Internet support of the research

community worldwide.
• This sharing and cooperation between agencies on Internet-related issues had a
long history. An unprecedented 1981 agreement between Farber, acting for
CSNET and the NSF, and DARPA's Kahn, permitted CSNET traffic to share
ARPANET infrastructure on a statistical and no-metered-settlements basis.
• Subsequently, in a similar mode, the NSF encouraged its regional (initially
academic) networks of the NSFNET to seek commercial, non-academic
customers, expand their facilities to serve them, and exploit the resulting
economies of scale to lower subscription costs for all.
• On the NSFNET Backbone - the national-scale segment of the NSFNET -
NSF enforced an "Acceptable Use Policy" (AUP) which prohibited Backbone
usage for purposes "not in support of Research and Education." The
predictable (and intended) result of encouraging commercial network traffic at
the local and regional level, while denying its access to national-scale
transport, was to stimulate the emergence and/or growth of "private",
competitive, long-haul networks such as PSI, UUNET, ANS CO+RE, and
(later) others. This process of privately-financed augmentation for commercial
uses was thrashed out starting in 1988 in a series of NSF-initiated conferences
at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on "The Commercialization and
Privatization of the Internet" - and on the "com-priv" list on the net itself.
• In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and
with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF
titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on
then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the
networking foundation for the future information superhighway.
• In 1994, a National Research Council report, again chaired by Kleinrock (and
with Kahn and Clark as members again), Entitled "Realizing The Information
Future: The Internet and Beyond" was released. This report, commissioned by
NSF, was the document in which a blueprint for the evolution of the
information superhighway was articulated and which has had a lasting affect
on the way to think about its evolution. It anticipated the critical issues of
intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and
regulation for the Internet.
• NSF's privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the
NSFNET Backbone. The funds thereby recovered were (competitively)
redistributed to regional networks to buy national-scale Internet connectivity
from the now numerous, private, long-haul networks.

The backbone had made the transition from a network built from routers out of the
research community (the "Fuzzball" routers from David Mills) to commercial
equipment. In its 8 1/2 year lifetime, the Backbone had grown from six nodes with 56
kbps links to 21 nodes with multiple 45 Mbps links. It had seen the Internet grow to
over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and outer space, with approximately
29,000 networks in the United States.

Such was the weight of the NSFNET program's ecumenism and funding ($200 million
from 1986 to 1995) - and the quality of the protocols themselves - that by 1990 when
the ARPANET itself was finally decommissioned10, TCP/IP had supplanted or
marginalized most other wide-area computer network protocols worldwide, and IP
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was well on its way to becoming THE bearer service for the Global Information
Infrastructure.

The Role of Documentation

A key to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the
basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols.

The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research
community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results.
However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too
slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks.

In 1969 a key step was taken by S. Crocker (then at UCLA) in establishing the
Request for Comments (or RFC) series of notes. These memos were intended to be an
informal fast distribution way to share ideas with other network researchers. At first
the RFCs were printed on paper and distributed via snail mail. As the File Transfer
Protocol (FTP) came into use, the RFCs were prepared as online files and accessed
via FTP. Now, of course, the RFCs are easily accessed via the World Wide Web at
dozens of sites around the world. SRI, in its role as Network Information Center,
maintained the online directories. Jon Postel acted as RFC Editor as well as managing
the centralized administration of required protocol number assignments, roles that he
continued to play until his death, October 16, 1998

The effect of the RFCs was to create a positive feedback loop, with ideas or proposals
presented in one RFC triggering another RFC with additional ideas, and so on. When
some consensus (or a least a consistent set of ideas) had come together a specification
document would be prepared. Such a specification would then be used as the base for
implementations by the various research teams.

Over time, the RFCs have become more focused on protocol standards (the "official"
specifications), though there are still informational RFCs that describe alternate
approaches, or provide background information on protocols and engineering issues.
The RFCs are now viewed as the "documents of record" in the Internet engineering
and standards community.

The open access to the RFCs (for free, if you have any kind of a connection to the
Internet) promotes the growth of the Internet because it allows the actual
specifications to be used for examples in college classes and by entrepreneurs
developing new systems.

Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet, and that is certainly true
in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet
engineering. The very early RFCs often presented a set of ideas developed by the
researchers at one location to the rest of the community. After email came into use,
the authorship pattern changed - RFCs were presented by joint authors with common
view independent of their locations.

The use of specialized email mailing lists has been long used in the development of
protocol specifications, and continues to be an important tool. The IETF now has in
12

excess of 75 working groups, each working on a different aspect of Internet

engineering. Each of these working groups has a mailing list to discuss one or more
draft documents under development. When consensus is reached on a draft document
it may be distributed as an RFC.

As the current rapid expansion of the Internet is fueled by the realization of its
capability to promote information sharing, we should understand that the network's
first role in information sharing was sharing the information about it's own design and
operation through the RFC documents. This unique method for evolving new
capabilities in the network will continue to be critical to future evolution of the
Internet.

Formation of the Broad Community

The Internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies,

and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well
as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward. This
community spirit has a long history beginning with the early ARPANET. The early
ARPANET researchers worked as a close-knit community to accomplish the initial
demonstrations of packet switching technology described earlier. Likewise, the Packet
Satellite, Packet Radio and several other DARPA computer science research programs
were multi-contractor collaborative activities that heavily used whatever available
mechanisms there were to coordinate their efforts, starting with electronic mail and
adding file sharing, remote access, and eventually World Wide Web capabilities. Each
of these programs formed a working group, starting with the ARPANET Network
Working Group. Because of the unique role that ARPANET played as an
infrastructure supporting the various research programs, as the Internet started to
evolve, the Network Working Group evolved into Internet Working Group.

In the late 1970's, recognizing that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a
growth in the size of the interested research community and therefore an increased
need for coordination mechanisms, Vint Cerf, then manager of the Internet Program at
DARPA, formed several coordination bodies - an International Cooperation Board
(ICB), chaired by Peter Kirstein of UCL, to coordinate activities with some
cooperating European countries centered on Packet Satellite research, an Internet
Research Group which was an inclusive group providing an environment for general
exchange of information, and an Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB),
chaired by Clark. The ICCB was an invitational body to assist Cerf in managing the
burgeoning Internet activity.

In 1983, when Barry Leiner took over management of the Internet research program
at DARPA, he and Clark recognized that the continuing growth of the Internet
community demanded a restructuring of the coordination mechanisms. The ICCB was
disbanded and in its place a structure of Task Forces was formed, each focused on a
particular area of the technology (e.g. routers, end-to-end protocols, etc.). The Internet
Activities Board (IAB) was formed from the chairs of the Task Forces. It of course
was only a coincidence that the chairs of the Task Forces were the same people as the
members of the old ICCB, and Dave Clark continued to act as chair.
13

After some changing membership on the IAB, Phill Gross became chair of a
revitalized Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), at the time merely one of the IAB
Task Forces. As we saw above, by 1985 there was a tremendous growth in the more
practical/engineering side of the Internet. This growth resulted in an explosion in the
attendance at the IETF meetings, and Gross was compelled to create substructure to
the IETF in the form of working groups.

This growth was complemented by a major expansion in the community. No longer

was DARPA the only major player in the funding of the Internet. In addition to
NSFNet and the various US and international government-funded activities, interest
in the commercial sector was beginning to grow. Also in 1985, both Kahn and Leiner
left DARPA and there was a significant decrease in Internet activity at DARPA. As a
result, the IAB was left without a primary sponsor and increasingly assumed the
mantle of leadership.

The growth continued, resulting in even further substructure within both the IAB and
IETF. The IETF combined Working Groups into Areas, and designated Area
Directors. An Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) was formed of the Area
Directors. The IAB recognized the increasing importance of the IETF, and
restructured the standards process to explicitly recognize the IESG as the major
review body for standards. The IAB also restructured so that the rest of the Task
Forces (other than the IETF) were combined into an Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF) chaired by Postel, with the old task forces renamed as research groups.

The growth in the commercial sector brought with it increased concern regarding the
standards process itself. Starting in the early 1980's and continuing to this day, the
Internet grew beyond its primarily research roots to include both a broad user
community and increased commercial activity. Increased attention was paid to making
the process open and fair. This coupled with a recognized need for community support
of the Internet eventually led to the formation of the Internet Society in 1991, under
the auspices of Kahn's Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and the
leadership of Cerf, then with CNRI.

In 1992, yet another reorganization took place. In 1992, the Internet Activities Board
was re-organized and re-named the Internet Architecture Board operating under the
auspices of the Internet Society. A more "peer" relationship was defined between the
new IAB and IESG, with the IETF and IESG taking a larger responsibility for the
approval of standards. Ultimately, a cooperative and mutually supportive relationship
was formed between the IAB, IETF, and Internet Society, with the Internet Society
taking on as a goal the provision of service and other measures which would facilitate
the work of the IETF.

The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has
brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have
not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. A new
coordination organization was formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Initially led from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Berners-Lee (the
inventor of the WWW) and Al Vezza, W3C has taken on the responsibility for
evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the Web.
14

Thus, through the over two decades of Internet activity, we have seen a steady
evolution of organizational structures designed to support and facilitate an ever-
increasing community working collaboratively on Internet issues.

Commercialization of the Technology

Commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive,

private network services, but also the development of commercial products
implementing the Internet technology. In the early 1980s, dozens of vendors were
incorporating TCP/IP into their products because they saw buyers for that approach to
networking. Unfortunately they lacked both real information about how the
technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this
approach to networking. Many saw it as a nuisance add-on that had to be glued on to
their own proprietary networking solutions: SNA, DECNet, Netware, NetBios. The
DoD had mandated the use of TCP/IP in many of its purchases but gave little help to
the vendors regarding how to build useful TCP/IP products.

In 1985, recognizing this lack of information availability and appropriate training,

Dan Lynch in cooperation with the IAB arranged to hold a three day workshop for
ALL vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do
well. The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both
developed these protocols and used them in day to day work. About 250 vendor
personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. The results were surprises
on both sides: the vendors were amazed to find that the inventors were so open about
the way things worked (and what still did not work) and the inventors were pleased to
listen to new problems they had not considered, but were being discovered by the
vendors in the field. Thus a two way discussion was formed that has lasted for over a
decade.

After two years of conferences, tutorials, design meetings and workshops, a special
event was organized that invited those vendors whose products ran TCP/IP well
enough to come together in one room for three days to show off how well they all
worked together and also ran over the Internet. In September of 1988 the first Interop
trade show was born. 50 companies made the cut. 5,000 engineers from potential
customer organizations came to see if it all did work as was promised. It did. Why?
Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone's products
interoperated with all of the other products - even with those of their competitors. The
Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations
around the world each year to an audience of over 250,000 people who come to learn
which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest
products, and discuss the latest technology.

In parallel with the commercialization efforts that were highlighted by the Interop
activities, the vendors began to attend the IETF meetings that were held 3 or 4 times a
year to discuss new ideas for extensions of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Starting with a
few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these
meetings now often exceeds a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community
and paid for by the attendees themselves. This self-selected group evolves the TCP/IP
suite in a mutually cooperative manner. The reason it is so useful is that it is
comprised of all stakeholders: researchers, end users and vendors.
15

Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and
commercial communities. In the beginning of the Internet, the emphasis was on
defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation. As the network
grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the
network would not scale. Manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed
automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults. In 1987 it
became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the
network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way. Several
protocols for this purpose were proposed, including Simple Network Management
Protocol or SNMP (designed, as its name would suggest, for simplicity, and derived
from an earlier proposal called SGMP) , HEMS (a more complex design from the
research community) and CMIP (from the OSI community). A series of meeting led to
the decisions that HEMS would be withdrawn as a candidate for standardization, in
order to help resolve the contention, but that work on both SNMP and CMIP would go
forward, with the idea that the SNMP could be a more near-term solution and CMIP a
longer-term approach. The market could choose the one it found more suitable. SNMP
is now used almost universally for network based management.

In the last few years, we have seen a new phase of commercialization. Originally,
commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking
products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services.
The Internet has now become almost a "commodity" service, and much of the latest
attention has been on the use of this global information infrastructure for support of
other commercial services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread
and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users
easy access to information linked throughout the globe. Products are available to
facilitate the provisioning of that information and many of the latest developments in
technology have been aimed at providing increasingly sophisticated information
services on top of the basic Internet data communications.

History of the Future

On October 24, 1995, the FNC unanimously passed a resolution defining the term
Internet. This definition was developed in consultation with members of the internet
and intellectual property rights communities. RESOLUTION: The Federal
Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition
of the term "Internet". "Internet" refers to the global information system that -- (i) is
logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet
Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support
communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols;
and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level
services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.

The Internet has changed much in the two decades since it came into existence. It was
conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal
computers, client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It
was designed before LANs existed, but has accommodated that new network
technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame switched services. It was
envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to
16

resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more
recently the World Wide Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small
band of dedicated researchers, and has grown to be a commercial success with billions
of dollars of annual investment.

One should not conclude that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet,
although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the
traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must,
continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain
relevant. It is now changing to provide such new services as real time transport, in
order to support, for example, audio and video streams. The availability of pervasive
networking (i.e., the Internet) along with powerful affordable computing and
communications in portable form (i.e., laptop computers, two-way pagers, PDAs,
cellular phones), is making possible a new paradigm of nomadic computing and
communications.

This evolution will bring us new applications - Internet telephone and, slightly further
out, Internet television. It is evolving to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing
and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is
changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies
with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband residential access to
satellites. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new
applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.

The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology
will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. As
this paper describes, the architecture of the Internet has always been driven by a core
group of designers, but the form of that group has changed as the number of interested
parties has grown. With the success of the Internet has come a proliferation of
stakeholders - stakeholders now with an economic as well as an intellectual
investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over control of the domain
name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the
next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future. The form of that
structure will be harder to find, given the large number of concerned stake-holders. At
the same time, the industry struggles to find the economic rationale for the large
investment needed for the future growth, for example to upgrade residential access to
a more suitable technology. If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for
technology, vision, or motivation. It will be because we cannot set a direction and
march collectively into the future.
17

Timeline

Footnotes
1
Perhaps this is an exaggeration based on the lead author's residence in Silicon Valley.
2
On a recent trip to a Tokyo bookstore, one of the authors counted 14 English
language magazines devoted to the Internet.
3
An abbreviated version of this article appears in the 50th anniversary issue of the
CACM, Feb. 97. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Andy
Rosenbloom, CACM Senior Editor, for both instigating the writing of this article and
his invaluable assistance in editing both this and the abbreviated version.
4
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) changed its name to Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971, then back to ARPA in 1993,
and back to DARPA in 1996. We refer throughout to DARPA, the current name.
5
It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the
ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This
was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice
considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize
robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large
portions of the underlying networks.
6
Including amongst others Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Jon Postel. Joining them
later were David Crocker who was to play an important role in documentation of
electronic mail protocols, and Robert Braden, who developed the first NCP and then
TCP for IBM mainframes and also was to play a long term role in the ICCB and IAB.
7
This was subsequently published as V. G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn, "A protocol for
packet network interconnection" IEEE Trans. Comm. Tech., vol. COM-22, V 5, pp.
627-641, May 1974.
8
The desirability of email interchange, however, led to one of the first "Internet
books": !%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks, by Frey and
Adams, on email address translation and forwarding.
18

9
Originally named Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, FRICC. The
FRICC was originally formed to coordinate U.S. research network activities in
support of the international coordination provided by the CCIRN.
10
The decommisioning of the ARPANET was commemorated on its 20th anniversary
by a UCLA symposium in 1989.

References

P. Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks", IEEE Trans. Comm. Systems,

March 1964.

V. G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn, "A protocol for packet network interconnection", IEEE
Trans. Comm. Tech., vol. COM-22, V 5, pp. 627-641, May 1974.

S. Crocker, RFC001 Host software, Apr-07-1969.

R. Kahn, Communications Principles for Operating Systems. Internal BBN

memorandum, Jan. 1972.

Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Packet Communication Networks, Volume

66, No. 11, November, 1978. (Guest editor: Robert Kahn, associate guest editors:
Keith Uncapher and Harry van Trees)

L. Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", RLE Quarterly

Progress Report, July 1961.

L. Kleinrock, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, Mcgraw-

Hill (New York), 1964.

L. Kleinrock, Queueing Systems: Vol II, Computer Applications, John Wiley and Sons
(New York), 1976

J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, "On-Line Man Computer Communication", August

1962.

L. Roberts & T. Merrill, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared

Computers", Fall AFIPS Conf., Oct. 1966.

L. Roberts, "Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication", ACM

Gatlinburg Conf., October 1967.

Authors

Barry M. Leiner was Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer
Science. He passed away in April, 2003.
19

Vinton G. Cerf is Senior Vice President, Technology Strategy, MCI.

David D. Clark is Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science.

Robert E. Kahn is President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Leonard Kleinrock is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California,

Los Angeles, and is Chairman and Founder of Nomadix.

Daniel C. Lynch is a founder of CyberCash Inc. and of the Interop networking trade
show and conferences.

Jon Postel served as Director of the Computer Networks Division of the Information
Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California until his untimely death
October 16, 1998.

Lawrence G. Roberts is Chairman and CTO of Caspian Networks

Stephen Wolff is with Cisco Systems, Inc.

A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN

Ben Segal / CERN IT-PDP-TE
April, 1995

Now that the Internet has exploded in popularity on a world wide scale, with a major
component of its success (the World Wide Web) being developed at CERN, it seems a
good time to look back and trace the history of the Internet at CERN. Even before the
Web allowed Internet penetration in the most unexpected places, the presence of the
Internet protocols at CERN had already encouraged their adoption not only in many
other parts of Europe but also in such influential organizations as the ITU and ISO in
Geneva.

Another reason for writing this history today is that it is almost exactly ten years ago
that CERN named me as its first "TCP/IP Coordinator". The TCP/IP protocols (as
20

Internet protocols were then called) had actually entered CERN a few years earlier,
inside a Berkeley Unix system, but not too many people were aware of that event. In
the computer networking arena, a period of 10-15 years represents several generations
of technology evolution. Readers of this history will perhaps be surprised that in a
period of only three years there can be developments that radically change the whole
way that people think about computer communications. This has just happened with
the Web (prototyped in 1990-1, fully accepted over 1993-4), but several related steps
needed to take place beforehand to enable the Web's emergence. First of all, standards
had to emerge in computer systems themselves, and in programming techniques.
Next, standards were needed in network and computer hardware, with the
accompanying price reductions. Finally there had to be a change in mentality, among
both manufacturers and computer users, for them first to allow and then to insist that
their systems should be able to communicate freely.

Another interesting element, apart from the rapidity of change, is the factor of
accident or coincidence, often traceable to a personal event or a meeting of one or two
people in critical circumstances. Bringing the Internet to CERN was not a simple
business, although similar events probably occurred at other pioneer sites. Being very
well acquainted with the people involved, the present author was ideally placed to
observe the interplay of technical, personal and political elements at CERN that
helped bring about a major part of today's Information Revolution.

In the Beginning - the 1970's

In the beginning was - chaos. In the same way that the theory of high energy physics
interactions was itself in a chaotic state up until the early 1970's, so was the so-called
area of "Data Communications" at CERN. The variety of different techniques, media
and protocols used was staggering; open warfare existed between many
manufacturers' proprietary systems, various home-made systems (including CERN's
own "FOCUS" and "CERNET"), and the then rudimentary efforts at defining open or
international standards. There were no general purpose Local Area Networks (LANs):
each application used its own approach. The only really widespread CERN network at
that time was "INDEX": a serial twisted pair system with a central Gandalf circuit
switch, connecting some hundreds of "dumb" terminals via RS232 to a selection of
accessible computer ports for interactive login.

CERNET, beginning in 1976, offered a fast file transfer service between a number of
mainframes and minicomputers via 2Mbit/s serial lines using packet switching in a
network of gateway nodes. Remote login (known as "virtual terminal service") was
only supported to a single system, the central IBM mainframe. At the end of its ten
year life CERNET supported 100 systems, including its own version of a LAN bridge,
connecting some of CERN's first Ethernets. However, even though architecturally
CERNET resembled ARPAnet, all its protocols had been developed independently. It
was therefore doomed, though this was of course unknown at the beginning. Even if
its designers had been in contact with Vint Cerf and company, there was no efficient
way to run a transatlantic collaboration. Imagine a period without electronic mail...
but no, this was only introduced at CERN to any extent at the beginning of the 1980's.

This was also a period without standards for computer systems themselves, not just
communication systems. There are therefore few computer files from this period and
21

we must rely on the written record. We must look back into our paper files, typed by
our typists, back into a time when there were no PC's, no Macintoshes, no Unix and
no C programming at CERN...

The Stage is Set - early 1980's

To my knowledge, the first time any "Internet Protocol" was used at CERN was
during the second phase of the STELLA Satellite Communication Project, from 1981-
83, when a satellite channel was used to link remote segments of two early local area
networks (namely "CERNET", running between CERN and Pisa, and a Cambridge
Ring network running between CERN and Rutherford Laboratory). This was certainly
inspired by the ARPA IP model, known to the Italian members of the STELLA
collaboration (CNUCE, Pisa) who had ARPA connections; nevertheless the STELLA
internet protocol was independently implemented and a STELLA-specific higher-
level protocol was deployed on top of it, not TCP. As the senior technical member of
the CERN STELLA team, this development opened my eyes to the meaning and
potential of an Internet network protocol.

Ethernet made its appearance at CERN at about that time (1983), when an initial
stretch of the soon-to-be-famous yellow cable arrived to support a demonstration of
the very advanced Symbolics machine from MIT, which actually ran ChaosNet, XNS
and TCP/IP protocols if I remember correctly. Before that, starting in 1982, we had
installed some Apollo Domain coaxial cables for a 12 Mbit/s token ring network
running Apollo's proprietary protocol, the first to offer a real distributed file system as
well as network virtual memory paged over the ring.

The Apollo workstations brought CERN firmly into the distributed computing
business. They had no equal for large scientific and graphics applications. The fact
that the system was proprietary seemed unimportant at that time: Unix based
competitors like Sun and HP were outclassed, and Unix itself had little appeal for
CERN physicists. A file-exchange gateway was made (by this author) between the
Apollos and the home-grown CERNET network, sufficient to exchange data and
program files with the central CERN mainframes and other CERNET hosts. Remote
login was made, if desired, by terminal emulation via RS232 cables; other
connections were improvised by other techniques, in the disjoint spirit of those times.

In 1983, for the first time, a Data Communications (DC) Group was set up in the
CERN computing division (then "Data-handling Division" or "DD") under David
Lord. Before that time, work on computer networking in DD had been carried out in
several groups: I myself belonged to the Software (SW) Group, which had assigned
me and several others to participate in DD's networking projects since 1970. All my
work on STELLA had been sponsored in this way, for example. The new DC Group
seemed to have a mandate to unify networking practices across the whole of CERN,
but after a short time it became clear that this was not going to be done
comprehensively. DC Group decided to leave major parts of the field to others while
it concentrated on building a CERN-wide backbone infrastructure. Furthermore,
following the political currents of the time, they laid a very formal stress on ISO
standard networking, the only major exception being their support for DECnet. PC
networking was ignored almost entirely; IBM mainframe networking (except for
BITNET/EARN) as well as the developing fields of Unix and workstation-based
22

networking all remained in SW Group. So did the pioneering work on electronic mail
and news under Dietrich Wiegandt, which made CERN a European leader in this
field. (From the early 1980's until about 1990 CERN acted as the Swiss backbone for
USENET news and gatewayed all Swiss e-mail between the EUnet uucp network,
BITNET, DECnet and the Internet). As these were precisely the areas in which the
Internet protocols were to emerge, this choice led to a situation in which CERN's
support for them would be marginal or ambiguous for several years to come.

It was from around 1984 that the wind began to change.

TCP/IP Introduced at CERN

In August, 1984 I wrote a proposal to the SW Group Leader, Les Robertson, for the
establishment of a pilot project to install and evaluate TCP/IP protocols on some key
non-Unix machines at CERN including the central IBM-VM mainframe and a VAX
VMS system. This was to decide if TCP/IP could indeed solve the problem of
heterogeneous connectivity between the newer open systems and the established
proprietary ones. It also proposed to evaluate Xerox's XNS protocols as a possible
alternative. The proposal was approved and the work led to acceptance of TCP/IP as
the most promising solution, together with the use of "sockets" (pioneered by the BSD
4.x Unix system) as the recommended API.

In early 1985 I was appointed the "TCP/IP Coordinator" for CERN, as part of a
formal agreement between SW Group (under Les Robertson) and DC Group (under
its new leader, Brian Carpenter). Incorporating the latter's policy line, this document
specifically restricted the scope of Internet protocols for use only within the CERN
site. Under no circumstances were any external connections to be made using TCP/IP:
here the ISO/DECnet monopoly still ruled supreme, and would do so until 1989.

Between 1985 and 1988, the coordinated introduction of TCP/IP within CERN made
excellent progress, in spite of the small number of individuals involved. This was
because the technologies concerned were basically simple and became steadily easier
to buy and install.

A major step was taken in November 1985 when the credibility of the Internet
protocols as implemented within CERN was sufficient to convince the management
of the LEP/SPS controls group that the LEP control system, crucial for the operation
of CERN's 27 km accelerator LEP then under construction, should use TCP/IP. This
decision, made by P-G. Innocenti, Jacques Altaber and Pal Anderssen, combined with
a later decision to use Unix-based systems, turned out to be essential for the success
of LEP. The TCP/IP activity in LEP/SPS included a close collaboration with IBM's
Yorktown Laboratory to support IP protocols on the IBM token ring network that had
been chosen for the LEP control system.

Other main areas of progress were: a steady improvement of the TCP/IP installations
on IBM-VM/CMS, from the first University of Wisconsin version (WISCNET) to the
fully-supported IBM version that still runs today; the rapid spread of TCP/IP on VMS
systems, using third-party software in the absence of any DEC product; the first
support of IBM PC networking, starting with MIT's free TCP/IP software and
migrating to its commercial descendant from FTP Software. This latter work, by Mike
23

Gerard and Brian Henningsen (who would later move to ISO in Geneva), led directly
to the very comprehensive support of PC and Macintosh networking that exists today
at CERN using TCP/IP, Novell and Apple protocols. All this was accompanied by a
rapid change from RS232 based terminal connections to the use of terminal servers
and virtual Ethernet ports using TCP/IP or DEC-based protocols. This permitted either
dumb terminals or workstation windows to be used for remote login sessions, and
hence to today's X-Windows. In particular, starting from 3270 emulator software
received from the University of Wisconsin and developed by myself for Apollo and
Unix systems, a full-screen remote login facility was provided to the VM/CMS
service; this software was then further developed by Mike Gerard and used as the
basis for the Terminal Access Gateway service (TAG) which became a standard way
for CERN users to access VM/CMS systems world-wide.

As late as September 1987, DD's Division Leader P. Zanella would still write
officially to a perplexed user, with a copy to the then Director of Research, J.
Thresher: "The TCP-IP networking is not a supported service." This illustrates the
ambiguity of the situation (already referred to above) as these words were written at
essentially the same time as another major step forward was made in the use of Unix
and TCP/IP at CERN: the choice to use them for the new Cray XMP machine instead
of Cray's well-established proprietary operating system COS and its associated Cray
networking protocols. Suddenly, instead of asking "What use is Unix on a
mainframe?" some users began to ask "Why not use Unix on everything?".

The Cray represented CERN's first "supercomputer" according to US military and

commercial standards and a serious security system was erected around it. As part of
this system, in 1987 I purchased the first two Cisco IP routers in Switzerland (perhaps
in Europe?), to act as IP filters between CERN's public Ethernet and a new secure IP
segment for the Cray. I had met the founder of "cisco systems", Len Bosack, at a
Usenix exhibition in the USA in June 1987 and been very impressed with his router
and this filtering feature. Cisco was a tiny company with about 20 employees at that
time, and doing business with them was very informal. It was hard to foresee the
extent to which they would come to dominate the router market, and the growth that
the market would undergo. Unfortunately I did not purchase any Cisco shares when a
little later they went public...

Birth of the European Internet

In November 1987 I received a visit from Daniel Karrenberg, the system manager of
"mcvax", a celebrated machine at the Amsterdam Mathematics Centre that acted as
the gateway for all transatlantic traffic between the US and European sides of the
world-wide "USENET", the Unix users' network that carried most of the email and
news of that time using a primitive protocol called "uucp". Daniel had hit on the idea
of converting the European side ("EUnet") into an IP network, just as major parts of
the US side of USENET were doing at that time. The news and mail would be
redirected to run over TCP/IP (using the SMTP protocol), unnoticed by the users, but
all the other Internet utilities "telnet", "ftp", etc. would become available as well, once
Internet connectivity was established. Even better, Daniel had personal contacts with
the right people at the NIC who would grant him Internet connect status when he
needed it. All he was missing was a device to allow him to run IP over some of the
EUnet lines that were using X.25 - did this exist? I reached for my Cisco catalogue
24

and showed him the model number he needed. Within a few months the key EUnet
sites in Europe were equipped with Cisco routers, with the PTT's, regulators and other
potential inhibitors none the wiser. The European IP network was born without
ceremony.

CERN Joins the Internet

In 1988, the DC Group in DD Division (later renamed CS Group in CN Division)

finally agreed to take on the support of TCP/IP, and what had been a shoestring
operation, run out of SW Group with a few friendly contacts here and there, became a
properly staffed and organized activity. John Gamble became the new TCP/IP
Coordinator, performing this task until quite recently; he had just returned from
extended leave at the University of Geneva where he had helped to set up one of the
very first campus-wide TCP/IP networks in Europe. A year later, CERN opened its
first external connections to the Internet after a "big bang" in January 1989 to change
all IP addresses to official ones. (Until then, CERN had used an illegal Class A
address, Network 100, chosen by myself).

CERN's external Internet bandwidth flourished, with a growing system of links and
routers managed by Olivier Martin and Jean-Michel Jouanigot. Concurrently with the
growth of the new European IP network (later to be incorporated as "RIPE" within the
previously ISO-dominated organization "RARE"), many other players in Europe and
elsewhere were changing their attitudes. Prominent among these was IBM, who not
only began to offer a good quality mainframe TCP/IP LAN connection product of
their own but also began to encourage migration of their proprietary BITNET/EARN
network towards IP instead of the much more restricted RSCS-based service. They
even began a subsidy programme called EASINET to pay line charges for Internet
connection of their European Supercomputer sites of which CERN was one. In this
way, the principal link (1.5 Mbit/sec) between Europe and the USA was located at
CERN and funded by IBM for several years during the important formative period of
the Internet.

By 1990 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe and this fact, as
mentioned above, positively influenced the acceptance and spread of Internet
techniques both in Europe and elsewhere. Brian Carpenter, still the leader of CS
Group, is today a member of the Internet Architecture Board and a well known
speaker at Internet gatherings. Experts like Olivier Martin and Jean-Michel Jouanigot
are world authorities on Internet traffic and routing questions. CERN also facilitates
the efforts of some staff members, including myself, who take time to teach Internet
technology in developing countries.

The Web Materializes

A key result of all these happenings was that by 1989 CERN's Internet facility was
ready to become the medium within which Tim Berners-Lee would create the World
Wide Web with a truly visionary idea. In fact an entire culture had developed at
CERN around "distributed computing", and Tim had himself contributed in the area
of Remote Procedure Call (RPC), thereby mastering several of the tools that he
needed to synthesize the Web such as software portability techniques and network and
socket programming. But there were many other details too, like how simple it had
25

become to configure a state of the art workstation for Internet use (in this case Tim's
NeXT machine which he showed me while he was setting it up in his office), and how
once on the Internet it was possible to attract collaborators to contribute effort where
that was lacking at CERN.

Footnote
The above is a short and personal record and I may have missed out some people or
events that deserve mention. I would be happy to hear from colleagues whose
memories can add to this history, which does not have to be considered as my private
property. Of course in the end I take responsibility for what appears under my name.
The key words that came to my mind while writing this history were: synergy,
serendipity and coincidence. Many of life's most propitious happenings are very
deeply "a question of timing". It is my personal belief that the Web could have
emerged considerably earlier if CERN had been connected earlier to the Internet: the
first Web proposal was written immediately after the opening of CERN's first external
connection and it is known that Tim had been working with hypertext ideas since
1980, influenced by Ted Nelson's work on Xanadu among other things. But this
remains in the realm of speculation. What is certain is that the Internet has provided a
unique opportunity for some of us at CERN to take part in a series of events which are
helping to change the world for countless people, hopefully for the better.