The Internet: On its International Origins and Collaborative Vision
A Work In-Progress

                               By Ronda Hauben

“[T]he effort at developing the Internet Protocols was international 
from the beginning.”
                                   Vinton Cerf, "How the Internet Came to Be"   

       				ABSTRACT

       The process of the Internet's development offers an important
       prototype to understand the creation of a multinational
       collaborative research project which depends on and fosters
       communication across the boundaries of diverse administrative
       structures, political entities, and technical designs.
 
       The mythology surrounding the origins of the Internet is that it
       began in 1969 in the US That is the date marking the origins
       of the ARPANET (a US packet switching network), but not the
       birth of the Internet. The origins of the Internet date from 1973.
       The goal of the researchers creating the Internet was to create a
       network of networks, a means for networks from diverse countries 
       to intercommunicate. Originally the design was to link up several
       national but diverse packet switching networks including the ARPANET
       US),Cyclades (France),and NPL (Great Britain). When that was not
       politically feasible, the research project involved Norwegian,
       British and American research groups, and researchers from other
       countries, especially France, at various junctures. These research
       groups did the early development work. The Internet was
       international from its very beginnings. 
--

Preface 

The following work in progress begins the investigation of the collaboration between researchers from the US and several European countries in the early development of the Internet. Both Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, Internet researchers who are credited with the invention of the TCP/IP protocol, have noted that the Internet was international from its very origins. Yet the common understanding of the development of the TCP/IP protocol, the protocol that made it possible to build the Internet, has been that it was an American development. This misconception prevents the development of an accurate public understanding of the origins of the Internet, and of the lessons that this early history can provide for the future. It is impossible to have achieved the development of an international network of networks, of the Internet, without the international participation and collaboration to build the prototype and the functioning implementations of the needed technology.

This hidden history involved researchers from Great Britain, France, Norway, Germany and Italy, and the US. Recently I have also learned of the knowledge and interest in computer networking of researchers in Eastern European countries including Hungary, Russia and East Germany. How the actual historical development unfolded cannot be known unless there is serious attention to this research while pioneers of these achievements are alive and can be interviewed and encouraged to provide the help they can give. In the following working draft I begin to document some of the links and events that have come to the fore. I hope this working draft will begin the discussion needed to raise some of the research questions involving the Internet’s origins that need scholarly collaborative attention especially while the Internet pioneers are still alive.

I- Introduction:  How Will the History of the Internet Be Told?

	In a review essay in the December 1998 issue of the American Historical Review, the author, Roy Rosenzweig points to how rarely most histories of the 20th century mention either computers or the Internet. Rosenzweig, however, predicts that this will soon change.  He writes:

   It is a fair guess that textbooks of the next century will devote
   considerable attention to the Internet and larger changes in
   information and communication technologies that have emerged so
   dramatically in recent years. 

Then he asks the question, "How will the history be written?" 

	Discussing several recent books about the history and development of the Internet, Rosenzweig suggests that no one single account is sufficient; that there will need to be a more adequate history written which will include aspects of all the books.

	The review raises the question of what is needed to write the history of the Internet. It also considers whether the books already written meet the challenge or if there are essentials left out that can be investigated and documented.

	Several of the books that have been written thus far focus mainly on the development of the ARPANET.(1) The ARPANET was an important predecessor to the Internet. It is the network that demonstrated to the world that large scale packet switching would be a feasible form of computer communications technology. Describing the ARPANET’s contribution to the development of the Internet, Robert Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol explains: "The ARPANET was helpful in that it demonstrated the power of networking even though for a single network and community. The kinds of things that happened there, happen in all kinds of networks and communities. It also showed the importance of protocols and introduced an example of protocol layering (e.g. FTP on top of NCP on top of the communication subnet.)"(Kahn, Email, September 15, 2002.) This new technology made possible the resource sharing of human and computer resources.(2) This background helps to understand the origins of the Internet. 

	The history of the ARPANET and of packet switching, however, is not the history of the Internet. The ARPANET was a single network that linked  heterogeneous computer systems into a resource sharing network, first within the US, and eventually it had tentacles to computer systems in other countries.(3) The ARPANET also supported the sharing of human resources and enabled people to interact.  But the computer systems had to meet certain requirements, including permission from the US government to connect to the ARPANET. The history of the ARPANET is the history of some of the foundations for the Internet. But it is not the history of the Internet. "What the ARPANET didn't address,” Kahn clarifies, “was the issue of interconnecting multiple networks and all the attendant issues that raised." (Kahn, Email, September 15, 2002)(4)

II- Purpose

	This paper is a beginning study of the origins, international in scope, of the Internet, and of the technology that made the Internet possible. This was the development of the TCP/IP protocol. The purpose of  the paper is three fold. The first is to distinguish between the ARPANET  and the Internet. In order to look at the origins and development of the Internet, it is important to recognize that the Internet is the solution to the multiple network problem, whereas the ARPANET and other packet switching networks were the solution to an earlier problem: the problem of communication among dissimilar computers and operating systems.(5)

	Second, this paper documents the international collaboration and participation to create and develop the Internet that could span national borders and interconnect the computer communications networks of different countries. This collaboration involved the US, Norway and the UK and researchers from France and then Germany and Italy, at different stages in the process. Creating an Internet was a difficult problem to solve, not only theoretically, but practically as well. To understand the nature of the Internet, it is necessary to understand the multiple network problem and how it was solved. The difficulties were not only technical. Describing some of the difficulty he encountered, a British Internet pioneer, Peter Kirstein writes, "I was certainly ordered, in 1976, to stop work on the Internet Protocol but to concentrate only on European developments. I refused, and pursued several alternate paths for at least another decade." (Kirstein, Email, October 4, 2002.)

	Third, a central aspect in the development of the Internet is the vision that inspired and provided the glue for the international collaborative research efforts. To explore the nature and origin of this vision helps to understand the research processes creating the TCP/IP protocol.

III - Packet Switching Networks

	Early research efforts to develop a way of transporting computer data 
led to the development of what is called "packet switching". Packet switching technology breaks a message into small sections of data, gives each of these addressing information called a header, which together with the data are called "packets". It then routes and delivers the packets, interspersed with other packets from other messages. After the packets reach their destination, the message is reconstructed. Paul Baran in the US and a few years later, and unaware of Baran's work, Donald Davies in the UK, developed similar concepts. In 1966 Davies implemented a packet switch connecting a set of host computers. Paal Spilling, a Norwegian Internet pioneer, refers to the resulting National Physical Laboratory (NPL) network as the first packet switching local area hub network. (Spilling, Email, August 2002)

	In the US, there was interest in exploring the feasibility of  packet switching for resource sharing computer networks. This interest led the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to recruit Larry Roberts, a researcher at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories to join the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). IPTO was planning to establish a packet switching network interconnecting a number of geographically dispersed dissimilar computers.

	Networking technology was also of interest to other researchers around the world. In the early 1970s in France, Louis Pouzin was developing a French packet switching network, building on the lessons learned from previous packet switching research. He studied the research developments in the US and Great Britain, and along with his research group, created the Cyclades/Cigale network. In the UK, the NPL network was being developed by a research group headed by Donald Davies. In the US, there was the ARPANET development.(6) The question became how could these networks be interconnected, i.e. how would communication be possible across the boundaries of these dissimilar networks. (Ronda Hauben, “The Birth of the Internet”)

      A plan at the time was to connect the ARPANET in the US, CYCLADES, in France and NPL in Great Britain. A memo written in 1973 describing early technical plans for this interconnection, included a diagram of these three networks linked by gateways. These gateways would make it possible to transmit messages across the boundaries of different constituent networks. Following is a replica of the diagram (Cerf, Memo, p. 5. See Also Graphic I):

                                                                                                                            (Host)
                                                                                                                                /
                                                                			                          /
                    (         )                                    (            )                                    (            ) 
                  (              )                               (               )                                (                  )
                (                   )                           (                   )                            (        	       )
(Host)---(CYCLADES)----(gateway)---(    ARPA     )-----(gateway)----(     NPL          )
                (                   )                           (                  )                             (                      )
                  (             )                               (                 )                                 (                  )         	                                                                
                     (        )                                   (            )                                      (              )
                                       			 \
                                                                           \
                                                                            \
                                                                         (Host)

Also there was a diagram of data going from a host computer on one  computer network  to a gateway and then to a host on another computer network.

(H)--(G)----(G)---(H)
             \     /
              \   /
              (H)

    Another description of the goal of connecting these 3 different networks, is presented at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)in Laxenburg, Austria, in 1974. In a paper for a conference there, British researcher, Donald Davies writes:

“To achieve...the interconnection of packet switching systems we have to                  decide at what level they will interwork. The levels chosen
   could be character stream, packet transport or the virtual circuit. 
   After some discussion, a group including ARPA, NPL, and CYCLADES is 
   trying out a scheme of interconnection based on a packet transport
   network with an agreed protocol for message transport....
      (Davies, “The Future of Computer Networks”, IIASA Conference 
      on Computer Communications Networks, October 21-25, 1974, p. 36)

Davies’ paper is helpful in documenting the interest in creating a metanetwork of other networks including the ARPANET, NPL and CYCLADES. Also, however, the occasion of the paper is significant. The IIASA is a research institute which supported collaboration among researchers from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries and from the US, Western Europe and Japan. The conference in 1974 at which Davies spoke was a conference where researchers from these different countries were all introduced to networking technologies and developments of the time, including the ARPANET, NPL and CYCLADES developments.

    At a workshop the following year in Laxenburg, in 1975, sponsored jointly by the IIASA and also the International Federation of Information Processing Organizations (IFIP), another British researcher, Peter Kirstein presented a paper that described the collaboration between the UK and the US in networking. The paper included a diagram of the satellite and ground connectivity between the ARPANET in the US and the University College London computers in UK. The diagram also showed the Norwegian connection to the US and UK networks. Kirstein’s paper, “The Uses of the ARPA Network via the University College London Node” was reported to have been exciting to those present and plans for a network connecting the researchers of the IIASA were developed. The list of those at this workshop included researchers from Austria, Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US. Davies and Kirstein were there from the UK, Cerf from the US, Lazzori from Italy. Kopetz from Austria, K. Fuchs-Kittowski from the Germany Democratic Republic. Also there was discussion at the workshop about what kind of network researchers the IIASA would develop to support their collaboration. 

    The IIASA conference in 1974 and the workshop in 1975 include reports on the networking research being done to create the Internet and other networks like the EIN. It is significant that at a group including researchers from both Eastern Europe, the US and Western Europe, the details of the internetworking developments were presented and discussed. Fuchs-Kittowski, a researcher from the GDR present at the 1975 workshop, remembers discussing possible participation in the UCL network in the UK by those from the German Democratic Republic. (See for example, Graphic III) There is at least one discussion in 1976 about whether or not to have an IIASA connection to the ARPANET or to the European Informatics Network (EIN).  There was also international collaboration as part of the IFIP 6.1 working group toward the development of the Internet.

     There are various streams of research that made contributions to the development of the Internet. The French research developing Cyclades/Cigale is an important example. The French contributed the concept of the datagram as a means of transporting data. Pouzin also is credited with the creation of the sliding window as a flow control mechanism.(6) There were discussions among those participating in the INWG, later called IFIP, WG 6.1, where decisions were considered about what the standards should be to create the protocol for an Internet. For example, Pouzin describes some of the meetings:

“Within INWG, which joined IFIP as WG 6.1, we had lengthy discussions about which level of protocol should be agreed first. It must have been during an INWG meeting on a boat (Stockholm-Turku and return) that a consensus developed on the principle of a common packet format. I don't have a record of this meeting in my diary, but I gather it was in August 1974, at the time of an IFIP Congress.”
						(Pouzin, Email, April 28, 2003)

Pouzin was also at the IIASA 1974 conference and describes some of the discussion there. He writes:

“Yes, this was 21-24 October 1974. We kept refining a common packet format. I had cranked up a proposal overnight during the workshop, and I remember Peter Kirstein made some objections after a call to Vint Cerf in the US. I don't know if this paper was recorded in history, perhaps as an INWG note.” 
(Pouzin, Email, April 28, 2003)

Describing the efforts that were made to link Cyclades and NPL, Pouzin explains:

“In the end, there never was an interconnection based on this plan. What occurred was a demo during an ICCC conference in Toronto, 3-5 August 1976. There was a Cyclades terminal concentrator (like a TIP) connected to Paris with a leased phone line. There, a link to NPL was using the packet network EIN (alias Cost 11), (if I remember). Then at NPL it was connected to the internal local net.

On the exhibit in Toronto, Derek Barber demonstrated using an NPL host through this patchwork. I felt it was amazing, if rather intricate.

Another more elaborate attempt was the definition of a protocol subset allowing a TCP-IP host to talk to a Cyclades host, without a gateway, simply by using a restricted set of protocol features. This work was carried out by Alex McKenzie from BBN. He wrote an INWG note. Maybe someone has a copy ! Presumably, there was not enough steam, and money, to implement the idea.”

					(Pouzin, Email, April 28, 2003)	

IV - Great Britain and the US Plan to Collaborate

      As early as the end of 1970, there was discussion between American and British research groups on how to link the US and UK networks together. One plan was to utilize the connection between the US and Norway connecting the NORwegian Seismic ARray (NORSAR) near Oslo to the US. Describing this discussion, Peter Kirstein of the University College London (UCL)(7) writes:

  "In late 1970, Larry Roberts proposed to Donald Davies that it would
  be very interesting to link their two networks together. The existence 
  of the Washington to NORSAR line would make it comparatively cheap to 
  break the connection in London and link in the NPL network. There were 
  two problems with this plan; first of all we underestimated the tariff 
  implications of adding the extra drop-off point; secondly, the timing 
  could not have been worse from a British national perspective. The 
  problem was that the British government had just applied to join the 
  European Community; this made Europe good and the US bad from a 
  governmental policy standpoint. NPL was under the Department of 
  Technology and Donald was quite unable to take up Larry's offer. He had 
  to concentrate on European initiatives like the European Informatics 
  Network (EIN). In the meantime, I had been interested in the ARPANET 
  from the beginning; it was therefore agreed early in 1971, that we would 
  attempt to set up a project link in UCL instead of NPL." (Kirstein, Email, 
  July 3, 2002)

	Through discussion between the UK and IPTO researchers, an agreement was reached for a research collaboration. Larry Roberts, according to Kirstein, "agreed to provide a Terminal Interface Message Processor (TIP) for the project, valued at 50,000 pounds, and to allow us to use the very expensive existing transatlantic link. It was merely for the UK to provide any manpower and travel costs needed to complete the project, and to provide the (assumed modest) cost of breaking the communications link in London....By the end of 1971, the technical proposal was complete." (Ibid.)

	Kirstein describes how he struggled through most of 1972 trying to get funding support from the British government without success. "These machinations," he notes, "took most of 1972, and by the end of that period, the situation looked hopeless. Neither the SRC (Science Research Council) nor the DOI (Department of Industry) would supply any finance." (Ibid.)
	Also the situation had changed with regard to the Washington to NORSAR link. "The Scandinavian Tanum Earth Station in Sweden had come on-stream," writes Kirstein, "as a result the US Norway connection no longer passed through the UK. Hence a new 9.6 kbps link between London and Kjeller was needed; the cost of this link was going to be very expensive." (Ibid.)(8)

	Fortunately, the British Post Office (BPO) and NPL, two British government organizations, came through with the promise of support. Kirstein continues(9):

  "Two senior directors of the BPO, Murray Laver of the National Data
  Processing Service, and Alec Merriman of Advanced Technology, agreed
  to provide the finance for the U.K. Norway link for one year. In
  addition, Donald Davies agreed to promise the most he could sign for
  personally, (5000 pounds). With these two modest contributions, I told
  Larry Roberts that we would proceed."(Ibid.)

      Even with this support, however, Kirstein was faced with a difficult working environment in the UK. He writes:

  "It would be nice, in retrospect, to have called it a British decision;
  it was not. There was grudging support, and the main research initiatives
  were in pursuit of the X.25 protocol suite and its upper levels. There
  was almost no European activity on the Internet Protocols outside Oslo 
  and UCL." (Kirstein, Email, October 4, 2002)

V- US and Norwegian Collaboration is Arranged

	While these negotiations between UCL and IPTO were ongoing, IPTO invited Norwegian researchers to collaborate on resource sharing network research.  After an invitation to the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration (NTA) did not generate interest, the IPTO extended an invitation to the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE, "Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt").

	NDRE welcomed the proposed collaboration. According to Yngvar Lundh, one of the Internet pioneers in Norway, NDRE's interest in basic computing and networking research was the reason for the Norwegian collaboration with IPTO.(10)

	On September 18, 1972, Larry Roberts and Robert (Bob) Kahn visited Norway, meeting with Lundh, then a research engineer at NDRE, Finn Lied, the director of NDRE, and Karl Holberg, the research superintendent of the NDRE electronics department. (Lundh, Email, April 24, 2002) Lundh had met Roberts several years earlier during Lundh's sabbatical in 1958-9 as a visiting researcher. He was at MIT’s Electronics
Systems Lab when Roberts was a graduate student finishing up his PhD. They were both using the TX-0.(11)

       Lundh recalls that the meeting with the visitors from IPTO was held in Oslo at a civilian research administrative office at the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Also at the meeting were representatives from other Norwegian organizations. (Lundh, Email, April 26, 2002.) In a history in Norwegian of the role of Norway in early Internet development, Gisle Hannemyr writes that Lundh saw the collaboration with IPTO as "an opportunity to further advance data communication research in Norway."(Hannemyr)

	Roberts and Kahn invited NDRE to collaborate and recommended they send researchers to the first International Computer Communications Conference (ICCC'72) planned for October 1972 in Washington, DC. There was to be a demonstration of the resource sharing packet switching network that was being developed in the US. Describing the importance of this event, Donald Davies writes:

  “The meeting at the Washington Hilton in 1972 was quite the most
  important and influential conference I have ever attended....I arrived 
  at the Hilton Hotel early to see what was happening and met an extraordinary 
  scene. On a podium was 'Terminal IMP' or TIP...joined to the existing ARPA network,   
  surrounded by many terminal devices of all kinds.

  The astounding thing was a crowd of young, enthusiastic researchers who 
  were rushing around or huddled in earnest discussions trying to get 
  everything to work. Listening to their conversation we heard all that
  we had been trying to promote for the previous 5 years being talked 
  about as self-evident -- a new and strange experience. Most of all,
  one had the impression of a great amount of intellectual effort now 
  being applied to computer networking, which must grow in importance.
  It was a complete turn-around, seemingly in one day, though in fact it 
  was the enormous efforts of the ARPA team that achieved this demonstration
  and caused the revolutionary change in thinking about networks.

  It completely changed attitudes to computer communications. Yet, many 
  of the ideas it fostered had been talked about for five years or more. 
  What happened in Washington was that people could now see these ideas 
  in the form of practical achievements. They could get a glimpse of the 
  intellectual impact that networks were destined to produce.”
       Donald W. Davies, "Early Thoughts on Computer Communications"

         Lundh writes that he attended the ICCC conference on October 25 and 26, 1972. While at the demonstration, he was invited to attend a meeting with other networking researchers from around the world held after the ICCC'72 at the Comsat Corporation (at L'Enfant Plaza). He writes that this meeting "may well have been the first Internet meeting."(Lundh, Email April 26, 2002) This was also the meeting where the International Network Working Group(INWG) was created. Lundh reports that at the meeting at Comsat, "The discussion(s) were in rather general terms as I recall, and mainly clarifying reasons for establishing a net of nets where each individual net would use the best low level protocol for utilizing the respective transmission. He estimates that there were 10-15 people there that day. Certainly Bob Kahn and most likely Dick Binder from BBN." (Lundh, Email, June 24, 2002) Kirstein notes that he was there. Cerf adds that he was there, along with Steve Crocker from ARPA, Louis Pouzin, Gesualdo Lemoli, Roger Scantlebury and perhaps Donald Davies. Also Kirstein presented a paper at the ICCC'72 conference.(12)

	Although the research proposed by IPTO was new to him, Lundh found "the ideas interesting and accepted the invitation to participate in the development." (Lundh, Email, April 9, 2002) To actively participate in the research, he built "a small group of researchers which became one of ten groups which took part in basic Internet research during a ten year period from 1972." (Lundh, Email, April 9, 2002) He was frustrated, however, trying to muster resources and was hoping for some assistance from ARPA. But he also realized that it was difficult for IPTO to help fund the Norwegian researchers. (Lundh, Email, July 12, 2002)

	Lundh reports, "I had no financial support in the beginning, but I formalized a small 'job' called 'Radio Data Systems-RADA' at NDRE with the purpose (of) fitting in with ARPA's resource sharing (research)." In the beginning of the collaboration, Lundh had to support the travel and the research he did in his spare time with
other projects he was working on. For the first few years, he recalls, he had help from two graduate students whose thesis work he was supervising. 

        The ARPANET TIP was not put at NDRE which was in a military area with restricted, and thus, limited access. Instead it was placed in NORSAR's building which was on the other side of the fence from NDRE. Lundh explains that "seismic array technology or test detection was not NDRE's reason for placing the NDRE TIP at NORSAR.(13) It was a practical arrangement for us, and probably a convenient arrangement for ARPA too." (Lundh, Email, April 18, 2002) The TIP at NORSAR was thus at a civilian facility, providing access for more widespread Norwegian participation 
in networking research and facilitating academic collaboration in networking.(Lundh, Email, April 18, 2002)

	A problem the Norwegian group faced, according to Lundh, was that it was difficult to build a research team given the lack of funding. "It was hard to convince Norwegian financing sources of the importance of computer networking," Lundh writes.(Lundh, 18) He was excited by the concept of resource sharing. "My reasons for wanting to participate," he explains, "were that I intuitively thought the 
possibilities of resource sharing were fantastic." Lundh elaborates, "I saw 'resource sharing' as (providing-ed) interesting possibilities in several 'dimensions', resources being expensive programs, special data, ideas, people with various interests and capabilities, etc." (Lundh, Email, July 12, 2002) Despite these funding difficulties, the Norwegian research group made an important contribution to the development of TCP/IP and the Internet.

VI - How to Communicate Across Network Boundaries?

	Shortly after the successful ICCC'72 conference, Bob Kahn left his job at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) and went to work at IPTO. Joining IPTO as a program manager, Kahn initiated certain projects and also took over responsibility for one that had already been funded. A new initiative was to create a ground based packet radio network. An existing initiative was to create a satellite-based packet switching network. (Ronda Hauben, "The Birth of the Internet", 7)

	The ground packet radio network would be of particular interest to the US Department of Defense(DOD), as it would make packet switching computer networks possible in otherwise difficult to reach areas or conditions. Kahn's objective was to create a multinode ground packet radio network (PRNET) where each node could be mobile. In parallel, he sought to create a packet satellite network (SATNET) utilizing INTELSAT satellites.(14) The goal of the packet satellite network research was to make resource sharing computer communications networking possible with different European sites. Two of the networks (PRNET and SATNET) would use radio transmission and the third network which already existed (ARPANET) used shared point to point leased lines from the telephone company. Though Kahn originally considered the possibility of seeking changes to each of the constituent networks to solve the multiple network problem, he soon recognized the advantage of an architecture that would directly accommodate a diversity of networks. While existing networks like the ARPANET would require that another network become a component of it, there was a need for an architectural conception that would allow the communicating networks to function as peers of each other, rather than requiring that any one become a component of another. There was a need to design an architecture that would be open to all networks, an architecture that Kahn called "open architecture".(15)

VII - Designing Protocols and Specifications for an Internet

	Once at IPTO, Kahn invited Vinton (Vint) Cerf to collaborate with him.  Kahn wanted to design an open architecture protocol and needed Cerf's knowledge of computer operating systems to do it. Other researchers were also interested. For example, at an INWG meeting in June, 1973, in New York City, Kahn and Cerf were joined by E Aupperle, R Metcalfe, R Scantlebury, D Walden and H Zimmerman. Scantlebury was from the UK and Zimmerman, from France. Others listed were members of the US network research community. The document also credits G Grossman and G LeLann for contributing after the meeting. LeLann is French. (INWG note #39 NIC # 18764, dated 9-13-73). Cerf explains that LeLann worked with Louis Pouzin at IRIA (now INRIA) and “spent 6 months
working with me and others on the design of the Internet's TCP protocol."
(Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003) Pouzin also remembers a June 1973 INWG meeting, noting that it was quite hot in NYC. (Pouzin, Email, April 28, 2003)

	The INWG note #39 is a draft paper that Kahn and Cerf prepared for presentation at the September 16, 1973 INWG meeting in Brighton, England. A revised draft of the paper was published in May, 1974, titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" in the IEEE Transactions on Communications. The paper describes the philosophy and design for the TCP/IP protocol, though the original paper called the protocol TCP, as the IP function was originally embedded in TCP.(16)

	After designing a protocol, there is a need to write specifications to implement the design.(16a) Cerf refers to the development of two versions of the specifications for TCP developed at Stanford University, one in December 1974 and a second in March 1977. Subsequently two further specifications were developed with other groups.(Cerf) Among the names of those working on the initial specifications for TCP, Cerf lists US researchers or graduate students including Y Dalal, C Sunshine, R Karp, J Estrin, and J Mathis, at Stanford, R Tomlinson and W Plummer, at BBN, R Metcalfe, D Boggs, and John Schoch, at Xerox PARC. He also lists several researchers from the UK, from UCL, F. Deignan, C J Bennett, A J Hinchley and M Gallard. Cerf also thanks G LeLann from the University of Rennes, France. Cerf writes that Dag Belsnes, from the University of Oslo, Norway provided "additional philosophical leavening which influenced the design of the protocol."(Cerf, The Final Report, IEN 151, 2)

     When asked what he thought the term "philosophical leavening referred to," Belsnes responded, "I also wonder what 'philosophical leavening' is referring to. Perhaps that I always like to discuss and establish some understanding of problems."(17)

     In 1973, Belsnes received a one year grant from the Norwegian Research Council. After meeting Vint Cerf at a conference in England in 1973, Belsnes contacted Cerf and was accepted to be part of the research effort at the Digital System Laboratory at Stanford University. "I got the opportunity," Belsnes writes, "to participate in his Protocol Design Group that worked on creating a specification for the Internet Transmission Control Program." Belsnes explains that among his main interests were "protocol correctness and flow congestion control." (Belsnes, Email, June 17,2002)

	Creating a design and then specifications for the development of a protocol for an Internet is a significant step. It is, however, part of a larger research process. Elaborating on the value of the experimental work, Paal Spilling, another of the Norwegian Internet pioneers, writes:

  "A group at Stanford University (SU) specified in detail a control
  program ... the Transmission Control Program (TCP) allowing computers
  in different inter-connected networks to communicate....  Although the
  TCP was specified in detail, it had to be considered as a first
  approach towards making a reliable process-to-process communication
  tool in an internetwork environment.  Experience showed that this was
  the case....  The results obtained, helped in the debugging of this 
  first version of the TCP, and uncovered some deficiencies in its design. 
  Some of these could be taken care of rather easily, while others were 
  subjects for further investigations."(Spilling, Proposal to Nato)

	Kahn had recognized the need to include at least three different kinds of packet switching networks to test if the protocol created for intercommunication among dissimilar networks would be adequate. If a prototype has only two different entities, it is difficult to tell what is particular about each and what is general about the two. With three or more dissimilar networks as part of a prototype, it is possible to identify what is general to them all despite the dissimilar nature of each.

	In June 1973, a TIP was installed at Kjeller, Norway for the NDRE researchers. By the end of July 1973, the UCL TIP in the UK was also passing packets between the US and UK. These packets went from the US via satellite to the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden, via land and underwater lines to NORSAR in Kjeller, Norway, and then to London in the UK. Kirstein and Kenny provide a diagram of the relation between the 
UK TIP, the Norwegian TIP and the US ARPANET.(18) 

	Kirstein writes that one of the significant activities in the early work to develop the Internet was "an early protocol experiment in late 1974 between a junior assistant professor at Stanford (Vint Cerf) and a visiting scholar from Norway at UCL (Paal Spilling) of the Proposed Transmission Control Protocol." Spilling visiting UCL from NDRE, worked with Kirstein's research group. Judy Estrin was a graduate student working with Vint Cerf at Stanford. Estrin and Spilling "did what was probably the first TCP tests with each other.  They were independent implementations," Kirstein explains. (Kirstein, Email, May 20, 2002.) Describing this research, Spilling elaborates, "As I remember the fellows at the Stanford side may have been Judy Estrin and Jim Mathis. At the UCL side were Frank Deignan, Andrew Hinchley and me. Frank was the implementer. It was extremely exciting to observe packets coming from Stanford and after an initial debugging being accepted and processed by Frank's implementation of TCP. One critical problem I can remember was that the TCP checksum was applied slightly differently at Stanford and at UCL." (Spilling, Email, August 1, 2002) 
        Kirstein describes how the British government became more supportive of his research by 1975. He writes:

        "The British authorities became increasingly positive from 1975. I had 
  set up a management committee to oversee the use of the Arpanet link. 
  This included representatives from the British Post Office, the Ministry 
  of Defence, the Science Research Council and the Department of Industry. 
  They had to approve all requests for usage. From 1976, there was increasing 
  pressure for using the emerging X.25 infrastructure (International Packet 
  Switched Service - IPSS) as an alternative to SATNET. First this involved a 
  commercial 9.6 Kbps line from about 1978 between UCL and BBN; here it was 
  necessary to arrange the link so that no commercial charges would arise to 
  BBN and DARPA. Later, I think it was around 1980, a 64 Kbps IPSS link was 
  provided also free of charge by the British Post Office. This link existed 
  until around 1984, and allowed much fuller research into multiple routes 
  with different capacity, charging and access control considerations. The 
  IPSS link was always using IP; for this reason the multiple use of the 
  commercial use and SATNET was an important landmark into the use of 
  interconnected networks. It was their existence which allowed UCL to adopt 
  a phased approach to the adoption of the Internet Protocol.  We first proved 
  it on the IPSS link without affecting NCP traffic on SATNET; this needed 
  NCP-TCP relays at UCL and BBN. We could then move it onto SATNET, without 
  impacting too drastically our service traffic -- which could use the IPSS 
  route in an emergency. Finally, when the ARPANET had moved to Internet 
  Protocols, we could abandon our relays in BBN and also leave SATNET; all 
  the traffic could use IP/X.25 over IPSS. It is the phased nature of this 
  transition which explains why UCL finally left SATNET (see below) after the 
  Norwegians -- though they used IP for service traffic much earlier.

  By the time we got to around 1983, complete alternate mail nets, like
  UUCP and Bitnet started coming into being. The various gateways these
  provided gave a much richer topology. When the DNS was added, its
  impact on the international infrastructure was not realised at first.
  When we introduced blocking on some of our IPSS routes, we suddenly
  realised the magnitude of international traffic that was passing
  over the UK-US routes originating from these other networks. It was
  then that the work on peering and service agreements took on a new
  urgency for these data networks." (Kirstein, Email, October 8, 2002)

VIII - Early Norwegian Internet Research Challenges

	During its earliest stage, Lundh's research group consisted of his 2 graduate students and himself. By 1974 he was able to get Paal Spilling assigned to his group, Spilling had a PhD in nuclear physics and was interested in the networking project.  Subsequently other qualified engineers were assigned by NDRE to the research group. Lundh describes the change Spilling's participation made in the NDRE research group. He writes (Lundh, Email, June 12, 2002)(19):

  "Paal Spilling came to my group in 1994....I recruited him from
   one of my colleague's group(s) at NDRE where he had become superfluous.
   At that time I had good contact with people in PSP and INWG. I 
   participated in their meetings and knew Peter Kirstein. They were all
   delighted that I finally got someone beside me. And - as I recall -
   Peter offered to have him at UCL for a couple of months to give a 
   flying start, which was very good and useful indeed. Paal soon
   got the whole networking business 'under his skin' and after that
   participated together with me in all the meetings. He soon became
   the main contributor to the networking effort at NDRE, for some time
   being the only one who spent full time in it."

	Lundh emphasizes that the continual invitation to the Norwegian
Telecommunications Administration Research Establishment (NTA-RE) to participate in the research led to "the free loan for experimental purposes of a spare channel in the INTELSAT IV satellite and a spare line between NDRE and the existing Scandinavian Satellite Earth Station at Tanum, Sweden. This permission was obtained in 1975 permitting the SIMP - Satellite IMP - to be installed at the Tanum Station in mid 1975. From then on SATNET had three ground stations permitting experiments involving contentious traffic situations. Mario Gerla in Leonard Kleinrock's group at UCLA was very active in the SATNET studies which eventually resulted in the CPODA-protocol for Contention Priority Oriented Demand Access."(Lundh) According to Lundh, other researchers in Norway were not eager to use the NORSAR TIP during the 1970s. But interest was expressed by the staff at NORSAR in utilizing the ARPANET as an alternative to the channel they had for exchanging seismic data with the US. Lundh notes that "Commercial traffic was prohibited in the Arpanet from the outset and that was still the rule as the network changed into the Internet. The network was an experimental facility supported for research purposes."(Lundh, 18)(20)

IX - Creating an Internet

	The protocol suite that makes the Internet possible is known as the TCP/IP protocol suite (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Lundh explains the extensive effort needed to transform the design into functioning protocol specifications. He describes the years of experiments, analysis of the results, and the design of new experiments to test the theory developed from the experimental
process. Failures or surprises from the actual experience of the researchers helped them to make the needed changes in the implementation efforts. Lundh writes:

  "Those protocols resulted from an extremely thorough analysis and design. 
  'No stone was left unturned' during the development which took several 
  years. Theoretical analyses were complemented by experiments. Combinations 
  of traffic types and requirements, network topologies and application types 
  were imagined, tried, failed, changed and tried again. The 'final' TCP and 
  IP were not easily postulated and approved. Nobody can ever reproduce in a
  laboratory the chaotic traffic pattern of a lively telecom or computing 
  network and even less the diverse demands of information exchange. The 
  growing active dynamic traffic situation in the ARPANET prevailed during 
  onwards development of its own underlying technology. That may be one reason 
  for the robustness, elegance and survivability of the result." (Lundh, 12)

Lundh emphasizes the importance of a functional network with actual users and traffic as a laboratory for the researchers. He describes how theory grew out of experimental research and then was used to guide the experimental process. In this way, the theory was verified or modified.

	Recalling his experience, Lundh writes, "During a period of intensively active development, methods were conceived and perfected until functioning well in an environment which was closer to reality than anyone might have dreamt up in a 'sterile' laboratory." This experimental process was closely intertwined with theoretical development. He adds:

 "At the same time a profound theoretical understanding was developed.
  It kept its scrutiny on experimental results and was both guiding and
  following up the work in an admirable teamwork."(Lundh, 12)

Describing the political conditions that had to be accommodated to create a protocol that would function for the international community, Spilling explains the rationale of the TCP design:

  "In order to allow Host computers, connected to different networks to
  communicate, these networks have to be interconnected. This is not a
  trivial matter, since different networks, in general, are supported by
  organizations with different requirements and therefore will develop
  differently. Any changes in existing networks in order to interconnect
  these, will be costly and impeded by political factors. The obvious
  approach therefore, would be to leave the local nets undisturbed and
  to perform the interconnections outside them. This is one of the main 
  ideas behind the TCP." (Spilling, Proposal to Nato, 5)

The protocol requirements were such that the networks participating in the Internet would not be limited in their internal development or activities.(21) The use of gateway computers helped in this process. Gateway computers would reformat the packets of data from the form needed by one network into the form to meet the requirements of the next network on their journey to their final destination. The gateway software would also determine the best next path for the packets of data to take to get to their destination.

	Spilling explains that when Host 1 (on Net 1) wants to exchange data with Host 2 (on Net 2), it forms the data into Internet packets according to the TCP format and encloses them in the format required by Net 1. This action, he says, is called "wrapping."(Spilling, Proposal to Nato, 6) Spilling attributes the term "wrapping" to an article by Louis Pouzin and H. Zimmerman. Internet packets are then transported to the gateway where they are unwrapped from the Net 1 format and rewrapped in the format for Net 2 for transmission to Host 2 (on Net 2).

X - 1970s Networking Collaboration to Develop Internet Technology

        Critical to the scientific process of the development of the TCP protocol was the international collaboration of researchers working together on its development. Describing the role of this collaboration, Lundh writes:

  "(T)he network technology was further refined and developed in an 
  intimate co-operation of ten research groups during the 1970s. That 
  co-operation resulted in the technology underlying today's Internet."
  (Lundh, 10) 

The results were documented as standards and made openly available to anyone around the world, particularly to academic researchers. The period from 1973 to 1980 was a significant period in the research to develop the Internet.  For Lundh, the Internet is the networking of interconnected nets. "From the initial ARPANET," he writes, "the technology was developed into a basically new computer cooperating technology -- Internetworking technology. Its main constituents were defined as proposed standards around 1980."(Lundh, 10) Further important technical refinements and geographical expansion occurred in the 1980s.

        This development was done on a non-commercial research basis. The earliest ARPANET development was done on the basis of leased telephone lines. The research in the mid to late 1970s and into the 1980s, however, included research on Ethernet, packet radio and packet satellite forms of communication.  Lundh points out that not only was the ARPANET a laboratory, it was at the same time "an active telecom network, a resource sharing network and a forum of creative and critical people."(Lundh, 12)(22)

	Lundh cites an experiment where three people were located in different geographical locations, Boston, MA in the US, London, England, and Kjeller, Norway. They held a demonstration conference using speech, which was observed by other researchers in a meeting at another ARPANET-TIP international site, at University College London (UCL). Lundh writes: 

  "Each of the three sites ... communicated through local area nets
  interconnected through gateways via Arpanet and SATNET. The packet
  traffic in that Internet situation (new then!) was a combination of
  that speech traffic together with 'natural' traffic in the Arpanet at
  the time."(Lundh, 13)

	Lundh calls this experiment in 1978, "one of the several major milestones during development of Internet technology." He also emphasizes that not only did the Internet research result in important and robust standards, but it also influenced and actually pioneered a new methodology for developing telecommunication standards.(Lundh, 13)

	According to Lundh, ten groups collaborated on developing the TCP/IP protocols. The whole team, he explains, referred to itself as the "Packet Switching Protocols Working Group - PSPWG." Eight of the groups were in the USA, one in England and a small group in Norway. "The development comprised investigation of a variety of suggested methods. They were thoroughly studied theoretically and experimentally." 
(Lundh, 13)(23) Kirstein adds that in phases of the SATNET research, there were researchers from Germany and Italy involved and there were also meetings at their sites. (24)

        Communication via email helped the research, along with in person meetings held every three months that some people from each group attended. Lundh credits DARPA/IPTO with providing the leadership and much of the funding for the work. The research, he emphasizes, "had the main purpose to study and develop resource-sharing networks." (Lundh, 14)

         The resources to be shared were the 'power' of the computers, programs and data of various types. The human users were also seen as a significant resource. "Further, and not least," writes Lundh, "it was important to create an environment where human resources could co-operate and strengthen creativity and knowledge." (Lundh, 14)

	Lundh lists ten of the research groups that collaborated on Internet research in the 1970s. (Lundh, 16)

  1. ARPA in Washington, DC, USA
     Advanced Research Projects Agency - Information Processing
     Techniques Office

  2. BBN in Cambridge, MA, USA
     Bolt Beranek and Newman

  3. SRI in Menlo Park, CA, USA 
     Stanford Research International 

  4. UCLA in Los Angeles, CA, USA 
     University of California

  5. ISI in Marina del Rey, CA, USA 
     Information Sciences Institute 

  6. Linkabit in San Diego, CA, USA 
     Linkabit Corporation 

  7. Comsat in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA 
     Comsat Corporation 

  8. MIT in Cambridge, MA, USA 
     Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

  9. UCL in London, England 
     University College London

 10. NDRE in Kjeller, Norway 
     Norwegian Defence Research Establishment 

       "The tone," Lundh writes, "was open and could be heated although always friendly. A certain amount of social occasions usually took place and stimulated the smooth co-operative spirit. ... The assembled group," he explains, "constituted a strong and inspiring research team." (Lundh, 17) When not assembled, "from day to day the researchers exchanged e-mail. It comprised of discussions, experimental results, comments and programs." (Lundh, 17) From 1977, the usual 2 day PSPWG was "supplemented," reports Lundh, by a third day "Internet meeting dedicated to techniques for internet-working of different nets." (Lundh, 17) Also see Appendix.

	Following is a list Lundh provides of some of the rotation of meetings. These were meetings between August 1974 and February 1978. (Lundh, 17):

  10-11 Aug 74  On the ferry between Stockholm, Sweden and Abo, Finland

  4-5 Sep 75    Linkabit Co, San Diego, California 
  		      Host: Irwin Jacobs

  12-13 Nov 75  UCL, London, England
	  	      Host: Peter Kirstein

  12-14 Feb 76	DCA and ARPA, Washington, DC.
		      Host: Bob Kahn

  29-30 Apr 76	BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts
		      Host: David Walden

  29-30 Jun 76	NDRE, Kjeller, Norway
		      Host: Yngvar Lundh

  23-24 Sep 76	UCLA, Los Angeles, California
		      Host: Leonard Kleinrock

  9-10 Dec 76	UCL, London, England
		      Host: Peter Kirstein

  10-11 Mar 77	Comsat, Washington, DC
		      Host: Estil Hoversten

  8-10 Jun 77	NDRE, Kjeller, Norway
		      Host: Yngvar Lundh

  17-19 Aug 77	Linkabit, San Diego, California
		      Host: Irwin Jacobs
 
  31 Oct-2 Nov 77 BBN, Cambridge, MA
		      Host: Bob Bressler

  1-3 Feb 78	UCLA, Los Angeles, California
		      Host: Wesley Chu

Dave Mills, who worked at COMSAT, as chief architect for the Internet 
from 1977–1982, adds that there were several meetings after the ones Lundh lists, at least until January 1, 1983 when ARPANET computers were officially to change to the TCP/IP protocol. The actual Internet coming out party, Mills writes was at the NCC in 1979. (Mills, Email, April 28, 2003)

	The original vision of resource sharing networking was an important source of inspiration for Internet development. Included in this resource sharing were technical resources, and even more significantly, the sharing of human resources, ideas and suggestions.(Lundh, 10) 

XI - The Vision

	Spilling credits JCR Licklider with the vision that inspired the Internet developments. Spilling writes:

  "Dr. Licklider, educated both in electrical engineering and
  psychology, had the vision of 'an on-line community of people,' where
  the computers should help people to communicate and provide support
  for the human decision processes...."(Spilling, The Internet)(25)

	The vision Licklider proposed was of an "intergalactic network". This was to be a human computer communications networking utility which would function like other utilities in that everyone would have access to it. However, this was to be global and to make it possible for governments, scientists and people around the world to communicate in a way that was unprecedented.  Licklider's vision was of an on-line community of people. Computers would help humans to communicate with each other. 
This vision inspired the early development of the Internet.(26) It is articulated in diverse forms through this formative period of the Internet's development. For example, an editorial in the ARPANET News in February, 1974 explains:

  "Inherent in the concept of a resource sharing computer network is
  the idea of a cooperative, collaborative working mode. This calls
  for a very special 'place for people's heads' -- a special ability 
  to be cognizant of and concerned for the welfare of the whole. This
  long-term objective and viewpoint requires a personal feeling of
  responsibility for the welfare of the network instead of the
  short-sightedness of acquisitive self-interest....  With the backing
  of ARPA-IPT in this endeavor...  the ARPANET shows every promise of
  becoming the global tool for enhanced communication and
  understanding between nations and their scientists and people that
  was envisioned for it in its beginning."(27)

	The ARPANET News editorial proposes that the ARPANET can be an international network. The researchers developing this worldwide networking system, though, recognized the need for something different from a centralized single network like the ARPANET. Networks like Cyclades in France, NPL in Great Britain, and the ARPANET in the US were under the control of different national governments and were developing in different technical ways suited to the needs of the political and administrative entities they belonged to.  This was the problem posed for networking researchers of the early 1970s. An international collaboration made it possible to solve the problem of interconnecting dissimilar packet switching networks to make communication possible across their boundaries. Lundh also credits Engelbart with contributing to the vision of resource sharing.

	While Licklider formulated the vision which inspired networking research, Lundh points to Kahn's role in providing an overall direction toward realizing this vision. Lundh writes that "more than anybody else Kahn was the person who formulated goals and guided development of the Internet technology during the most active development period." (Lundh, 16)

        Kirstein concurs. He writes: "Others had much to do with protocol design and implementation detail, Kahn had the overall research goals and direction. He was personally responsible for formulating the programme, and for ensuring that they followed the right lines. Moreover, when other activities, like those of the PTTs
at the time, threatened some of the directions of the programme, it was Kahn who formulated activities that kept the programme on the right lines without alienating the PTTs too much. Thus when the British Post Office insisted on the use of IPSS (see earlier), Kahn asked BBN to organise things with relays at BBN in a way that would allow those channels to be used on the US side -- even though this had no real interest to him in true Internet research."(Kirstein, Email, October 8, 2002)

	Kahn had worked on the BBN proposal to design the ARPANET. He was part of the BBN team to create the IMP subnetwork. He was the author of the original 1822 protocol specification for the interface between the IMPs and Hosts for the ARPANET. He also provided important leadership for the development of the Internet. In an article published in November, 1972, Kahn presents both human and computer interaction in information processing as a property of resource sharing networks. He writes:

   "A principal motive underlying computer network development is to
   provide a convenient and economic method for a wide variety of
   resources to be shared. Such a network provides more than an
   increased collection of hardware and software resources; it
   affords the capability for computers as well as individuals to
   interact in the exchange and processing of information."
   (Kahn, “Resource Sharing”, 116)

	Kahn describes how such networks encourage participation among users.  This is a cooperative process that generates high levels of technical achievement. He writes:

   "Computer networks provide a unique mechanism for increased
   participation between individuals. Participation in research and
   development using the distributed resources of a computer network
   can lead to close cooperation between individuals who might
   otherwise have little incentive to work together. This
   interaction can further cross-fertilize the network community and
   encourage even higher levels of achievement through technical
   cooperation." (Kahn, “Resource Sharing”, 117)

	In 1972, before the design of the TCP/IP protocol, Kahn proposed that "a communication system not preclude the possibility that separate... data networks may be accessed through it if all resources are to be mutually accessible." (Kahn, “Resource Sharing”, 120)(28)

	The problem Kahn identified in his article on resource sharing networks is the need for a means to link the networks of different countries.(29)

	Intimately tied to the problem of communicating across the boundaries of dissimilar packet switching networks, was the need to support a collaborative process to create a working protocol for an Internet.  The requirements for this protocol were that it be as minimal as possible, asking only of the differing networks, what was necessary for internetworking communication. Also it was desirable to have the internetworking process implemented outside of the individual networks whenever possible (via gateways, which were later called routers). Then the networks, themselves, would require the least change, if there were to be a change in the protocol.

	The TCP/IP protocol suite requires the agreement of the participating networks to certain gateway and operating system specifications in the host computers. Substantial collaborative scientific research and experimentation were required to develop the design and work out the implementation problems. Utilizing the SATNET research, IPTO and their research community, in collaboration with research groups in Norway and the UK, developed and then spread a robust and functional protocol design and implementation. Subsequently, German and Italian researchers joined the cooperative efforts. Meanwhile other researchers, particularly French researchers contributed in important ways.  This created the basis for a global Internet.(30)

	In his book The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig advocates preserving the Internet's unique architecture and culture.(31) He proposes that it is the end-to-end principle of networking architecture and shared code that are critical aspects of the Internet. The end-to-end principle requires that the network not be changed to accommodate the uses of individual entities.  Instead such uses are to be implemented at the ends of the Internet. This is an important principle for the development of resource sharing in packet switching networks. This is not, however, sufficient to make an Internet a reality. Neither is the sharing of programming code, though this, too, is desirable for Internet development and a desirable networking goal. The critical aspect of the Internet's development is the ability to develop an architecture that asks as little as possible of the collaborating networks and that treats each network as a peer of the other, rather than subordinating any network to any other. This architecture, called by Kahn "open architecture", is the critical principle of the Internet.(32)

	This architecture means that each network wanting to interconnect and to communicate does not have to ask any other network for permission to join. This is one characteristic that leads Lessig and others to call the Internet a "commons". Also Internet standards are freely available to all interested. Therefore, any network can implement the TCP/IP protocol suite as part of a host operating system and connect with a gateway to other networks. This "open architecture" of the Internet facilitates its ability to spread around the globe. Networks do not have to change their nature or ownership to become part of the global Internet. The Internet welcomes the technical and political diversity and provides for communication accommodating this diversity.(33) Communication among those with differences is a generative process. It is in the interaction of diverse ideas that new ideas emerge. (Michael Hauben, “The Net and the Netizen”, in Hauben and Hauben, Netizens)(34)

XII - Conclusion

	The earliest development of the Internet and its protocol suite TCP/IP solved the problem of sharing resources across the boundaries of differing networks and peoples. This development took place during the 1970s. It demonstrates the generative capacity of a collaborative environment where the researchers from different nations are able to work together to create an ever evolving and developing Internet. This is one of the most significant developments of the 20th century. Will it be studied and continued? Lessig and others raise the possibility that it may all be lost. A precious heritage has been contributed by visionaries like Licklider and Engelbart, and research pioneers like Kahn and Cerf, Davies and Kirstein, Lundh and Spilling, and Pouzin and Zimmerman. Many netizens have participated to create this important advance for modern society.(35) Its loss would be a great setback to our modern world. A collaborative and resource sharing environment, similar to the one that nourished the Internet's earliest development, continues to be needed, if we are to generate the means for the Internet's ongoing evolution.

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Footnotes

(1) There are several books that document aspects of Internet history, and others that document related developments that set the foundation for the Internet. These include Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, 1999; Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, N.Y, 1996; Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben,
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Los Alamitos, 1997, John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, N.Y., 1999, Arthur Norberg and Judy O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology, Baltimore, MD, 1996; Howard Reingold, Tools for Thought, 1985 and reprinted 2000; Peter Salus, Casting the Net, Reading, MA, 1995; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, New York, 2001.

Vint Cerf observes that a lot has been left out of the current histories, and "that a lot of mistakes are made - the popular 'histories' being the worst. Even when principals write, we forget details or get them wrong." And that one of his biggest complaints is that many books focus mainly on the development of the ARPANET. (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

An example of such confusion, mistaking the development of the ARPANET for the development of the Internet, is in The Internet Galaxy, where Manuel Castells writes:

"The origins of the Internet are to be found in ARPANET....The openness of the ARPANET's architecture allowed the future Internet to survive its most daunting challenge....ARPANET's protocols were based on the diversity of networks." (pg 10, 26) (Oxford University Press, 2001)

(2) See Michael Hauben, "Social Forces Behind the Development of Usenet" in Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. 
Draft version online at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook. 
 
Also see Robert Kahn, "The Introduction of Packet Satellite Communication", PROC NTC, November 1979.

To make communication possible among differ entities, there is a need to have some common conventions or agreements. In computer networking technology these are called protocols. Describing the nature of communication in computer networking, Cerf and Kirstein write:

   A fundamental aspect of interprocess communication is that 
   no communication can take place without some agreed upon 
   conventions. The communicating processes must share some physical
   transmission medium (wire, shared memory, radio spectrum, etc.)
   and they must use common conventions or agreed upon translation
   methods in order to successfully exchange and interpret the data
   they wish to communicate. One of the key elements in any network
   intercommunication strategy is therefore how the required 
   commonality is to be obtained. In some cases, it is enough to 
   translate one protocol into another. In others, protocols can be
   held in common among the communicating parties.
                            Vinton Cerf and Peter Kirstein "Issues 
                            in Packet Network Interconnection"
  
Kahn describes the importance of recognizing the potential for resource sharing in computer networking development:
 
   Computer networks provide a unique mechanism for increased 
   participation between individuals. Participation in research and 
   development using the distributed resources of a computer network 
   can lead to close cooperation between individuals who might  
   otherwise have little incentive to work together. This interaction
   can further cross-fertilize the network community and encourage
   even higher levels of achievement through technical cooperation.

                            Robert Kahn, “Resource Sharing Computer
                            Communications Networks”

(3) "The ARPA computer communication network, ARPANET ... has been in operation since 1970. The main part of it operates within the US, but it has two tentacles, one to Hawaii and one to Norway and England."  (Spilling, Research Proposal to Nato, 1)

First Norway was connected to the ARPANET, and then Great Britain. Later even several Eastern European countries were involved with networking and knew of the ARPANET. (See IIASA Networking Proceedings, Laxenburg, Austria, 1975)

(4) Kirstein, commenting on the importance of the development of TCP/IP as the means to make an Internet possible writes:

  "Kahn is largely right, in that the Arpanet community in the US
  did not address these problems. The Europeans connected to the 
  Arpanet did. As early as 1974, mechanisms for connecting British
  and French networks with the Arpanet were being explored. By 1978,
  interconnection between the British Research Network and the 
  Arpanet had one link via SATNET and one via International Packet
  Switched Service of the British Telecom and Telenet. The technology
  used was not that of the final Internet: the motivation was there.
  It was just that the protocol wars had not been settled." 

He also comments, "This is the difference, the other mechanisms explored internetworking: they did not embrace the IP protocols." 
(Kirstein, Email, October 3, 2002)

(5) See Ronda Hauben, "Developing the New Field of Computer Communications" 
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/computer-communications.txt and Ronda Hauben, "The Birth of the Internet: An Architectural Conception for Solving the Multiple Network Problem" http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt

Cyclades was the name for the network and the host computers, while Cigale, for the French word for grasshopper, was the packet switching subnetwork. In 2003, Louis Pouzin was awarded the Legion of Honor award by the French government for his networking contributions to the Internet’s development.
 
Offering a description of the difficult environment that made solving this problem even more challenging, Kirstein writes:

  "By 1973, many PTTs were pursuing packet-switched networks which
  led to the emergence of X.25 - which was, incidentally embraced by
  Larry Roberts then at Telenet. This was meant to be, and actually was, 
  an Internet. All the protocol structure could have been built on top 
  of it.  Indeed, in the British Coloured Books, embraced by the British 
  research network, this was done. The technology was packet switched, but
  the interconnection was virtual circuit. This made it more difficult
  to move to much higher speeds at the time. However many half truths
  were prevalent in the '80s to state that X.25 could not exceed 1
  Mbps - at a time that the British research network was operating at 8
  Mbps." (Kirstein, Email, October 4, 2002)

(6) French researchers like Pouzin and others working on Cyclades, and US and other researchers involved with the development of the Internet participated in a number of meetings where they met and shared their research. For example, at a relatively early stage in the development of the research to create Cyclades, the director of the program, Louis Pouzin remembers a visit by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf to his project on March 19, 1973. Also during that year, Pouzin lists an INFOTECH workshop and INWG meeting in London, Feb. 20-23, 1973, and INWG meeting in NYC on June 7-8, 1973. He lists a NATO summer school in Brighton at the Univ of Sussex in England on Sept 10-14, 1973, and an ACM Data Communications Symposium in Tampa, Nov. 13-15, 1973. (Pouzin, Email, April 28, 2003)

(7) Robert Kahn also explains how there was the need to have access to an experimental system in order to develop a Satellite packet switching network. "This is the context in which an experimental program on packet satellite technology was first raised with the British Post Office, with... Comsat and subsequently with the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration and the NDRE." Kahn, "The Introduction of Packet Satellite Communications", Sec 4.5.2. 

Dave Mills describes the important negotiations with INTELSAT that Kahn managed to achieve to be able to use satellite for the SATNET program. Mills writes:

  “I reviewed the common carrier documents for the satellite circuits. Bob 
  actually accomplished something nobody had done before. The war games
  were played with the government telcos of six overseas countries and two
  domestic US carriers. None of these guys could function relative to the
  others.... What seemed to make it work was the participation of the military 
  and military research infrastructures of the US (DoD), UK (RSRE) and Norway (NDRE).   
  I don't know where Germany (DFVLR) or the Italians got their support. There was   
  considerable friction between the landline, earth station and satellite providers  
  - they came from very different cultural groups with rigid expectations for revenue.

  Case in point was the INTELSAT tariff for SATNET. SATNET used a single
  56-kbps SPADE satellite channel, but eventually seven earth stations
  shared the channel. INTELSAT wanted to charge full capacity for each
  earth station separately, even though only one uplink operated at a time.
  Bob managed to negotiate more favorable terms, but then there was the
  earth station operators, who wanted their fair share of the loot.

  Example: INTELSAT charged the earth station operators about US$.05 per
  connected minute for the satellite channel itself. You might remember
  the cost of a call between the US and UK was US$2.40 at the time. Guess
  who got the difference? For monthly cost to COMSAT for the INTELSAT
  channel of US$2160, COMSAT charged DoD some US$29,000. But, that
  included the SIMP depreciation used as the satellite interface. Similar
  gouging occurred overseas.” (Mills, Email, April 19, 2003) 

(8) The Tanum earth station built in 1970-71 made possible international telecom traffic between Sweden and the rest of the Nordic region.

When Dave Mills joined the research effort in 1976, he explains that the NORSAR circuit was multiplexed with SDAC seismic data and ARPANET traffic. The biggest problem he writes, “was the unreliability of the Tanum-Kjeller microwave link.” (Mills, Email, April 19, 2003)

It is also helpful to know something about the creation of NORSAR to understand the collaborative relationship between NDRE and IPTO.

Lundh explains that NORSAR is the Seismic Observatory built in collaboration with ARPA in South Norway in the mid 1960s. "The initiative and most of the financing," he reports, "was made by ARPA's Nuclear Test Detection Office in an effort to build a foundation for (an) international nuclear test ban and to stop underground nuclear tests...."(Lund, Email, April 18, 2002)

This relationship was actually facilitated by a treaty between the US and Norwegian governments signed in 1968. The agreement was toward the construction of a large seismic array and research installation at Kjeller, Norway, just outside of Oslo. After notes were exchanged between the American Ambassador to Norway at the time, Margaret Jay Tibbets and the Norwegian Minister for Foreign Affairs, John Lyng, an 
agreement was reached which concerned:

  "seismological research focused on development of methods and systems
  for detection and identification of underground nuclear explosions.” See 
  http://www.norsar.no

The NORSAR (NORwegian Seismic ARay) website describes the conditions of the treaty:

  "The agreement specified that the purpose of the installation was to be     seismological research and experimentation primarily in the field of detection seismology. At the same time the agreement provided that the facility could be used for independent research at the direction of the Norwegian government. A framework for funding the construction and operation of the array facilities was also specified.

Cooperating agencies were authorized on both sides to conclude administrative agreements to carry out the details of the agreement. The cooperating agency for the United States has for more than 25 years been the Advanced Research Projects Agency, while for Norway the cooperating agency during construction of the NORSAR large-aperture array was the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, while the
Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (NTNF)was chosen in 1970 as cooperating agency for the management of the facility....

NORSAR opened in 1969. Data gathered by it was transmitted to a data center in Virginia, the Seismic Data Analysis Center (SDAC). By 1970/71 the Nordic satellite station in Tanum, Sweden was opened to transmit the data via satellite. The transmission capacity of the satellite was 2.4 kb/s.

Cerf adds that "The ARPA office in charge of Nuclear Detection was called the Nuclear Monitoring Research Office. Col David C. Russell worked in that office before he succeeded Larry Roberts and J.C.R. Licklider as ARPA/IPTO director. On Russell's retirement from the US Army, Bob Kahn, who was then deputy director of the office, became office director of IPTO." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

(9) With regard to funding the UCL research, eventually there was also "funding from IPTO on ARPANET and then tcp/ip experimentation. The funding mechanism involved the appropriate foreign security reviews, but was otherwise like any other funding." (Kahn, Email, July 22, 2002)

(10) It is generally believed that the transport of seismic data from Norway to the US was the reason for the Norwegian connection to the ARPANET. Lundh explains that this is a misunderstanding. It was interest in the research that IPTO was doing, not the desire to transport seismic data more efficiently between the US and Norway,
that was the motivating factor for NDRE to accept the invitation from IPTO to join the Internet research program.
 
(11) Lundh reports that his first contact with ARPA was in Fall, 1965 when he "was invited to Washington and to Billings Montana" on the occasion of the opening of the seismic array in Montana LSSA (Large Scale Seismic Array). Lundh's interest was, he explains, in "powerful computing methods, notably multicomputers." His contacts at ARPA were Harry Sonneman and Stephen Lukasik and occasionally Bob Frosh. (Lundh, 
Email, April 18, 2002)

(12) Kirstein's paper was "On the Development of Computer and Data Networks in Europe", Proc. Int. Conf. on Computer Communications, Washington, 240-244, 1972.

Cerf describes some of those present at the ICCC'72. He lists Donald Davies from the UK, National Physical Laboratory, Remi Despres who was involved with the French Reseau Communication par Paquet (RCP, and later with X.25 networking), Larry Roberts and 
Barry Wessler, from IPTO, Gesualdo LeMoli, an Italian network researcher; Kjell Samuelson from the Swedish Royal Institute, John Wedlake from British Telecom; Peter Kirstein from University College London; Louis Pouzin who led the Cyclades/Cigale packet network research program at the Institute Recherche d'Informatique et d'Automatique (IRIA, now INRIA, in France). Roger Scantlebury from NPL with Donald Davies may also have been there and Alex McKenzie from BBN probably was there. (Cerf, "How the Internet Came to Be")

Cerf writes that the IFWP later became the IFIP 6.1. with the help of Alex Curran who was the US representative to IFIP Technical Committee 6. Cerf also credits Keith Uncapher and Dick Tanaka with helping this affiliation to be carried out. (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

(13) Spilling, however, writes, "Yngvar and I disagree a little on this point.  I had the impression that Bob Kahn was looking for a good demonstration object, sort of on a global scale, to defend all the spending on developing the technology. The seismic detection facility NORSAR had to send seismic information across a leased line to the processing plant in Washington, D.C. And what could be a better 
demonstration object, than to convey this information via packet switching 
technology from Norway to the US From what I understood, Bob Kahn used this as an example of the usability of the technology – when NORSAR became connected -- toward his defence funding party."

Lundh responds that:

"I believe Paal may well be right in his impression of Bob's motive 
for inviting Norway. However, my reason for suggesting that NDRE accept the 
invitation to actively collaborate and to actually undertake that 
collaboration was my interest in resource sharing networking and its 
manifold possibilities. That interest was first inspired by Bob Kahn and 
Larry Roberts and the Washington, DC conference and demo in 1972. It was 
further strengthened later by all that we learned and experienced during 
the following years of collaboration." (Lundh, Email, October 15, 2002)
Cerf adds that "The original circuit was 2400 baud so the 9600 baud,
circuit, though shared, was faster for the data transport. Later 
SATNET provided 64 kb/s service." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

Kirstein writes that "It (Seismic array technology or test detection-ed) was
ARPA's original reason for placing a TIP there. From the time Arpanet came on-stream in 1970, ARPA wanted to bring the NORSAR array to SDAC in Washington over Arpanet. This is what justified the bulk of the ARPA expenditure (from the Nuclear Monitoring Research Office - NMROP on the link in the early days.) I do not know when the extension...which did result from the extended IPTO interest in the NMRO activity, put actual expenditure in the IPTO budget.”(Kirstein, Email, October 8, 2002)

(14) Important developments in satellite technology in the 1960s and early 1970s led to the development of INTELSAT IV and made possible the SATNET packet switching network. Abramson and Kuo write: 
   "In 1970 the ARPA Network came into existence as a communications
   network for the sharing of resources among a large number of computer
   centers. The ARPANET and its resource sharing capabilities became
   feasible because of the use of a new method of communication system
   organization -- called packet switching.... In April 1965, the scope
   and nature of human communication was irreversibly altered by the
   successful launch of INTELSAT I, the first geosynchronous
   communication satellite. Since that time the cost of information
   transmission over long distances has decreased at a rate that makes
   even the present decrease in information processing costs seem mild by
   comparison.  The cost per year of a single voice grade channel in
   INTELSAT I was about $20,000 per year; that satellite had a capacity
   of 24 such channels. The corresponding cost on INTELSAT IV, launched
   in January 1971 was about $2,000 per year, and each INTELSAT IV has
   about 5,000 channels...."

   "By the beginning of 1973 the lower cost, higher channel capacity,
   higher power, and small ground stations required by new communication
   satellites had suggested the magnitude of the impact these
   developments would make in computer-communication networks of the
   future.... By the end of 1972, the worldwide satellite communication
   net of INTELSAT had been completed...." (from Preface, Norman Abramson
   and Franklin F. Kuo) Computer-Communications Networks edited by
   Abramson and Kuo, 1973, Englewood Cliffs, N.Y., xvii.)

(15) For further elaboration see Ronda Hauben, "The Birth of the Internet" http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt and Ronda Hauben, "Open Architecture", in The Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History. Raul Rojas, Editor, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 2001, vol 2, pp. 652-653.

Kirstein adds:

"This was Kahn's thinking, but there was also a practical consideration.
The basis of all the network itself between 1969 and 1974 was the IMP,
and this was firmly under the control of one division of BBN. With the
interest in the Packet Radio and SATNET, any attempt to connect them was delayed by the need to further develop the IMP to meet all its demands. This was one very important reason why Kahn proposed a "gateway" which could be programmed by others, freeing the programs from the stranglehold of one group. In practice the IMPs could now
be developed differently for the different network technologies. Moreover, an important development occurred. Shortly after, in 1975/76 when Dave Mills (then at COMSAT) programmed the “fuzzballs", to provide a cheaper and more lightweight alternative to the BBN implementation." (Kirstein, Email, July 3, 2002)

Cerf elaborates, "In this case, the fuzzballs were functioning as routers - handled IP switching as opposed to the IMPs. The apples-to-apples comparison would be between fuzzballs and the BBN Internet Gateways. I believe in fact the fuzzballs were providing all the functionality of the IMPs and the gateways by switching IP packets." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

Kirstein adds that the development of the application level relay "during this period was also a new form of interconnection" which "allowed all the British network developments to occur independently of the US ones, but traffic still to flow easily between the networks."

He explains that, "This was not an interconnection at the network level, but at the application protocol level (Telnet, FTP initially). This form of interconnection was new at the time, (and-ed) allowed the different networks to develop quite independently. In fact it was to exercise this new concept, that all the traffic between the UK and ARPANET was justified in the '70s and early '80s. Later in the '80s, this concept even allowed the US to develop Mockapetris' Domain Name
System, while the UK developed the 'Network Registration Service'."

"While these developments were quite different," Kirstein notes that, "the relay function allowed them to look to users as a single network.... Clearly application level relays are not adequate in performance or robustness, however, they played an important role prior to the world agreeing that IP was the way to go." (See the article by V.G. Cerf and P.T. Kirstein, "Issues in Packet Network Interconnection," Proc IEEE 66, 11, pp 1386-1408, November 1978. This is a special issue devoted to 
packet internetworking issues.)

Kirstein adds:

  “In fact the original grant I had from ARPA was to connect in two
  computers, the large IBM Computer at the Rutherford Laboratory near
  Oxford and the CDC in London. Both were the centre of centralised
  proprietary interactive and remote job entry networks. This connection
  was made as one between two networks from the beginning. It looked to ARPANET
  as if IBM was directly connected as a Host, and any ARPANET Host looked
  like a remote IBM device.”

  (Higginson, PL, PT Kirstein and AV Stokes: "The Problems Connecting
  Hosts into ARPANET via Front-end Computers", Workshop on Distributed
  Computer Systems, Darmstadt (1974). Lloyd, D and PT Kirstein: "Alternative
  Approaches to the Interconnection of Computer Networks", London, Proc
  European Comp. Conf. on Communications Networks, London, Online, 499-515 (1975))

Kirstein continues:

  This was not an Internet design; this was connections at an application
  level, and hence not very rugged. However, this mechanism continued
  for the next 15 years, while the British NREN became quite sophisticated,
  including packet switching, their version of the Domain Name Service
  (Name Registration Scheme), FTP, Telnet, mail, etc. By 1990, while the 
  links to the Internet had long gone IP, the hosts on the British networks
  were running a totally different set of protocols. While history (and
  the analysis we made at the time) showed this was not the best, rugged
  or fast way to go, it allowed both interconnectivity and independent 
  development of protocol structures to co-exist until all the bugs had been 
  resolved in the Internet  protocols, and also commercial products to be
  produced by new firms such as Cisco." (Kirstein, Email, Oct 3, 2002)

(16) The Brighton INWG meeting took place just after the NATO Advanced Institute.  Though the original protocol was called TCP, it later was split into two parts and from then on called TCP/IP. When the paper describing the philosophy and design for TCP was officially published in May, 1974, the authors, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, wrote:       
“The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early     discussions of international network protocols especially R. Metcalfe, R.  Scantlebury, D. Walden, H. Zimmerman.  D.  Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively 
commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues, and S. Crocker who 
commented on the creative destruction of associations."(p 643) (See also, Ronda
Hauben, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", in The Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History. Raul Rojas, Editor, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 2001, vol 2, pp. 652-653.)

16a)Describing the process of creating a protocol specification, or Request for Comment (RFC), Mills writes, “One of the principal drivers in the standardization effort was the published TCP and IP standards, which were issues both as RFCs and Military Specifications (MILSPEC). Bob considered this a major coup. Later, DoD policy saluted COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) and told the agencies to avoid MILSPEC. Nobody at the time happened to notice that TCP and IP were MILSPECs.

There is a lot more to the formal specification issues. The RFCs were designed principally as instructions to system programmers on how to implement the protocol and as such should not be considered formal standard specifications. Later at great expense and contractor involvement (SDC) a formal specification was in fact prepared. I was consultant on that project, which did in fact do the right thing. So far
as I know, the document is rusting in a dark place.” (Mills, Email, April 28, 2003)

(17) Remembering the meeting in Brighton, UK in September 1973, Lundh writes that he first met Dag Belsnes at it. Lundh writes that "it was clear to me then that Dag knew much more than I did about protocol details." 

Describing his introduction to networking research, Belsnes writes that he had "started working with data communication in 1970 at the University of Oslo. The university was (connected) by a CDC Cyber computer together with some other research institutions (among them, the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, where Yngvar was working) and the computer was to be located about 25 km away from the university campus. I headed a team," he writes, "that implemented a network system to connect this remote (system-ed) at the university (a CDC 3300, Nord computer (a mini-computer of the Norwegian company Norsk Data) and later a DEC 10.) The design of the local
university network was highly influenced by what we could read about ARPA and Cyclades networks."  (Belsnes, Email, June 17, 2002) Explaining Belsnes’ contribution, Cerf writes: "Actually Dag worked out the need for a 5-way handshake to assure that old duplicate packets would not be confused for new ones. We concluded this was too much 
overhead and chose a three way handshake with a timeout mechanism to 'clear the net' of old packets from a given connection. I considered Dag's work to provide a very solid ground for the TCP - as did Ray Tomlinson, Yogen Dalal who worked on the 3-way version and Carl Sunshine who did correctness proofs for this version." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

Also Kuninobu Tanno (from Tohoku University) from Japan was part of the Stanford seminars Cerf held to explore "how to get host computers to communicate across multiple packet networks without knowing the network technology underneath." (Cerf, "How the Internet Came to Be") 

(18) See the diagram from the "Uses of the ARPA Network via the University College London Node" by Peter T Kirstein and Sylvia B. Kenny, IIASA Conference on Networks, Laxenburg, Austria, 1975, p. 54 Lundh calls Kjeller "the little townlet where some research establishments reside, some 20 km NE of OSLO."

Cerf explains that the TIPs were just part of the ARPANET "we did not yet have gateways/routers running IP." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

(19) Lundh also writes:

"Later, I believe, around 1981-82 when I could no longer get even the small support needed at NDRE, Paal left NDRE (with my blessings) and took the equipment with him to the neighboring institute ("TF"), the research establishment of the Norwegian Telecom Administration. They are located at Kjeller also, just across the street from NDRE and next to NORSAR. Paal was alone there being interested in Internetworking. NTA did not believe in the Internet until about 1995 -- similarly to most telecom operators....I think only one person at TF gave Paal some help during those years. Going back some years again, a few months after Paal joined me he also got another friend of his (Aage Stensby) over from his old group at NDRE, having become 'similarly
superfluous' there. However, Paal was the main contributor without any doubt. Later on I was able to recruit a few more people to the networking effort....The most active ones were Oyvind Hvinden and Finn Arve Aagesen. Both (were) very good people....Finn Arve is an unusually able person and made a great contribution during the short time he was with us...." (Lundh, Email, June 12, 2002)

(20) Kirstein disagrees about the prohibition of commercial sites, though not of commercial traffic. He writes that the UCL connection was to the public telecom and consequently was accessible to both commercial and academic sites. There was broad usage of the network in the UK and hence there was much interest in it. As Kirstein explains, "A management committee, which included the British Post Office, had to approve all sites connected and their use. From the late '70s, applications included quasi-commercial usage where one site was a British contractor to a US Agency, and the other the US Agency or another such US contractor -- usually in relation to R & D projects. When requested by the US such usage was normally approved; we were only concerned that the experimental nature of the interconnection would not lead to any legal responsibilities to the user entities. In the UK we connected the TIP to the Public Telephone network immediately (by September 1973, and to the British 
research networks (from late 1973)." (Kirstein, Email, October 8, 2002.) "I should add," he writes, that “the British Post Office was part of the management committee which was told all that we were doing. For this reason they tolerated activities they might otherwise have forbidden; they were clearly contrary to their monopoly." (Kirstein, Email, Oct. 3, 2002)

(21) Spilling continues:

"The control program therefore must be an integral part of the programs in the Host computers wishing to participate in internetwork connections. The device interconnecting the two networks is called a Gateway.... The Gateway is connected to the two networks. Net 1 and Net 2, in the same way as normal Host computers, and therefore looks like a Host to both networks. When Host 1 wishes to exchange data with Host 2, it forms an internet packet according to the TCP format and encloses it in the format required by Net 1, for communications in that network. This action...is called 'wrapping.' The internet packet is then transported to the
Gateway where it is unwrapped from the Net 1 format and is re-wrapped in the format for Net 2 for transmission across the net to Host 2. This process can easily be extended through an arbitrary number of networks and gateways. This form of data exchange between Host 1 and Host 2 looks to all intermediate networks like normal host-host
communications, thus the local networks are not aware of any internetwork
activities. This is taken care of by the TCP's in Host 1 and Host 2 and by the Gateway."(Spilling, Proposal to Nato, pg 5)

Cerf explains the process using the term "encapsulation": 

  "We adopted very early the idea of encapsulating IP packets in the packets of 
  connected networks - the gateways would remove the IP packets from the 
  carrying packet format and re-encapsulated it in the next networks packet
  structure. Of course, before we split IP from TCP, it was just TCP packets
  that were encapsulated." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

(22) See Spilling, "Final Report," for a description of how the SATNET program was initially developed using the ARPANET and gradually separated apart from the ARPANET.  The SIMPs were the Satellite IMPs created for interfaces for SATNET. He writes:

"The purpose of the Packet Satellite Program is to develop a general-purpose satellite network based upon the packet-switching principles... In order to utilize as much as possible the facilities available in ARPANET, the initial satellite network was an integral part of ARPANET.... During the program period, the SIMPs were developed to a stage where they could be separated from the ARPANET, so that the SIMP programs could be optimised for the satellite environment.... As mentioned, the SIMPs initially were logically a part of ARPANET and therefore had to obey the ARPANET IMP-IMP protocol. This was done in order to utilize the ARPANET techniques in
maintaining and controlling the satellite part of the network from the Network Control Center (NCC) at BBN. Gradually the SIMP programs were evolved to such a level that SATNET could be separated from ARPANET, and its operation fine tuned to the satellite environment. The separation made it necessary to develop an interface both for host
access to SATNET and for access to and from other nets...."

(23) See list of the PSPWG notes in Spilling, “Final Report”.
 
(24) Kirstein writes, "Certainly by 1979, the SATNET project as a development project had been largely completed. There was a major meeting in Washington, with a session on SATNET. I know that UCL participated in it....At that meeting we used packet voice to present part of the proceedings from London in Washington. I am sure that
CNUCE (Pisa, Italy) and DFVLR (Munich, Germany) were well and truly aboard by them. Equally clearly the SATNET route had become an operational entity by around 1983, using TCP/IP. Shortly after that the academic parties in Italy and Germany dropped out. The Defence parts never played any important role in network development in 
Germany, Italy or the UK.  See also Kirstein, PT, et al. "SATNET Applications Activities", Proc. Nat. Telecom. Conf. Washington, 45.1.1-45.1.7(1979). (Kirstein, Email, October 3, 2002)

Cerf adds that "In fact, we formed a coordination board - the International
Coordination Board (ICB) that included NDRE, UCL, the German DFVLR and the Italian CNUCE as well as DARPA to coordinate the international efforts." (Cerf, Email, April 13, 2003)

(25) In "The Internet- A Cuckoo in the Telecom Service Nest An Evolution in 
Packet Switching" Spilling gives as an example of such a decision process -- 
the command and control processes of the Department of Defense.

(26) See Michael Hauben, "The Vision of Interactive Computing and the Future" and Ronda Hauben, "The Birth and Development of the ARPANET" in Netizens and Ronda Hauben, "Licklider" in Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History.  Often, in funding proposals, it seems that only computer resource sharing is referred to rather than human communication facilitated by computers.  See for example Ronda Hauben, Chapter 1, in Cyberhypes(in German).

(27) ARPANET News, February 1974, Editorial, pp. 2-3.

(28) These statements of a vision for a communications system identified a goal for the development process and thus made it possible to evaluate whether the actual development makes progress toward this goal or not.

(29) Several articles provide an overview to document this international 
collaborative research process. Such a process, was essential to develop both a prototype and then the Internet.  See for example: Kahn, Robert E., "The Introduction of Packet Satellite   Communications," in Proc NTC, November, 1979, pp. 45.1.1-45.1.6.

Lundh, Yngvar, "Yngvar Lundh: Computers and Communication – Early development of     
  Computing and Internet Technology - a Groundbreaking part of Technical History".    ` in Telektronikk Vol 97 No 2/3 2001, pp. 3-19.

Paal Spilling, "Research Proposal presented to NATO, Scientific
  Affairs Division by Norwegian Defence Research Establishment also on
  behalf of University College London and Stanford University,
  California concerning A Study of the Transmission Control Program, a
  Novel Program for Internetwork Computer Communications." 2 December
  1975, NDRE.

(30) Also the packet radio network (PRNET) program made important contributions to the creation of the Internet. See Kahn, Robert E., "The Organization of Computer Resources into a Packet Radio Network", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol Com-25, No. 1, January 1977, pp. 169-178.

(31) Lessig writes, "The environment of the Internet is now changing. Features of the architecture -- both legal and technical that created this environment of free creativity are now being changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce the very barriers that the Internet originally removed." (Lessig, p. 16)

(32) Considering the international collaborative process needed to develop "open architecture" as the foundation for the Internet, it is interesting that Lessig describes architecture as referring "to both the Internet's technical protocols (e.g. TCP/IP)  and its entrenched structures of governance and social patterns of usage that themselves are not easily changeable, at least not without coordinated action by many parties." (from Lawrence Lessig and Paul Resnick, "Zoning Internet Speech," Michigan Law Review, 98 (1999):395, quoted as footnote 34 in Lawrence Lessig, 
The Future of Ideas, Random House, NY, 2001, p 276.)

(33) See Kirstein and Cerf's explanation of the conventions needed to make communication possible in their November 1978 article.

(34) Describing the work of Licklider and Taylor in their article "The Computer as a Communication Device", Michael Hauben writes:

  “Their concept of the sharing of both computing and human
  resources together matches the modern Net. The networking of
  various human connections quickly forms, changes its goals,
  disbands and reforms into new collaborations. The fluidity of such
  group dynamics leads to a quickening of the creation of new ideas.
  Groups can form to discuss an idea, focus in or broaden out and
  reform to fit the new ideas that have been worked out." from "The Net
  and Netizens: The Impact the Net has on People's Lives”, Chapter 1 in Netizens.

(35) Michael Hauben, “Preface”, Netizens.

(36) Peter Kirstein writes: "UCL was the first to introduce the Internet protocols as their sole way of communicating with the ARPANET in 1981. This was not to be pioneering. We changed computers and the new ones did not support NCP." (Kirstein, Email, October 3, 2002.) 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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               Email April 18, 2002
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-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Special thanks to Yngvar Lundh, Paal Spilling, Gisle Hannemyr, Peter Kirstein, Les Earnest, Louis Pouzin, Dag Belsnes, Andrew Hinchley, Robert Kahn, Dave Mills, Vint Cerf, Horst Claussen, and Hans Vorst for providing background 
or documents about this important period of Internet history. Ole Jacobsen, 
Patrice Flichy and Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski also provided helpful material or suggestions on people to contact, as did several people on mailing lists. Please know the help is appreciated. And thanks to Jay Hauben and in memoriam to Michael Hauben for the work done that has set a foundation for the understanding of Internet history. Also I want to thank Dr. Samuel Moyn for his encouragement, helpful comments and discussion toward the research for this paper.

Appendix

    An issue of the Computer Communications Review (vol 20, no 5, Oct
1990) provides a set of ARPANET maps documenting different phases in the 
development of the ARPANET.  The maps are also helpful in providing a 
chronology of the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet.

Following are some of the relevant dates:

Jun. '75 - Satellite circuits now cross oceans to Hawaii and the UK.
First TCP implementations tested in this configuration by Stanford,
Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and University College London (UCL).

April '79 - Multiple satellite links to UK and Norway. According to
Kirstein, one UK-US link made via the commercial British Post Office 
International Packet Switched Service(IPSS) using IP/X.25, the other 
using the SATNET. Some UK traffic starts using the IPSS route.

Mar '82 - Norway leaves the ARPANET and become an Internet connection
via TCP/IP over SATNET.

Nov '82 - UCL leaves the ARPANET and becomes an Internet connection.

   Cerf writes that in 1979 satellite systems were extended to include
the ground stations in Italy and Germany. (Cerf, "How the Internet Came
to Be") Horst Claussen confirms this:

   Describing the participation of Germany in SATNET, Claussen writes:

  "Having no access to some of the documents I saved back in Salzburg:
  the first access to the Arpanet was established in the 1977-1978 timeframe
  when I was involved in the DARPA HOL program which later on led to the
  programming language Ada. We connected through a Public Data Network to the
  VAN gateway at BBN and were "on the net". Later on the idea came up to 
  cooperate with the German Space Research Center (then DFVLR - now called 
  DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen who was involved in satellite communications 
  and had a cooperation with Comsat Labs. Comsat Labs also was involved in 
  the SATNET and this way we got back to DARPA - Bob Kahn was very 
  supportive and so was Vint Cerf. Then I joined DFVLR in 1981 and we
  found support in the German Ministry of Defense and we also could get
  funding for a PSP (I recall that the thing cost us $275K - and that at a
  time when the exchange rate for the German Mark fell through the bottom!)
  The most difficult thing was to get the support of the German PTT - Research
  Center people who "owned" and operated the old Symphonie Station at
  Raisting; Symphonie was an early satellite project funded by the EEC which
  had been terminated and there was this beautiful antenna and ground station
  building sitting empty at Raisting. Mostly through the unofficial support by
  the local engineers we were able to set up the PSP and the gateway at
  Raisting and connect to the research center at Oberpfaffenhofen which is
  some 20 miles away. Don't ask me how much we had to pay for the 9.6kbit/sec
  leased line from Oberpfaffenhofen to Raisting - horribly expensive.

  When it comes to the exact dates I will have to dig up some of my old files
  but officially it must have been at least 1982, maybe even 1983 until we 
  got the official permission, however, we did operate the SATNET station 
  almost a year under a ‘temporary testing agreement’.

  In May 1985 we ran a combined Packet Radio - SATNET demonstration for the
  German Armed Forces and for the US Army at Heidelberg simultaneously and
  this was quite successful. SATNET was in operation after I left DFVLR for
  another year or two and used mainly for measurements and tests besides being
  used for Internet protocol development. (I forgot to mention that we did
  implement IP, TCP, UDP etc. in Modula-2 for our own VAX system and that this
  implementation was later ported to the Siemens computers used by FGAN
  (another government lab working for MOD) for the Packet Radio - SATNET
  demonstrations.” (Horst Claussen, Email, April 17, 2003)

  Hans Dodel offers a similar account:

"The German participation in SATNET began in the seventies, when the German military became interested enough to ask their ‘Consultant Agency’ IABG to watch what was going on there.   Within IABG it was Dr. Horst Claussen who would come   to the SATNET meetings then, which I joined in 1979 or 1980.

  	Horst and I both joined the German Air and Space Administration
  	DFVLR and spent many years there, working on SATNET and 
  	establishing the first Gateway to SATNET in continental Europe.
  	(I think the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern,
  	UK, beat us by a few months.)” (Hans Dodel, Email, April 17, 2003)

   These accounts help to document that there were both ARPANET and Internet connections between UCL, Norway, Germany and the US.(36) The Packet Satellite Program (PSP) provides a means of understanding the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet with the development of TCP/IP. First the ARPANET was used to
develop TCP/IP. Then SATNET was created as a packet satellite network, and the research on TCP/IP was transitioned from the ARPANET to SATNET providing communication between diverse networks via TCP/IP. Hence this was an important step to creating the Internet. A series of Packet Satellite Program Working Papers (PSPWP) were issued to document "Ideas, specific investigations, and results and software and hardware specifications." (Spilling, Lundh, and Aagesen) Like the Packet Switching Protocol group that Lundh describes, the Packet Satellite Program (PSP) held regularly scheduled meetings, rotating through the institutions where the researchers worked. This was to encourage
the exchange of ideas and the coordination of their activities. Norwegian researchers explain the nature of the program. They write (Spilling, Lundh, and Aagesen):

     "In mid 1975 the Packet Satellite Program (PSP) was initiated
     by DARPA, with the purpose to develop a satellite-based, packet-
     switching communication network, to demonstrate its capabilities,
     and to investigate its performance factors."

   The program involved the collaboration of a number of research groups in the US and Europe. In the appendix to the Report they list the groups.

   SATNET was used as an experimental testbed for their research. To begin 
with, SATNET was an integral part of the ARPANET, but as the research evolved, 
SATNET became a free standing separate network. The devices connecting 
SATNET with the ARPANET were called Gateways. 

   Describing the importance of gateways and Kahn's foresight regarding
the development of the Internet, Kirstein writes (Kirstein, Email, July 3, 
2002):

    "Bob Kahn's real contribution here was to recognize in 1974
     the conceptual need of these gateways and to design them
     at a level which would endure."

Kirstein also describes other important innovations that were crucial at 
the time, but didn't endure. Yet these innovations played an important
role in helping the Internet survive a number of obstacles it faced.
Kirstein writes, (Ibid):

    "One of the really important developments of the mid '70s
     was the ability to create relays and gateways between
     networks to allow different technologies to be interconnected --
     without a complete capitulation by each group to adopt the     
     US and Internet Suite. Some like DECNET and BITNET capitulated
     in the late '80s; others like the British networks, stayed different
     until the early '90s. However, it was because they were 
     interconnected, and IP was then demonstrated to be better that it
     really won the war....My own approach was pragmatic; it worked
     well at the level, and for the purpose, that I intended; however,
     it could not be extended to meet the needs of the future generation.
     To give...an example of the importance of the connection capability,
     I was ordered by 1977 (by people in our research council) to stop
     work on IP networks, because they were contrary to the British
     activities. It was only because of support from other bodies in
     the UK and US, and because I could continue to work with the IP
     networks connected to the favoured British flavours, that the
     large-scale experimental services could continue over the next
     10-12 years.”

    Elaborating on how ARPANET and SATNET were different entities,
Spilling writes:

    "ARPANET and SATNET operated in parallel for a long period.
     UCL in London and NDRE at Kjeller had both access to 
     ARPANET via a TIP at UCL and a TIP at Kjeller....There 
     was a leased line from London to Kjeller and a fully or
     partly defence-related line from Kjeller to Wiesbaden 
     in Germany and then over satellite to the ARPANET in the US
     This was the situation as far as I can remember until say mid
     1982.  The SATNET experiment ran from 1976 till 1979. Then it 
     turned 'operational.' That meant, no real experiments.
     Further it meant that European sites, mainly NDRE and UCL
     could start interconnecting their local networks to SATNET 
     via Gateways at Kjeller and UCL, and communicate with US hosts
     through a Gateway in the US This replaced gradually the 
     services provided by the TIPs or via the TIPs. This was then to   
     be known as the INTERNET, with capital letters, and as such was
     a fact at the end of 1979.

    Spilling notes that:

   "ARPANET links from the US over satellite to Kjeller and a 
    narrow-bank link further on to UCL, were not efficient and required
    special treatment by BBN. It was therefore a push to move away
    from ARPANET and over on SATNET. NDRE had its first INTERNET
    host up 1981/82, making use of Dave Mills' 'fuzzball' software."

   But Spilling does not have a direct reference to when the ARPANET
link to Kjeller/London was decommissioned. Kahn confirms these accounts. 
He writes (Kahn, Email, Sept. 5, 2002): 

   "(I)n the 1970s, I initiated a broadcast packet satellite (SATNET)
    experiment on INTELSAT IV with the first participants being the US 
    and UK. The third participant (of what eventually were five 
    participants) was Norway. We were already conducting internet 
    experiments over SATNET in the late 1970s using TCP/IP.

    In the early 1980s, we decided to rely solely on SATNET for
    connectivity with Europe and thus the two 9.6 kbps lines, which were
    running in parallel with the SATNET connections, were decommissioned."

   As Kirstein and Kahn emphasize, there were five nations who were 
participants in the SATNET experiment. He writes that SATNET included
not only the US, Norway and Great Britain, but eventually also sites
at DFVLR in Oberpfaffinghofen, Germany (near Munich), and CNUCE in 
Pisa, attached to the Fucino earth station in Italy. (Kirstein, Email,
July 3, 2002) 

   Providing a general chronology of the development of the 
3 different packet networks that TCP/IP interconnected to become
the Internet, Spilling writes, "DARPA...had three different networking
technologies under development in the '70s, namely:

    o The ARPANET; 1969 ->

    o The Packet Radio Network (PRNET); 1973 ->

    o A packet satellite network, called SATNET; 1976-1979

   "This implies," Spilling writes, "that the need for a protocol
that would connect these diverse networks was recognized early
on and that resulted in the paper by Cerf and Kahn, "A Protocol
for Packet Network Intercommunication."

    Explaining the difficulty of involving different countries in 
the research process, Spilling writes:

   "The start of the development and experimentation with SATNET 
    was considerably delayed. The idea was to use one 64 kb/s  
    channel in the so called 'Multi-destination half duplex'
    mode, with ground stations in Norway, England, Germany, Italy
    and the USA. The endpoints of this channel were terminated
    in equipment owned by different organizations. This was unheard
    of in the Intelsat/Comsat organisations, and they had no policy
    for handling this case -- no regulations and no tariff ratings.
    If I remember correctly, Bob Kahn spent a long time hammering on
    the satellite organizations -- more than a year -- to have them
    accept this new mode of operation."

   Spilling explains the result of the creation of SATNET was the 
creation of the INTERNET. He writes:

   "When SATNET development was ending in 1979 and the TCP/IP protocols
    were matured sufficiently, SATNET was used as a means to interconnect
    local area networks in Norway, England, Germany, and Italy with
    ARPANET, which interconnected many LANs scattered all over the US
    continent.  This constellation formed the INTERNET with capital letters,
    interconnecting defence institutions and research institutions with 
    military contracts, hence forming a very closed community.  As you
    have mentioned, you needed permission from DARPA in order to connect
    with this community.

    According to Kahn, by the 1980s there was a connection between
these different country networks using a gateway to SATNET and then
a gateway to connect to the ARPANET, "This was not a link over ARPANET," 
he emphasizes(Kahn, Email, Sept 11, 2002), "It was a connection 
using SATNET, which was a broadcast satellite system.... This is 
if you like an ETHERNET IN THE SKY with drops in Norway (actually routed 
via Sweden) and then the UK and later Germany and Italy. (Graphic IV)
  
   Kahn explains that NDRE and UCL had been experimenting with TCP/IP before 
the cutover to TCP/IP took place on the ARPANET in January 1983.  Therefore 
until January 1983, NDRE and UCL had two paths they would use.  They could 
still use NCP over the ARPANET links until they were dismantled...and in 
parallel TCP/IP could be used over SATNET. Once the ARPANET links were 
dismantled, they had only the SATNET remaining." (See also From the ARPANET to the Internet: A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest.)  http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/tcpdraft.txt

  When the ARPANET nodes serving the UK and Norway were decommissioned,
researchers in these countries had to use TCP/IP over SATNET. 
Responding to a question as to whether the 1983 cutover to TCP/IP
on the ARPANET created a new form of connection on the ARPANET, 
Kahn replies, "No. It was not a new form of connection so much as it was 
using a different protocol over the ARPANET (i.e.  TCP/IP vs NCP) and thus, 
in effect, everyone on the ARPANET was now Internet enabled since they 
could talk with anyone else with TCP/IP on the Internet."

GRAPHICS

Graphic I – Diagram of NPL, CYCLADES and ARPANET as prototype for Internet

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/1.pdf

Graphic II – Diagram of UCL, NORSAR and ARPANET links from Kirstein’s 1975 paper

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/2.pdf

Graphic III – Diagram of plan for 1981 IIASA computer networking linking research centers in Eastern and Western Europe and U.S.

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/3.pdf

Graphic IV – SATNET as an Ethernet in the Sky

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/4.pdf

Graphic V – 1977 Internet Experiment 

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/5.pdf

----------------------------------------

Ronda Hauben © 2004

Last updated: May 1, 2004