Important Documents from the Early Internet (1972) (original) (raw)

Alan J Sondheim on Fri, 18 Jul 1997 09:03:12 +0200 (MET DST)

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Important Documents from the Early Internet (1972)

EARLY IMPORTANT NET DOCUMENTS (1972)

SCENARIOS for Using the ARPANET at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUT- ER COMMUNICATION (ICCC) from 1972 is the first guide to what later became the Internet. The front page of this is illustrated in Peter Salus' Casting the Net. The conference ran from October 24-26 in Washington, D.C. The 62- page SCENARIOS was published by the ARPA Network Information Center of the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California.

A copy of the guide is with the BBN Library, and I have been tracking some of the material down. The ICCC was the first real introduction of the Net to the (professional) public, and this then becomes the first how-to, with examples indicating the thinking of the Net community vis-a-vis usage and implementation. This is the sociology, not the technical history of the Net, then. At the ICCC, there were a number of terminals; participants could walk among them, and log in. Each "scenario" connected to a differ- ent application, located somewhere across the United States.

The following, which I have now in xerox form, are the programs and the scenarios:

PROGRAM SCENARIO

English Language Conversational Programs DOCTOR BBN DOCTOR [Eliza-type program] SCHOLAR SCHOLAR PARRY SAIL PARRY TIMMY UCLA-NMC Sigma-7

Data Base Query NIC SRI-ARC ["general intellectual tasks"] NETWRK MIT-DMCG PDP-10 APE SAIL AP HOTline [Associated Press]

Games CHESS BBN CHESS CHESS MIT-AI PDP-10 LIFE BBN LIFE [Conway's game] JOTTO MIT-AI PDP-10

Network File Transfer [developed later into ftp] SMFS SRI-ARC RJS Remote Job Service

Miscellaneous ABACUS UCLA-NMC Sigma-7 HELP UCLA-NMC Sigma-7

Programming Languages SPEAKEZ SPEAKEASY PPL HARVARD PDP-10 FORTRAN BBN Tenex FORTRAN UCLA-CCN 360/91 TSO

Remote Job Entry RJS Remote Job Service

Symbolic Algebraic Manipulation MACSYMA Mathlab's MACSYMA

There is a table of contents, which also lists MIT H645 Multics, which apparently provided mail; mail was also available through BBN Tenex itself. For those not familiar, BBN is Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., responsible for the first IMP, basically routers, that were the founda- tion of the Arpanet. IMP = Interface Message Processor.

SRI-ARC (NIC) was set up at HOST #2 in the room. Control characters were indicated by an up-arrow sign, which later must have transformed into the current ^. For example, Control-a allowed backspace with delete; Control- c returned control to the TENEX EXECUTIVE SYSTEM (which roughly parallels Control-c for ending execution in Unix, linux, or DOS); and Control-t "checked to see if the system is still there," similar to the "are you there" command in some telnet programs.

Other commands included, of course, DEL, CR (carriage return), etc. Com- mands were preceded by @.

The SAIL AP Hotline was at HOST #11, "a direct Associated Press news line carrying national and international news. The AP Hotline has been interfaced to the SAIL system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Any terminal on the ARPA Network can be turned into an AP news line by running program 'HOT' at Sail."

The following setup had to be performed first: echo remote; insert linefeed after every carriage return login to SAIL LOGGER says you're being connected T R OPEN says you're connected, both transmit and receive.

Then a second login opens the particular program; the word is "hot" with some other commands: r hot (in other words, type r, space, hot, carriage return). You then get the linefeed from AP until you type... Control-c.

Finally, let's look at the UCLA-NMC HELP at HOST #1. The description is probably that of the first on-line example of hypertext (and very very early hypertext as well):

"HELP is a subsystem at UCLA-NMC which permits a user to interrogate a database which is organized in directed graph form. Each vertex of the graph has a paragraph of information, including some information about further details which can be obtained from vertices which are reachable from the current one.

"Thus, the user moves from vertex to vertex, investigating each item as his interest directs."

The login sequence is six steps. You then login: LOGIN iccc and get a return: JOB STARTED Then you type help and get NNN HELP STARTED where NNN ps the PID, or process number assigned to HELP. You next read DO YOU KNOW HOW TO USE THIS PROGRAM? no and you get a tutorial. Or you can answer yes, and then read: ENTER A SERVICE NAME, X, or ? to get a list of things you can get help about...

Here are the help functions: HELP - short description LOGIN - ditto MSG - "how to use our message processor" NETWORK - "tutorials on network resources" SRVYGRAPH TELNET - note this early appearance of TELNET for the public! SURVEY - "some random comments"

One of the critical papers presented at this ICCC is "THE NETWORK CONTROL CENTER FOR THE ARPA NETWORK," which monitored the IMPs. It was written by Alexander A. McKenzie, Bernard P. Cosell, John M. McQuillan, and Martin J. Thorpe. I have a copy of the preprint.

Here is a list of node from it, from TABLE 2: SUMMARY OF NETWORK OPERATION

May 1971 15 nodes June 15 July 15 August 15 September 18 2,892 Average Host Intersite Output October 18 5,329 (packets/node/day) November 18 6,473 December 19 5,679 January 72 19 9,055

The average line outage during these segments ranged from .59% to 3.21%. The average IMP downtime ranged from 1.77% to 5.50%.

Here are some of the reasons for the IMP downtimes: Main frame problems, repair, unknown. High voltage, test, repair power transients. Intermittent core stack IMP move. Software, repair, site Host test. Site power down. Blown fuses. Software bug. New system reload, NCC error. [NCC = Network Control Center]

Then as now, the questions at the end of the paper concerned issues of bandwidth:

"What are the peak hours of network use and what is the peak-to-average traffic ratio? "What percentage of network traffic do single-packet messages constitute, and how does this percentage vary from Host to Host? "What is the ratio of weekday use to weekend use? "What percentage of line capacity is used during peak hours, and during weekend?"

Note the oddly religious overtones from the capitalization of "host." Processing of information was done by paper tapes; BBN had another Host for dealing with the tapes, which was going to be used for analysis as well.

Finally, here is the abstract to the paper:

"The ARPA Network allows dissimilar, geographically separated computers (Hosts) to communicate with each other by connecting each Host into the network through an Interface Message Processor (IMP); the IMPs themselves form a subnetwork that can be thought of as a distributed computation system. To detect failures in this system each IMP automatically and per- iodically examines itself and its environment and reports the results to the Network Control Center (NCC), at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., for action. The NCC computer, like any other Host, can itself fail without affecting network integrity; further, the NCC central processor can easily be replaced, in case of failure, by any standard IMP.

"The present paper briefly describes the NCC hardware; discusses such software issues as NCC-related routines in the IMPs, data-collection and interpretation mechanisms, line status determination, IMP status and pro- gram reloading, and Host and line throughput; details NCC operations (man- ning, problem-handling procedures, track record); and summarizes overall NCC experiences and future plans."

Thanks to Janet Abbate of the Center for the History of Electrical Engin- eering; Alexander A. McKenzie; and BBN itself.

Note in relation to a timeline: the first four nodes connected in late 1969; the growth was slow at first, as the machines were tested. These nodes were UCLA, UCSB, SRI, and UTAH.

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