On Oct 29, 2019, at 10:34 PM, allison via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 10/29/19 8:50 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk wrote:
We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the
Internet less than 2 years
ago:
The ARPAnet was a WAN (wide area network) and not an Internet, but it
was one of the three networks involved in that first test on November
22, 1977 (after a two network test the previous year). The option to use
TCP/IP in addition to the native NCP became popular on the ARPAnet to
the point that NCP was turned off in 1983. It was hardly the only
network to get assimilated into the Internet, but it was the one with
the most impact. That makes the 50th anniversary of the first ARPAnet
packet an important milestone in Internet pre-history.
-- Jecel
The whole story of what was going on was far more complex and interesting.
Funny thing was DECnet was in 1983 the largest world wide network
period. By then is was well over 300 nodes and climbing fast.
And none of it used IP or NCP though it did transport P packets
encapsulated using DECnet. A lot of DEC hardware was involved
in the DARPA/Arpanet.
The network wars were warming up about then (1982ish) and it
would take till the late 80s early 90s for IP to win that war.
The big explosion was WWW.
Other names or routable networks, Banyan vines, and IPX come
to mind besides DECNET Phase III and IV.
And before DECnet learned to route (which came in Phase III) there was routing in
Typeset-11 clusters. Those used the distance vector routing algorithm too, but it had
nothing in common with DECnet other than the fact it used DMC-11s to communicate. As far
as I know none of this has been preserved, unfortunately.
paul