So while I didn't have time to do either of these (my Proteon email, if I still even have it, will be on a magtape I'd have to get Chuck to read; and the paper records are mixed in with a giant pile of other stuff - I was on the IESG while I was at Proteon, and it's all mixed in together), I did take a quick look online to see if I could locate anything from that time period - knowing how bad human memory really is, I wanted to make sure my memory wasn't playing me false. I didn't have high hopes, since stuff from the late 80's is hard to find online, and I my expectations weren't disappointed (at least, in the brief time I could put into it), but I did happen to turn up this: John T. Moy, "OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol" which I'd vaguely heard about, but don't have (although I have everyone else's books; I'll have to get a copy), wherein one may find (pg. 303) this: "OSPF considered, but did not use, IS-IS as a starting point." which seems fairly definitive, and straight from the horse's mouth. I do wish I had access to more contemporary documents to, to give it a bit more detail. As I recall the circumstances, I had previously wanted to do a link-state replacement for EGP (to be called FGP) but Dave Clark (who was at that time on the Proteon board) shot it down (IIRC, in part because he thought it was too big a job for John - and John was not sanguine either; whereas I had already seen enough of John to know he was quite capable of it). That part I remember clearly, but from here on out it gets hazy (I was so busy with goings-on in the IETF, juggling so many things with that, Proteon, etc), alas; and it's been too many years since those memories were refreshed by use. I do recall that we also needed a better IGP, as RIP was not really that good, and Proteon decided they could do that - and John and I would have agreed that a link-state design was the only way to go. It started out as a Proteon-specific thing, for Proteon's customers, but like SGMP (which started in similar circumstances, before morphing into SNMP), it soon turned into an 'open' effort, in the IETF. I don't recall how (i.e. why) that happened, but I assume it was a similar set of reasoning as with SGMP/SNMP. It might be that if the IETF email archives from that period can be found, they'd have some useful coverage of that. My vague memory is that our biggest design influence was the ARPANET work, and especially the later version which added area support (described in: Josh Seeger and Atul Khanna, "Reducing Routing Overhead in a Growing DDN", MILCOMM '86, IEEE, 1986 which I have in hardcopy somewhere, which I saw on the top of a pile recently, so I can scan it if someone's interested), and also the subject of a memorable briefing to the proto-IETF by Linda Seamonson, which I remember clearly - not the technical details, alas, just at how good a presentation it was! :-) I remember in particular they had a very elegant/clever method for defining the area boundaries. Like I said, we did 'borrow' some idea from IS-IS, in particular the sequence number thing - but that may have come direct from Radia's paper: Radia Perlman, "Fault-Tolerant Broadcast of Routing Information", Computer Networks, Dec. 1983 I don't recall where the concept of a designated router stuff came from, if IS-IS was any influence there or not. I did interact with John quite a bit in the very early design stages (I'd been making a deep study of routing for quite a few years, so I was really the only person there who was steeped in routing he could talk to), but as the work prgressed - particularly once it moved to the IETF - I got out of the loop, as I was too busy with other things, and he clearly had things in hand. I also seem to vaguely recall disagreeing with him about some design points, but I can't remember what. Anyway, probably the wrong list for this. (Internet-history would have been better.) Sorry, I didn't mean to get into a long thing, thought I was just correcting a bit of nth-hand 'telephone-game' type garbling of a minor point.> Noel