50 yrs. ago today

[Paul Koning]

> 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:
>> 
>>> https://computerhistory.org/blog/born-in-a-van-happy-40th-birthday-to-the-internet/
>> 
>> 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