[7] [Editor's Note: In 1998, an oral history librarian asked Ronda
Hauben for a list of who she would propose be interviewed for an oral
history of the Internet. In response she wrote the following set of
notes toward drafting a proposal.]

                   Notes toward an Oral History of the Internet

Considering the importance of the development of the Internet, and of
the protocol suite TCP/IP that makes it possible, there are relatively
few books or other forms of written historical accounts about it. The
written documentation that does exist is in many cases scattered in
technical literature either online in what are known as Requests for
Comment (RFCs) or in journals of technical articles. And many of the
RFCs from the early period of TCP/IP development are not yet readily
available online.

The few currently existing accounts of this important networking
development mainly focus on the earliest history of the ARPANET, begun
in 1969. The Internet, however, is a qualitatively different
historical development from time-sharing and the early ARPANET. This
development grew out of work by researchers supported by ARPA's IPTO
in the early 1970s. The ARPANET, the pioneering packet switching
network, was constructed along the concept of one central network that
all would link up with if they wanted to be part of it. The Internet,
however, grew from a different architectural concept -- the concept of
open architecture networking developed by Robert E. Kahn.

The concept of open architecture networking was built on a recognition
that there would be diverse kinds of packet switching networks, but
that they should all be able to interconnect and intercommunicate.

As a researcher at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Kahn
made a significant contribution to the development of the early
ARPANET. His research influenced the ARPANET Request for Quotation
(RFQ) issued by Larry Roberts of ARPA in 1968. With others at BBN,
Kahn wrote BBN's proposal for the ARPANET contract. Also he designed
the IMP-host interface known as BBN Technical Report 1822. Along with
Al Vezza, Kahn organized a demonstration showing the utility of a
packet switching network. The demonstration took place at the
International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC72) in
Washington D.C. in October, 1972, thrilling many of the participants
and convincing them that packet switching was a significant and
functional new technology. As a result of the successful
demonstration, several researchers from different countries met and
formed the International Network Working Group (INWG) to collaborate
while developing packet switching networks in their diverse countries.

In November, 1972, Kahn went to work at ARPA. He was interested in the
multiple network problem of how to connect diverse packet switching
networks. This problem had not been originally considered when the
ARPANET was designed. But with the growing interest in creating packet
switching networks in the US and abroad, this problem had become an
urgent one to be solved. Becoming involved in ground packet radio
network research (PRNet) and satellite packet radio network research
(SATNET), when he joined ARPA/IPTO, Kahn was interested in how to
internetwork these very different packet switching networks with the
ARPANET packet switching network. This was the beginning of the
internetting project at ARPA and in time gave birth to the Internet.

By Spring of 1973, Kahn had identified the question that he felt had
to be solved to make the interconnection of diverse packet switching
networks possible: "How can I get a computer that is on a satellite
net and a computer on a radio net and a computer on the ARPANET to
communicate uniformly with each other without recognizing what is
going on in between?" (Hafner and Lyons, pg. 223) He invited Vint
Cerf, who had been part of the Network Working Group and the UCLA
ARPANET research, to collaborate with him in solving this generic
problem.  The two studied and struggled over the problem, finally
creating a strategy and architectural design for the protocol that
would solve the problem. They called the protocol the Transmission
Control Program, and they presented it September 1973 at a gathering
of those members of the INWG who were attending a conference at the
University of Sussex, in Brighton, England. Several months later,
their paper was published in the May 1974 issue of IEEE Transactions
on Communications. The paper was titled: "A Protocol for Packet
Network Intercommunication".

A concern of researchers during this period, like Louis Pouzin who was
developing the CYCLADES packet switching network in France, was that
there be a way to link up the diverse packet switching networks being
developed in different countries. The development of TCP/IP would
solve the problem and make possible the interconnection of a great
diversity of packet switching networks into an Internet.

Research over the next ten years by many led to a series of
implementations of TCP and its eventual split into TCP and IP. The
internetworking protocols allowed the ARPANET to be interconnected
with the satellite packet network SATNET and a mobile packet radio
network. But the official adoption of TCP/IP by the U.S. Department of
Defense did not occur until 1980. A cut over from the old ARPANET
protocol of NCP to the internetwork protocol of TCP/IP was scheduled
for January 1, 1983.

Several months after the cut over was successfully carried out, the
ARPANET was split into MILNET, an operational packet switching network
for the U.S. Department of Defense, and what remained of the ARPANET.
The latter was continued as a research oriented packet switching
network for university and other Department of Defense researcher
contractors funded by ARPA.

Development work on the Internet continued during the 1983-86 period.
In 1986 the National Science Foundation (NSF) began a networking
project to link several supercomputer centers and to create a packet
switching backbone network. By 1989, a number of ARPA Internet sites
were transferred to the NSFNET. The NSFNET utilized a backbone model
connecting diverse networks using TCP/IP. In 1995 the NSFNET was
privatized, with the role of the U. S. government being replaced by
commercial companies. Other countries and regions of the world have
other forms of networking architecture. But TCP/IP makes it possible
to interconnect a great variety of packet switching networks so that
those on these networks can communicate with people around the world
as part of an Internet.

Thus the Internet as we know it today is the result not only of the
pioneering packet switching research done on the early ARPANET and
ground packet radio and satellite networks, but also of the
internetworking research and development in the 1972-1987 period.

Though a few accounts have been written of the early ARPANET period,
there is little public documentation of the activities of the Internet
researchers with the exception of the RFCs, journal articles, and a
few articles written by networking pioneers. The one significant
exception is the oral history project conducted by Dr. Arthur Norberg,
along with researchers Judy O'Neill and William Aspray under the
auspices of the Charles Babbage Institute. Funded by a grant from
ARPA, they conducted an important set of oral histories of those
working at ARPA/IPTO from its beginning in 1962 under J.C.R. Licklider
to 1987, when the IPTO was ended and the research merged into another
program, the Information Science and Technology Office (ISTO). The two
components of the ISTO were the Basic Program and the Strategic
Computing Program. In addition to the oral history interviews funded
by the project, Dr. Norberg and Judy O'Neill produced two written
documents. One was the report, "A History of the Information
Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency" (Minneapolis, Minn: Charles Babbage Institute, 1992) and the
second, a book, Transforming Computer Technology. The focus of their
study was the ARPA/IPTO contribution to the support of computer
science research, and so the question of the development of the
Internet received attention within that broader framework.

Other book length accounts are few and include the following: Michael
Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet
and the Internet, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997. An online draft
of the book was available via ftp in January 1994 and individual
articles were posted on Usenet and available at ftp sites from 1992
on.

It contains chapters on the vision for the Net, the development of
time-sharing leading up to development of the early ARPANET, the early
development of UNIX and of early Usenet.  The book also contains
chapters regarding the debate about the future of the Net.
Http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook Peter Salus, Casting the Net:
From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond, Addison and Wesley, 1995.

It contains quotes from RFCs of the period, some of which are not
currently available online. This book describes some aspects of the
development of the ARPANET or Internet, including opinions and views
from some participants in the events of the period. Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet,
Simon and Schuster, 1996.

The book presents the development of ARPA and ARPANET research, some
of the developments on MsgGroup mailing list, and a brief account of
the origin of the Internet. Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1 : A Brief
History of the Internet, TV Books, 1998.

It has a few chapters that briefly describe the developments of the
ARPANET toward an Internet, including quotes from a number of the
ARPANET or Internet pioneers, and then focuses on the pioneers of the
personal computer. And the related book: Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E.
O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for
the Pentagon 1962-1986, The John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

It presents the history of the Information Processing Techniques
Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and its
development of computer science, which includes support for Artificial
Intelligence (AI), time-sharing, networking and graphics research.

There is a thesis on the topic. Janet Abbate, From ARPANET to
Internet: A History of ARPA-sponsored Computer Networks, 1966-1988.
University of Pennsylvania, 1994. Abbate's thesis focuses on the
1966-1988 ARPA packet-switching network development with much emphasis
on the earliest development of the ARPANET. It provides some
documentation of the SATNET and PRN developments and interconnection
with the ARPANET to create an internetwork. Her thesis mainly utilizes
interviews done by researchers at the Babbage Institute and refers to
a few articles in technical journals. The period of Internet
development is presented as a transition to the later NSF backbone.
Abbate presents ARPANET and Internet developments as stages in network
development.

Abbate has also published a more recent book Inventing the Internet,
MIT Press, 1999. This book describes the building of the ARPANET and
then gives some description of early research in building the
Internet. She includes some discussion of the efforts to create PRNET
and SATNET. Her book describes some of what has been included in the
Babbage Institute interviews.

These books document the earliest development of the ARPANET, which
began in 1969. Some of the above accounts include some description or
developments that were part of the period of Internet development, but
are limited to a few comments from people involved at the time or to
references to RFCs or technical articles.

None of the books currently available, however, provide the kind of
study of the early and important events in the development of the
Internet that will be helpful for those trying to understand its past
so as to understand the current and future needs.

In addition to these books, there are journal articles or online
articles that treat some aspect of Internet history and development.
These include "A Brief History of the Internet" by Barry Leiner et al,
http://www.isoc.org/. Peter Kirstein, "Early Experiences with the
ARPANET and Internet in the United Kingdom", in Annals of the History
of Computing, Vol 21, No. 1, January- March 1999. Ronda Hauben, "From
the ARPANET to the Internet: A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest and
the Role of Online Communication in the Transition from the ARPANET to
the Internet", http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/tcpdraft.txt, John
Adam, "Architects of the Net of Nets", in IEEE Spectrum, September
1996, pgs. 57-63, Vint Cerf, "How the Internet Came to Be, as told to
Bernard Aboba", in The Online User's Encyclopedia: Bulletin Boards and
Beyond, April 1994, pgs 527-534.  There is a serious need for books
and articles which document and analyze the nature of the developments
that have given birth to the Internet and made it possible for it to
grow and flourish. Oral history interviews with those who have
contributed to this early history of the Internet, similar to those
done by the Babbage Institute of those who were part of the IPTO,
would help to make such needed research and writing possible.

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Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 10 No 1 Spring/Summer 2000. 
The whole issue or a subscription are available for free via email. 
Send a request to jrh@ais.org  or see  http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/
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