Fwd: Technical History of the Internet

Rohit Khare (rohit@uci.edu)
Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:24:33 -0700


I'm sorry to say this completely fell off my radar until today, but
this session seems an absolute must for anyone studying the history
of protocol design patterns... anyone other than Joe Touch going for
sure?

Rohit

>Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 15:29:23 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Ellen Witte Zegura <ewz@cc.gatech.edu>
>To: tccc@ieee.org, end2end-interest@isi.edu
>Subject: Technical History of the Internet
>Sender: owner-end2end-interest@isi.edu
>
>
>Here are the late-breaking details on the structure and
>participants in Vint Cerf's Sigcomm'99 tutorial on the Technical
>History of the Internet (Tuesday, August 31). If the cast is
>any indication, it should be a fantastic event.
>
>Registration at: http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm99
>
>Ellen Zegura
>Tutorials Chair - Sigcomm'99
>
>
>TECHNICAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET TUTORIAL
>TENTATIVE SCHEDULE AND PARTICIPANTS
>===================================
>
>0: Tutorial introduction and global context setting (8:30-8:45am) - Vint Cerf
>
>1: LAYING THE FOUNDATION (8:45-9:45am) - Larry Roberts
> Early thinking about packet networks. Foundational research.
> Baran, Fraser, Green, Kleinrock, Pouzin
>
>2: BUILDING EARLY PACKET NETWORKS (9:45-10:45am) - Vint Cerf
> Getting the ARPANET and other packet nets built and working.
> Roughly 1969-1980.
> Cohen, Kleinrock, Roberts, Walden, Zimmerman
>
>Break - 10:45-11am
>
>3: CREATING THE INTERNET (11am-12:15pm) - Bob Braden
> Development of Internet standards. Roughly 1973-1983.
> Cerf, Clark, Cohen, Mills
>
>Lunch - 12:15-1:15pm
>
>4: FIXING THE INTERNET (1:15-2:30pm) - Craig Partridge
> The Internet shakedown cruise. Roughly 1980-1990.
> Braden, Clark, Jacobson, Kent, Mills
>
>5: CONNECTING THE WORLD (2:30-3:30pm) - Larry Landweber
> Reaching the many. Connecting different networks.
> Farber, Kirstein, Partridge, Wolff

T1: Tuesday, 31 August, 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
The Technical History of the Internet
Vinton G. Cerf

Senior Vice President, MCI WorldCom

Dr. Cerf will be joined by a stellar cast of original technical
contributors to the history of internetworking, including Paul Baran,
Bob Braden, Dave Clark, Danny Cohen, Dave Farber, Sandy Fraser, Ira
Fuchs, Paul Green, Van Jacobson, Steve Kent, Peter Kirstein, Len
Kleinrock, Larry Landweber, Bob Metcalfe, Dave Mills, Craig
Partridge, Louis Pouzin, Larry Roberts, Steve Wolff, and Hubert
Zimmermann.

The Internet that is everywhere today began a long, long time ago in
a world without personal computers, VCRs, or cellular telephones. How
did it evolve from a few radical ideas about packet switching in the
early 1960s into the global Internet that dominates the
communications landscape today?

This tutorial will present the technical history of the Internet -
the evolution of thinking about the architecture and technologies of
packet networks and internetworking, starting roughly with the early
1960s work on packet switching and extending to the present day. It
will be told by many of the people who were there, but it will focus
on the technical debates and decisions rather than on "who did what,
when, and where." Did you know that experiments with packet voice in
the early 1970s played a crucial role in the decision to create
separate TCP and IP protocols? Or that the 1968 decision to use an
error detection scheme consisting of a 24-bit parity check BCH code
with retransmission for the original ARPA network was based on the
"fundamental premise" that the mean time between undetected errors
should be at least an order of magnitude larger than the debugging
time for the network? At this tutorial, you will learn what worked,
what didn't work, and what had to be fixed later and how the
technical issues were confronted, avoided, redefined, argued, and
ultimately resolved. This tutorial will be presented in a highly
interactive, collective oral history format.

Intended Audience: Everyone who is interested in understanding the
technical sources of today's Internet should attend this tutorial.
Because its appeal is expected to be very broad, no other tutorials
have been scheduled for Tuesday.

Speaker's Biography: Vinton G. Cerf is senior vice president of
Internet Architecture and Technology for MCI WorldCom. Cerf's team of
architects and engineers design advanced Internet frameworks for
delivering a combination of data, information, voice, and video
services for business and consumer use. Cerf is the co-designer of
the TCP/IP protocol, the computer language that gave birth to the
Internet and which is commonly used today. In December 1997,
President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to
Cerf and his partner, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the
Internet. His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking,
and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966
and have two sons, David and Bennett.