Xah Lee's Unixism

[Morten Reistad]

In article <uisaoutfz.fsf at mail.comcast.net>,
Anne & Lynn Wheeler  <lynn at garlic.com> wrote:
>Morten Reistad <firstname at lastname.pr1v.n0> writes:
>> Since I am on a roll with timelines; just one off the top of my head : 
>>
>> Project start     : 1964
>> First link        : 1969
>> Transatlantic     : 1972 (to Britain and Norway)
>> Congested         : 1976
>> TCP/IP            : 1983 (the effort started 1979) (sort of a 2.0 version)
>> First ISP         : 1983 (uunet, EUnet followed next year)
>> Nework Separation : 1983 (milnet broke out)
>> Large-scale design: 1987 (NSFnet, but still only T3/T1's)
>> Fully commercial  : 1991 (WIth the "CIX War")
>> Web launced       : 1992
>> Web got momentum  : 1994
>> Dotcom bubble     : 1999 (but it provided enough bandwith for the first time)
>> Dotcom burst      : 2001
>
[i'll snip the excellent references you always come up with]

>was for backbone between regional locations ... it was suppose to be
>T1 links. What was installed was IDNX boxes that supported
>point-to-point T1 links between sites ... and multiplexed 440kbit
>links supported by racks & racks of PC/RTs with 440kbit boards ...  at
>the backbone centers.

It was an upgrade from 56k. The first versions of NSFnet was not really
scalable either; noone knew quite how to design a erally scalable network, 
so that came as we went.

>the t3 upgrades came with the nsfnet2 backbone RFP

For the grand timeline I'll see the two nsfnets as a continuing
development. 

>my wife and i somewhat got to be the red team design for both nsfnet1
>and nsfnet2 RFPs.
>
>note that there was commercial internetworking protocol use long
>before 1991 ... in part evidence the heavy commercial turn-out at
>interop '88
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#interop88

Yes, commercial internet offerings were available as early as in
1983-84; but until Cisco, IBM, Wellfleet and Proteon made real router
gear (1986?) it was a little lame.  I remember lamenting the software
of the IBM routers in ca1988; because they were light years ahead
of the competition in the actual hardware design. 

But until 1991 (Gordon Cook has the gory detail) you had to accept the
NSFnet AUP if you wanted full connectivity. (academic only, in
principle; although dissimination of Open Source products was probably
acceptable). A lot of the important servers and sites was only reachable
through this "full connectivity"; so uunet, EUnet, PSInet and others
had a collaboration to build around NSFnet. The first 'Ix was born
to exchange traffic; the CIX. 

It didn't go smoothly though. Some institutions had to be threatened
with retribution; and "Inverse AUP" to accept connectivity. But the
"CIX war" was won by the good guys; and the Internet became a commercial
endeavour. 

In other jurisdictions it took a little longer. In Norway it took a
parliamentary debate to make it crystal clear that a soggy half-commercial
model was unacceptable; and the threat of legislation was used. 

We had plans for a fully commercial ISP ready, in practice since 1986; 
and in 1992 we ran to implement them. 

>the issue leading up to the cix war was somewhat whether commercial
>traffic could be carried over the nsf funded backbone .... the
>internetworking protocol enabling the interconnection and heterogenous
>interoperability of large numbers of different "internet" networks.
>
>part of the issue was that increasing commercial use was starting to
>bring down the costs (volume use) .... so that a purely nsfnet
>operation was becomming less and less economically justified (the cost
>for a nsfnet only operation was more costly and less service than what
>was starting to show up in the commercial side).

It was the pains of the Internet growing out of academia, without a
good model to regulate it. 

>part of the issue was that there was significant dark fiber in the
>ground by the early 80s and the telcos were faced with a significant
>dilemma ....  if the dropped the bandwidth price by a factor of 20
>and/or offerred up 20 times the bandwidth at the same cost .... it was
>be years before the applications were availability to drive the
>bandwdith costs to the point where they were taking in sufficient
>funds to cover their fixed operating costs. so some of the things you
>saw happening were controlled bandwidth donations (in excess of what
>might be found covered by gov. RFPs) to educational institutions by
>large commercial institutions .... for strictly non-commercial use
>Such enourmous increases in bandwidth availability in a controlled
>manner for the educational market would hopefully promote the
>development of bandwidth hungry applications. They (supposedly) got
>tax-deduction for their educational-only donations .... and it
>wouldn't be made available for the commercial paying customers.

But this cannot be enforced without firewalls; and these institutions
didn't want to erect those; and wanted the policy hammered into the
Internet itself. That would have killed the Internet. Fortunatly
the "second internet"; a commercial Internet on purely commercially
obtained hardware and circuits; was built around the NSFnet. But the
two needed to interconnect. For a while there were two internets; 
one commercial and one academic that only half-way interconnected.
It was finally resolved in 1991; and from then on the Internet as
such was a fully comemrcial internetwork; where AUP's only applied to
local networks. 

-- mrr