[iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 86, Issue 3

[John Maxwell]

Jim Piccarello wrote:

IP, or Internet Protocol, by its very name could not be the original
> protocol for computer networking. When it was introduced there were many
> different proprietary protocols sold by a variety of vendors.
> ?Internetworking? was the term of art for how to get these different vendor
> products to work together. IP  was intended as a kind of digital inter
> lingua but it was so successful that it became ubiquitous and replaced
> virtually all of the proprietary protocols. The concept of packet switching
> goes back to at least the early 60s in the work of Leonard Kleinrock.


That said, wasn't the IP protocol a later development on the original
internetworking protocols that formed ARPAnet stretching back into the
1960s, well before there were competing proprietary protocols from vendors?
And that the original idea of internetworking was to interconnect
completely disparate, sometimes unique pieces of computing hardware without
the need to standardize computing platforms themselves. I think much of
that thinking precedes proprietary "vendor" agendas in the way we
understand them today -- although by the early 1980s (when modern TCP/IP
itself was widely implemented in Unix) this would have been a concern.

I recommend a short retrospective book from the National Research Council.
(1999) called _Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing
Research_. Washington: National Academy Press.


-- 

  - John W. Maxwell
    Publishing @ SFU
    Simon Fraser University
    jmax at sfu.ca
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