Where Wizards Stay Up Late (31 page)

The creation in 1985 of five supercomputer centers scattered around the United States offered a solution. Physicists and others were agitating for a “backbone” to interconnect the supercomputer centers. The NSF agreed to build the backbone network, to be called
NSFNET
. At the same time, the NSF offered that if the academic institutions in a geographic region put together a community network, the agency would give the community network access to the backbone network. The idea was not only to offer access but also to give the regional networks access to each other. With this arrangement, any computer could communicate with any other through a series of links.

In response, a dozen or so regional networks were formed around the country. Each had the exclusive franchise in that region to connect to the
NSFNET
backbone. In Upstate New York,
NYSERNET
(for New York State Educational Research Network) was formed. In San Diego there was the California Educational Research Network, or CERFnet (althoughVint Cerf had no relationship to the network, the CERFnet founders invited him to its inauguration). The funding for the regional networks would come from the member companies themselves. The NSF provided the backbone as essentially a “free good” to the academic community in the sense that the regional networks didn't pay to use it. On the other hand, NSF grants to universities to connect their campuses to the regional network were always two-year, strictly nonrenewable grants. This meant that after two years, universities were paying the cost of the regional connection out of their own pockets. Typical charges were between $20,000 and $50,000 per year for a high-speed connection.

In 1982 Vint Cerf announced that he was going to leave ARPA to take a job at MCI. Earlier that year he had met an MCI executive whose job was to get MCI into the data business. “His idea was to build a digital post office,” Cerf recalled. “I was immediately grabbed by the idea.” The reaction to Cerf's leaving was shock. One colleague cried. “Vint was as close to a general as we had,” said another.

Cerf was leaving at a critical time for the network. The
ARPANET
was about to make its official transition to TCP/IP, but no one knew for certain whether the U.S. Government was serious about embracing it. The Defense Department had endorsed TCP/IP, but the civilian branch of the government had not. And there was mounting concern that the National Bureau of Standards would decide to support an emergent rival standard for network interconnection called the OSI Reference Model.

Several years earlier, the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, had begun to develop its own internetworking “reference” model, called OSI, or open-systems interconnection. Since the 1940s, ISO had specified worldwide standards for things ranging from wine-tasting glasses to credit cards to photographic film to computers. They hoped their OSI model would become as ubiquitous to computers as double-A batteries were to portable radios.

A battle of sorts was forming along familiar lines, recalling the confrontation between AT&T and the inventors of packet-switching during the birth of
ARPANET
. On the OSI side stood entrenched bureaucracy, with a strong we-know best attitude, patronizing and occasionally contemptuous. “There was a certain attitude among certain parts of the OSI community whose message was, ‘Time to roll up your toy academic network,'” recalled one ardent TCP/IP devotee. “They thought TCP/IP and Internet were just that—an academic toy.” No one ever claimed that what had started with the Network Working Group and continued throughout the academic community for years had been anything but ad hoc. Someone had written the first RFC in a bathroom, for heaven's sake. Not only had the RFC series never been officially commissioned by ARPA, but some of the RFCs were, quite literally, jokes.

But the Internet community—people like Cerf and Kahn and Postel, who had spent years working on TCP/IP—opposed the OSI model from the start. First there were the technical differences, chief among them that OSI had a more complicated and compartmentalized design. And it was a
design,
never tried. As far as the Internet crowd was concerned, they had actually implemented TCP/IP several times over, whereas the OSI model had never been put to the tests of daily use, and trial and error.

In fact, as far as the Internet community was concerned, the OSI model was nothing but a collection of abstractions. “Everything about OSI was described in a very abstract, academic way,” Cerf said. “The language they used was turgid beyond belief. You couldn't read an OSI document if your life depended on it.”

TCP/IP, on the other hand, reflected experience. It was up and running on an actual network. “We could try things out,” Cerf said. “In fact we felt compelled to try things out, because in the end there was no point in specifying something if you weren't going to build it. We had this constant pragmatic feedback about whether things worked or didn't.”

Cerf and others argued that TCP/IP couldn't have been invented anywhere but in the collaborative research world, which was precisely what made it so successful, while a camel like OSI couldn't have been invented anywhere but in a thousand committees. Perhaps most important, the Defense Department had already announced its choice of TCP and IP as the protocols that would run on military computers.

ISO meetings, which were often held overseas in the 1980s, were occasionally painful experiences for people like Cerf and Postel. They attended them only to feel like King Canute yelling at the incoming tide. “I was the guy who was forever writing the counter-paper,” Cerf recalled.

If anyone could claim credit for having worked tirelessly to promote TCP/IP, it was Cerf. The magic of the Internet was that its computers used a very simple communications protocol. And the magic of Vint Cerf, a colleague once remarked, was that he cajoled and negotiated and urged user communities into adopting it.

While at MCI in 1983, building what was to become MCI Mail, Cerf tried to get IBM, Digital, and Hewlett-Packard to support TCP/IP, but they refused and adopted OSI instead. Digital, in particular, had invested a great deal of money in its
DECNET
network, based on OSI. TCP/IP, they argued, was “a research thing.” Cerf was disappointed and a little irked. “They said they weren't gonna make products out of it. So I had to build MCI Mail out of a dog's breakfast of protocols.” Cerf patched together MCI Mail from existing protocols that were being used internally by Digital and IBM, and developed a few more specifically for MCI Mail. “I understood why they took the position they did, but it still bugged me.”

On January 1, 1983, the
ARPANET
was to make its official transition to TCP/IP. Every
ARPANET
user was supposed to have made the switch from the Network Control Protocol to TCP/IP. On that day, the protocol that had governed the
ARPANET
would be mothballed, so that only those machines running the new protocols could communicate over the network. Some sites that hadn't made the transition yet pleaded their case to Postel or his colleague Dan Lynch, or, to Bob Kahn, who was overseeing the transition, and usually won a grace period. But by the spring of 1983, either you had made the conversion or your machine fell off the network.

As milestones go, the transition to TCP/IP was perhaps the most important event that would take place in the development of the Internet for years to come. After TCP/IP was installed, the network could branch anywhere; the protocols made the transmission of data from one network to another a trivial task. “To borrow a phrase,” Cerf said, “now it could go where no network had gone before.” An impressive array of networks now existed—from the
ARPANET
to
TELENET
to Cyclades. There were so many, in fact, that in an attempt to impose some order, Jon Postel issued an RFC assigning numbers to the networks.

In 1983 the Defense Communications Agency decided that the
ARPANET
had grown large enough that security was now a concern. The agency split the network into two parts: the
MILNET
, for sites carrying nonclassified military information, and the
ARPANET
for the computer research community. Before the split, there were 113 nodes in the combined network. Afterward, 45 nodes remained with the
ARPANET
, and the rest went to
MILNET
. Administratively and operationally there were two different networks, but with gateways connecting them users couldn't tell. The old
ARPANET
had become a full-fledged Internet.

In 1988, five years after the 1983
ARPANET
transition to TCP/IP, the ISO finally produced standards for Open Systems Interconnection, and the U.S. Government immediately adopted the rival OSI protocols as its official standard. It appeared that OSI might prevail over TCP/IP. In Europe, where national governments decree the standards, it seemed an article of faith that OSI was the solution.

On the other hand, an American culture of the Internet was growing exponentially, and its foundation was TCP/IP. And while governments throughout Europe were anointing OSI, something of an underground movement sprang up at European universities to implement TCP/IP.

One key development in determining the outcome between TCP/IP and OSI turned out to be the popularity of the
UNIX
operating system, which had been developed at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in 1969.

Programmers liked
UNIX
for two primary reasons: Its flexibility let them tailor it to whatever program they were working on, and it was “portable,” meaning it could be made to work on many different computers. In the late 1970s, programmers at Berkeley developed their own brand of
UNIX
, and seeded the computer science community with it. Berkeley
UNIX
eventually became a fixture at universities and research institutions all over the world. Around 1981, Bill Joy, a
UNIX
hacker at Berkeley, got ARPA funding to write TCP/IP into a version of Berkeley
UNIX
. BBN had already written a version of
UNIX
with TCP/IP, but Joy didn't like it and decided to do it his own way.

Then, in 1982, Joy joined a couple of Stanford Business School graduates who were starting a new company to build and sell powerful “workstations,” computers that were of an order of magnitude more powerful than personal computers. Joy was brought in as the
UNIX
expert. They called their company Sun (for Stanford University Network) Microsystems. The first Sun machines were shipped with the Berkeley version of
UNIX
, complete with TCP/IP. Berkeley
UNIX
with TCP/IP would be crucial to the growth of the Internet. When Sun included network software as part of every machine it sold and didn't charge separately for it, networking exploded.

It further mushroomed because of Ethernet.

While packet radio and
SATNET
sparked the thinking about a conceptual framework for internetworking, they were largely experimental. Ethernet—the local area network designed by Bob Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC back in 1973—was a practical solution to the problem of how to tie computers together, either on a campus or at a company. Xerox began selling Ethernet as a commercial product in 1980. At around the same time, Bob Taylor's division at Xerox PARC gave a grant to major research universities in the form of Ethernet equipment, powerful computers, and laser printers. It amounted to millions of dollars worth of hardware. Then a small networking company called Ungermann-Bass sold Ethernet as a connection between terminals and host computers. And Metcalfe started his own company, 3Com, to sell Ethernet for commercial computers, including Sun machines.

Throughout the early 1980s, local area networks were the rage. Every university hooked its workstations to local area networks. Rather than connect to a single large computer, universities wanted to connect their entire local area network—or LAN—to the
ARPANET
.

Ethernet made this possible. Ethernets were simple and, compared to the 50-kilobit lines of the
ARPANET
, they were tremendously powerful. Their rapid growth in the university and research community pushed the demand for network interconnection. If your whole university was not connected to the
ARPANET
,
CSNET
gave you a way to connect one computer at your university to the
ARPANET
. But it was Ethernet that created a huge networking constituency.

At major research universities there would be a network of hundreds of computers that could all talk to each other over an Ethernet network. To send traffic from an Ethernet in say, San Diego, to another Ethernet in Buffalo, you sent it through the
ARPANET
hub. In this way, the
ARPANET
was the centerpiece of what was called the ARPA Internet. And through the first half of the 1980s, the ARPA Internet resembled a star, with various networks surrounding the
ARPANET
at the center.

Perhaps what TCP/IP had to recommend it most was the fact that it was unerringly “open.” Its entire design was an open process, following a path first blazed by Steve Crocker and the Network Working Group and continuing into the Internet. The
ARPANET
, and later the Internet, grew as much from the free availability of software and documentation as from anything else. (By contrast, Digital Equipment's
DECNET
was a proprietary network.) The Internet also supported a wide range of network technologies. Although the satellite and packet-radio networks had finite lifetimes, they helped open developers' eyes to the need to handle a multitude of different networks.