Network visibility

Thu Oct 21 15:19:23 UTC 2021

> On Oct 20, 2021, at 11:31 , Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> 
> Jay Hennigan wrote:
>> On 10/20/21 10:30, Mel Beckman wrote:
>>> Owen,
>>> 
>>> LOL! Yeah, and in 1838 Samuel Morse’s telegraph system used electric impulses to transmit encoded messages over a wire to Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. Was/ that /the Internet?

No, but you are ignoring the point of my message…

The TCP/IP internet existed _BEFORE_ the flag day you mentioned. The flag day was the end of NCP, not the beginning of TCP/IP. IIRC, at the time,
it was IP version 2, but IP versions 2, 3, and 4 came in relatively rapid succession of each other and 4 was the first version with (relatively) clean
layer separation between 2, 3, and 4.

According to https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2016/09/final-report-on-tcpip-migration-in-1983/ , TCP/IP was developed starting in 1975 and
declared the official future standard of the ARPANET in March, 1982, with a transition plan supporting both protocols (NCP and TCP/IP)
until January 1, 1983.

January 1, 1983 is more analogous to the future happy day we finally turn off IPv4 at the majority of peering points and PNIs than it is to the
past days when IPv6 began being deployed.

True, the initial deployment of TCP/IP and the flag day were much closer together for the implementation of IPv4 and deprecation of NCP
than has been the case for IPv6 deployment and IPv4 deprecation, but nonetheless, it is still true that there were at least several months
of TCP/IP deployment, testing, and use at multiple sites and on multiple systems prior to the deprecation of NCP on January 1, 1983.

>> 
>> Nope. And it wasn't even the first digital encoding of text. Braille preceded it, and arguably semaphore.
>> 
> There's a wonderful book, "The Victorian Internet" - that talks about telegraphy, including optical telegraphy - and how the various telegraph networks were internetworked.
> 
> When it came to message traffic, it really was a lot like the modern Internet.
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> 
> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown