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Network Working Group V. Cerf Request for Comments: 1607 Internet Society Category: Informational 1 April 1994

                    A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
 does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
 this memo is unlimited.

A NOTE TO THE READER

 The letters below were discovered in September 1993 in a reverse
 time-capsule apparently sent from 2023. The author of this paper
 cannot vouch for the accuracy of the letter contents, but spectral
 and radiation analysis are consistent with origin later than 2020. It
 is not known what, if any, effect will arise if readers take actions
 based on the future history contained in these documents.  I trust
 you will be particularly careful with our collective futures!

THE LETTERS

 To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 Date: September 8, 2023 08:47.01 MT
 Subject:  Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

 Hi Jonathan!

 I just wanted to let you know that I have settled in my new
 offices at the Exobiology Lab at the Interplanetary Space
 Exploration Agency's base here on Mars. The trip out was
 uneventful and did let me get through an awful lot of
 reading in preparation for my three year term here. There
 is an excellent library of material here at the lab and
 reasonable communications back home, thanks to the CommRing
 satellites that were put up last year here. The transfer
 rates are only a few terabits per second, but this is
 usually adequate for the most part.

 We've been doing some simulation work to test various
 theories of bio-history on Mars and I have attached the
 output of one of the more interesting runs. The results are

Cerf [Page 1]  RFC 1607 A View from the 21st Century 1 April 1994

 best viewed with a model VR-95HR/OS headset with the
 peripheral glove adapter. I would recommend finding an
 outdoor location if you activate the olfactory simulator
 since some of the outputs are pretty rank! You'll notice
 that atmospheric outgassing seriously interfered with any
 potential complex life form development.

 We tried a few runs to see what would happen if an
 atmospheric confinement/replenishment system had been in
 place, but the results are too speculative to be more than
 entertaining at this point. There has been some serious
 discussion of terra-forming options, but the economics are
 still very unclear, as are the time-frames for realizing
 any useful results.

 I have also been trying out some new exercises to recover
 from the effects of the long trip out. I've attached a
 sample neuroscan clip which will give you some feeling for
 the kinds of gymnastics that are possible in this gravity
 field. My timing is still pretty lousy, but I hope it will
 improve with practice.

 I'd appreciate it very much if you could track down the
 latest NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT. I have need of
 some lab gear which isn't available here and which would be
 a lot easier to fabricate with the tool kit. The version I
 have is NTK-R5 (2020) and I know there has been a lot added
 since then.

 Therese,

 I wanted you to see the simulation runs, too. You may be
 able to coax better results from the EXAFLOP array at CERN,
 if you still have an account there. We're still limping
 along with the 50 PFLOP system that Danny Hillis donated to
 the agency a few years back.

 The attached HD video clip shows the greenhouse efforts
 here to grow grapes from the cuttings that were brought out
 five years ago. We're still a long ways from '82
 Beaucastel!

 Gotta get ready for a sampling trip to Olympus Mons, so
 will send this off for now.

 Warmest regards,

 David

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 To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 Date: September 10, 2023 12:30:14 LT
 Subject: Re: Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

 David,

 Many thanks for your note and all its news and interesting
 data! Melanie and I are glad to know you are settled now
 and back at work. We've been making heavy use of the new
 darkside reflector telescope and, thanks to the new petabit
 fiber links that were introduced last year, we have very
 effective controls from Luna City. We've been able to run
 some really interesting synthetic aperture observations by
 linking the results from the darkside array and the Earth-
 orbiting telescopes, giving us an effective diameter of
 about 200,000 miles. I can hardly wait to see what we can
 make of some of the most distant Quasars with this set-up.

 We had quite a scare last month when Melanie complained of
 a recurring vertigo. None of the usual treatments seemed to
 help so a molecular-level brain bioscan was done. An
 unexpectedly high level of localized neuro-transmitter
 synthesis was discovered but has now been corrected by
 auto-gene therapy.

 As you requested, I have attached the latest
 NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT.  This version integrates
 the Knowbot control subsystem which allows the NanoSystem
 to be fully linked to the Internet for control, data
 sharing and inter-system communication. By the way, the
 Internet Society has negotiated a nice discount for nano-
 fab services if you need something more elaborate than the
 ISEA folks have available at XOB. I could put the
 NanoSystem on the Solex Mars/Luna run and have it to you
 pretty quickly.

 Keep in touch!

 Jon and Melanie

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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 To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 Date: September 10, 2023 12:30:14 UT
 Subject: Re: Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

 Bon Jour, David!

 I am writing to you from the Hyatt Geosync where your email
 was forwarded to me from INRIA. Louis and I are here
 vacationing for two weeks. I have some time available and
 will set up a simulation run on my EXAFLOP account. They
 have the VR-95HR/OS headsets here for entertainment
 purposes, but they will work fine for examining the results
 of the simulation.

 I have been taking time to do some research on the
 development of the Interplanetary Internet and have found
 some rather interesting results. I guess this counts as a
 kind of paleo-networking effort, since some of the early
 days reach back to the 1960s. It's hard to believe that
 anyone even knew what a computer network was back then!

 Did you know that the original work on Internet was
 intended for military network use? One would never guess it
 from the current state of affairs, but a lot of the
 original packet switching work on ARPANET was done under
 the sponsorship of something called the Advanced Research
 Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense back in
 1968. During the 1970s, a number of packet networks were
 built by ARPA and others (including work by the predecessor
 to INRIA, IRIA, which developed a packet network called
 CIGALE on which the CYCLADES network operating system was
 built).  There was also work done by the French PTT on an
 experimental system called RCP that later became a
 commercial system called TRANSPAC. Some seminal work was
 done in the mid-late 1960s in England at the National
 Physical Laboratory on a single node switch that apparently
 served as the first local area network! It's very hard to
 believe that this all happened over 50 years ago.

 A radio-based network was developed in the same 1960s/early
 1970s time period called ALOHANET which featured use of a
 randomly-shared radio channel. This idea was later realized
 on a coaxial cable at XEROX PARC and called Ethernet. By
 1978, the Internet research effort had produced 4 versions
 of a set of protocols called "TCP/IP" (Transmission Control

Cerf [Page 4]  RFC 1607 A View from the 21st Century 1 April 1994

 Protocol/Internet Protocol"). These were used in
 conjunction with devices called gateways, back then, but
 which became known as "routers". The gateways connected
 packet networks to each other.  The combination of gateways
 and TCP/IP software was implemented on a lot of different
 operating systems, especially something called UNIX. There
 was enough confidence in the resulting implementations that
 all the computers on the ARPANET and any networks linked to
 the ARPANET by gateways were required to switch over to use
 TCP/IP at the beginning of 1983. For many historians, 1983
 marks the start of global Internet growth although it had
 its origins in the research effort started at Stanford
 University in 1973, ten years earlier.

 I am going to read more about this and, if you are
 interested, I can report on what happened after 1983.

 I will leave any simulation results from the EXAFLOP runs
 in the private access directory in the CERN TERAFLEX
 archive.  It will be accessible using the JIT-ticket I have
 attached, protected with your public key.

 Au revoir, mon ami, Therese

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1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 Date: September 10, 2023 17:26:35 MT
 Subject: Internet History

 Dear Therese,

 I am so glad you have had a chance to take a short
 vacation; you and Louis work too hard! I changed the
 subject line to reflect the new thread this discussion
 seems to be leading in. It sounds as if the whole system
 started pretty small. How did it ever get to the size it is
 now?

 David

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 Date: September 11, 2023 09:45:26 LT
 Subject: Re: Internet History

 Hello everyone! I have been following the discussion with
 great interest. I seem to remember that there was an effort
 to connect what people thought were "super computers" back
 in the mid-1980's and that had something to do with the way
 in which the system evolved. Therese, did your research
 tell you anything about that?

 Jon

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1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 Date: September 12, 2023 16:05:02 UT
 Subject: Re: Internet History

 Jon,

 Yes, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) set up 5
 super computer centers around the US and also provided some
 seed funding for what they called "intermediate level"
 packet networks which were, in turn, connected to a
 national backbone network they called "NSFNET." The
 intermediate level nets connected the user community
 networks (mostly in research labs and universities at that
 time) to the backbone to which the super computer sites
 were linked. According to my notes, NSF planned to reduce
 funding for the various networking activities over time on
 the presumption that they could become self-sustaining.
 Many of the intermediate level networks sought to create a
 larger market by turning to industry, which NSF permitted.
 There was a rapid growth in the equipment market during the
 last half of the 1980s, for routers (the new name for
 gateways), work stations, network servers, and local area
 networks.  The penetration of the equipment market led to a
 new market in commercial Internet services. Some of the
 intermediate networks became commercial services, joining
 others that were created to meet a growing demand for
 Internet access.

 By mid-1993, the system had grown to include over 15,000
 networks, world-wide, and over 2 million computers. They
 must have thought this was a pretty big system, back then.
 Actually, it was, at the time, the largest collection of
 networks and computers ever interconnected. Looking back
 from our perspective, though, this sounds like a very
 modest beginning, doesn't it? Nobody knew, at the time,
 just how many users there were, but the system was doubling
 annually and that attracted a lot of attention in many
 different quarters.

 There was an interesting report produced by the US National
 Academy of Science about something they called

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 "Collaboratories" which was intended to convey the idea
 that people and computers could carry out various kinds of
 collaborative work if they had the right kinds of networks
 to link their computer systems and the right kinds of
 applications to deal with distributed applications. Of
 course, we take that sort of thing for granted now, but it
 was new and often complicated 30 years ago.

 I am going to try to find out how they dealt with the
 problem of explosive growth.

 Louis and I will be leaving shortly for a three-day
 excursion to the new vari-grav habitat but I will let you
 know what I find out about the 1990s period in Internet
 history when we get back.

 Therese

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 Date: September 13, 2023 10:34:05 LT
 Subject: Re: Internet History

 Therese,

 I sent a few Knowbot programs out looking for Internet
 background and found an interesting archive at the Postel
 Historical Institute in Pacific Palisades, California.
 These folks have an incredible collection of old documents,
 some of them actually still on paper, dating as far back as
 1962! This stuff gets addicting after a while.

 Postel apparently edited a series of reports called
 "Request for Comments" or "RFC" for short. These seem to be
 one of the principal means by which the technology of the
 Internet has been documented, and also, as nearly as I can
 tell, a lot of its culture. The Institute also has a
 phenomenal archive of electronic mail going back to about
 1970 (do you believe it? Email from over 50 years ago!). I
 don't have time to set up a really good automatic analysis
 of the contents, but I did leave a couple of Knowbots
 running to find things related to growth, scaling, and

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 increased capacity of the Internet.

 It turns out that the technical committee called the
 Internet Engineering Task Force was very pre-occupied in
 the 1991-1994 period with the whole problem of
 accommodating exponential growth in the size of the
 Internet. They had a bunch of different options for re-
 placing the then-existing IP layer with something that
 could support a larger address space. There were a lot of
 arguments about how soon they would run out of addresses
 and a lot of uncertainty about how much functionality to
 add on while solving the primary growth problem. Some folks
 thought the scaling problem was so critical that it should
 take priority while others thought there was still some
 time and that new functionality would help motivate the
 massive effort needed to replace the then-current version 4
 IP.

 As it happens, they were able to achieve multiple
 objectives, as we now know. They found a way to increase
 the space for identifying logical end-points in the system
 as well increasing the address space needed to identify
 physical end-points. That gave them a hook on which to base
 the mobile, dynamic addressing capability that we now rely
 on so heavily in the Internet. According to the notes I
 have seen, they were also experimenting with new kinds of
 applications that required different kinds of service than
 the usual "best efforts" they were able to obtain from the
 conventional router systems.

 I found an absolutely hilarious "packet video clip" in one
 of the archives. It's a black-and-white, 6 frame per second
 shot of some guy taking off his coat, shirt and tie at one
 of the engineering committee meetings. His T-shirt says "IP
 on everything" which must have been some kind of slogan for
 Internet expansion back then. Right at the end, some big
 bearded guy comes up and stuffs some paper money in the
 other guy's waistband. Apparently, there are quite a few
 other archives of the early packet video squirreled away at
 the PHI. I can't believe how primitive all this stuff
 looks. I have attached a sample for you to enjoy. They
 didn't have TDV back then, so you can't move the point of
 view around the room or anything. You just have to watch
 the figures move jerkily across the screen.

 You can dig into this stuff if you send a Knowbot program
 to concierge@phi.pacpal.ca.us. This Postel character must
 have never thrown anything away!!

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 Jon

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>
 From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 Date: September 15, 2023 07:55:45 UT
 Subject: Re: Internet History

 Jon,

 thanks for the pointer. I pulled up a lot of very useful
 material from PHI. You're right, they did manage to solve a
 lot of problems at once with the new IP. Once they got the
 bugs out of the prototype implementations, it spread very
 quickly from the transit service companies outward towards
 all the host computers in the system. I also discovered
 that they were doing research on primitive gigabit-per-
 second networks at that same general time. They had been
 relying on unbelievably slow transmission systems around
 100 megabits-per-second and below. Can you imagine how long
 it would take to send a typical 3DV image at those glacial
 speeds?

 According to the notes I found, a lot of the wide-area
 system was moved over to operate on top of something they
 called Asynchronous Transfer Mode Cell Switching or ATM for
 short. Towards the end of the decade, they managed to get
 end to end transfer rates on the order of a gigabyte per
 second which was fairly respectable, given the technology
 they had at the time. Of course, the telecommunications
 business had been turned totally upside down in the process
 of getting to that point.

 It used to be the case that broadcast and cable television,
 telephone and publishing were different businesses. In some
 countries, television and telephone were monopolies
 operated by the government or operated in the private
 sector with government regulation. That started changing
 drastically as the 1990s unfolded, especially in the United
 States where telephone companies bought cable companies,
 publishers owned various communication companies and it got
 to be very hard to figure out just what kind of company it

Cerf [Page 10]  RFC 1607 A View from the 21st Century 1 April 1994

 was that should or could be regulated. There grew up an
 amazing number of competing ways to deliver information in
 digital form. The same company might offer a variety of
 information and communication services.

 With regard to the Internet, it was possible to reach it
 through mobile digital radio, satellite, conventional wire
 line access (quaintly called "dial-up") using Integrated
 Services Digital Networking, specially-designed modems,
 special data services on television cable, and new fiber-
 based services that eventually made it even into
 residential settings. All the bulletin board systems got
 connected to the Internet and surprised everyone, including
 themselves, when the linkage created a new kind of
 publishing environment in which authors took direct re-
 sponsibility for making their work accessible.

 Interestingly, this didn't do away either with the need for
 traditional publishers, who filter and evaluate material
 prior to publication, nor for a continuing interest in
 paper and CD-ROM. As display technology got better and more
 portable, though, paper became much more of a specialty
 item. Most documents were published on-line or on high-
 density digital storage media.  The basic publishing
 process retained a heavy emphasis on editorial selection,
 but the mechanics shifted largely in the direction of the
 author - with help from experts in layout and
 accessibility. Of course, it helped to have a universal
 reference numbering plan which allowed authors to register
 documents in permanent archives. References could be made
 to these from any other on-line context and the documents
 retrieved readily, possiblyat some cost for copying rights.

 By the end of the decade, "multimedia" was no longer a
 buzz-word but a normal way of preparing and presenting
 information. One unexpected angle: multimedia had been
 thought to be confined to presentation in visual and
 audible forms for human consumption, but it turned out that
 including computers as senders and recipients of these
 messages allowed them to use the digital email medium as an
 enabling technology for deferred, inter-computer
 interaction.

 Just based on what I have been reading, one of the toughest
 technical problems was finding good standards to represent
 all these different modalities. Copyright questions, which
 had been thought to be what they called "show-stoppers,"
 turned out to be susceptible to largely-established case

Cerf [Page 11]  RFC 1607 A View from the 21st Century 1 April 1994

 law. Abusing access to digital information was impeded in
 large degree by wrapping publications in software shields,
 but in the end, abuses were still possible and abusers were
 prosecuted.

 On the policy side, there was a strong need to apply
 cryptography for authentication and for privacy. This was a
 big struggle for many governments, including ours here in
 France,  where there are very strong views and laws on this
 subject, but ultimately, the need for commonality on a
 global basis outweighed many of the considerations that
 inhibited the use of this valuable technology.

 Well, that takes us up to about 20 years ago, which still
 seems a far cry from our current state of technology. With
 over a billion computers in the system and most of the
 populations of information-intensive countries fully
 linked, some of the more technically-astute back at the
 turn of the millennium may have had some inkling of what
 was in store for the next two decades.

 Therese

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

 To: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>
 CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>
 From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>
 Date: September 17, 2023 06:43:13 MT
 Subject: Re: Internet History

 Therese and Jon,

 This is really fascinating! I found some more material,
 thanks to the Internet Society, which summarizes the
 technical developments over the last 20 years. Apparently
 one of the key events was the development of all-optical
 transmission, switching and computing in a cost-effective
 way.  For a long time, this technology involved rather
 bulky equipment - some of the early 3DV clips from 2000-
 2005 showed rooms full of gear required to steer beams
 around. A very interesting combination of fiber optics and
 three-dimensional electro-optical integrated circuits
 collapsed a lot of this to sizes more like what we are
 accustomed to today. Using pico- and femto- molecular
 fabrication methods, it has been possible to build very
 compact, extremely high speed computing and communication

Cerf [Page 12]  RFC 1607 A View from the 21st Century 1 April 1994

 devices.

 I guess those guys at Xerox PARC who imagined that there
 might be hundreds of millions of computers in the world,
 hundreds or even thousands of them for each person, would
 be pleased to see how clear their vision was. The only
 really bad thing, as I see it, is that those guys who were
 trying to figure out how to deal with Internet expansion
 really blew it when they picked a measly 64 bit address
 space. I hear we are running really tight again. I wonder
 why they didn't have enough sense just to allocate at least
 1024 bits to make sure we'd have enough room for the
 obvious applications we can see we want, now?

 David

1. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Final Comments

 The letters end here, so we are left to speculate about many of the
 loose ends not tied up in this informal exchange. Obviously, our
 current struggles ultimately will be resolved and a very different,
 information-intensive world will evolve from the present. There are a
 great many policy, technical and economic questions that remain to be
 answered to guide our progress towards the environment described in
 part in these messages. It will be an interesting two or three
 decades ahead!

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Security Considerations

 Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Author's Address

 Vinton Cerf
 President, Internet Society
 12020 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 270
 Reston, VA 22091

 EMail: +1 703 648 9888
 Fax: +1 703 648 9887
 EMail: vcerf@isoc.org

 or

 Vinton Cerf
 Sr. VP Data Architecture
 MCI Data Services Division
 2100 Reston Parkway, Room 6001
 Reston, VA 22091

 Phone: +1 703 715 7432
 Fax: +1 703 715 7436
 EMail: vinton_cerf@mcimail.com

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