RFC 1251

Who's Who in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG and IRSG Members

📅 published August 1991, from ietf

Who's Who in the Internet 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to RFC 1251 🎀 It's an FYI RFC (FYI number 9 ✨) by G. Malkin of FTP Software, Inc., dated August 1991. It's titled Who's Who in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG and IRSG Members, and it sits in the Network Working Group series. It's informational, not a standard, and the header doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates, so no drama there 💅

Status of this Memo ⭐

okay so this FYI RFC has bios of people from three groups: the Internet Activities Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) 🧚

this memo is just info for the Internet community. it does not specify an Internet standard, and distribution is unlimited 🦋

Table of Contents 📚

   1. Introduction.................................................... 2
   2. Acknowledgements................................................ 2
   3. Request for Biographies......................................... 2
   4. Biographies
      4.1  Robert Braden.............................................. 3
      4.2  Hans-Werner Braun.......................................... 5
      4.3  Ross Callon................................................ 9
      4.4  Vinton Cerf................................................ 9
      4.5  Noel Chiappa...............................................12
      4.6  Lyman Chapin...............................................12
      4.7  David Clark................................................13
      4.8  Stephen Crocker............................................14
      4.9  James R. Davin.............................................16
      4.10 Russell Hobby..............................................17
      4.11 Christian Huitema..........................................18
      4.12 Stephen Kent...............................................19
      4.13 Anthony G. Lauck...........................................19
      4.14 Barry Leiner...............................................21
      4.15 Daniel C. Lynch............................................22
      4.16 Jonathan B. Postel.........................................23
      4.17 Joyce K. Reynolds..........................................24
      4.18 Gregory Vaudreuil..........................................25
   5. Security Considerations.........................................26
   6. Author's Address................................................26

1. Introduction 🌍

okay the internet is HUGE. there are thousands of networks, tens of thousands of host machines, and hundreds of thousands of users 😭 keeping the resources and protocols that make it work takes a ton of effort. some sites pay people to manage their hardware and software, but the internet's infrastructure is basically run by volunteers who give up a lot of their precious time to keep everyone connected 🫶

hundreds of people show up to the three IETF meetings every year. they come from the government, the military, research institutions, schools, and vendors all over the world. most of them are volunteers who just want to learn and share what they know 🌈 then there are the special ones who sit on the IAB, IESG, and IRSG. they don't just go to the meetings, they also put in extra hours to organize them. they're the IETF's link to other standards bodies and to the funding institutions. honestly? without them, the IETF and the whole Internet wouldn't be possible 👑

2. Acknowledgements 💜

the author wants to thank everyone who wrote their bio so she could compile them into this FYI RFC 🫶 she also gives a special shoutout to Joyce K. Reynolds (whose bio is in here too!) for helping create the biography request message and for being such a good sounding board ✨

3. Request for Biographies 💌

in mid-February, the author sent a message to the members of the IAB, IESG and IRSG. this RFC is basically all their responses put together 🍓 the message said:

  1. the ARPANET is 20 years old, and the next IETF meeting, in St. Louis that coming March, would be the 20th plenary. it's the perfect time to credit the people who help make the Internet possible 🎉
  2. the request went to the current members of the IAB, the IRSG, and the IESG. someday she wants to expand the list, but for now it's limited to those groups 💅
  3. she asked everyone to send their bio. the plan was to compile them into an FYI RFC published before the next IETF meeting.
  4. for consistency, each bio should have three paragraphs:
    1. your bio
    2. your school affiliation and other interests
    3. your opinion of how the Internet has grown
  5. if you wanted to say anything else, you were totally welcome to 💖

the whole point? to let the huge user community know who the people are that give them what they have. main character energy for the people behind the scenes ✨

4. Biographies 🦋

okay so the bios are in alphabetical order. the contents haven't been edited, only the formatting changed ✨

4.1. Robert Braden, IAB Executive Director 💖

okay bestie, Bob Braden joined the networking research group at ISI in 1986 🔥 ever since, he's been backed by NSF for research on NSFnet and by DARPA for protocol research. his projects include designing the statspy program for collecting NSFnet statistics, editing the Host Requirements RFCs, and coordinating the DARPA Research Testbed network DARTnet. his research interests are mostly end-to-end protocols, especially in the transport and network (Internet) layers 🧚 (and yes, the original really says "Since thenf" 🙈 that's not me, that's how it's spelled in the source!)

before ISI, Bob was at UCLA, where he had worked 16 of the preceding 18 years for the campus computing center 💅 he had technical responsibility for attaching the first supercomputer (IBM 360/91) to the ARPAnet, starting in 1970. he was super active in the ARPAnet Network Working Group and helped design the FTP protocol in particular 🌸 in 1975 he got direct DARPA funding to set up the 360/91 as a "tool-bearing host" in the National Software Works. then in 1978 he joined the TCP Internet Working Group and started building a TCP/IP implementation for the IBM system. because of that, UCLA's 360/91 was one of the ARPAnet host systems that swapped NCP for TCP/IP in the big changeover of January 1983 🎀 the UCLA package of ARPAnet host software, including Bob's TCP/IP code, got shared with other OS/MVS sites and was later sold commercially. iconic.

Bob spent 1981-1982 in the Computer Science Department of University College London ✨ while he was there, he wrote the first Telnet/XXX relay system that connected the Internet with the UK academic X.25 network. in 1981 he was invited to join the ICCB, the group that became the IAB, and he's been an IAB member ever since 💜 when IAB task forces got formed in 1986, he created the End-to-End Task Force (now Research Group) and still chairs it 👑

Bob has been in the computer field for 40 years this year 😭 before UCLA he worked at Stanford and Carnegie Tech, and he's taught programming and operating systems courses at Carnegie Tech, Stanford, and UCLA. he got a Bachelor of Engineering Physics from Cornell in 1957, and an MS in Physics from Stanford in 1962. the academic glow-up is real 🌈

okay now for Bob's own words, the opinion paragraphs 🎤

regardless of the ancient Chinese curse, living through interesting times is not always bad 💀

for him, being part of building the ARPAnet and the Internet protocols has been super exciting 🔥 he thinks a big reason it worked is that a ton of very bright people were all going in more or less the same direction, led by some very wise people at the funding agency. that created a community of network researchers who really believed collaboration beats competition. he doesn't think any other model would have gotten us to where we are today, and that worldview still lives on in the IAB and in the informal structure of the IAB, IETF, and IRTF 🦋

but here's the tea: with growth and success (plus some subtle policy shifts in Washington), things might be shifting toward competition, both commercial and academic 😬 to build protocols in a commercially competitive world, you need elaborate committee structures and rules, and then the action moves to the big companies and away from small companies and universities. in an academically competitive world, you don't really develop any (useful) protocols. you get 6 different protocols for the same goal, each with its own research paper, and the paper is the "real" output 💀 that makes research papers super efficient, but it might not produce the kind of intellectual consensus you need for good, useful communication protocols.

being on the IAB is sometimes really frustrating, ngl 😭 they've been painfully aware of the Internet's scaling problems for years, and since 1982 they've lived through a series of mini-disasters as different limits got exceeded. they keep saying "getting big" is probably a more urgent (and maybe harder) research problem than "getting fast", but it's really hard to convince people to launch the kind of research program they think is needed to deal with Internet growth 🙈

it's very hard to figure out when the exponential growth will stop, or whether the Internet's fundamental architectural model will ever get so out of kilter with reality that it stops being useful. his answer? "Ask me again in ten years." 💅✨

Okay so Hans-Werner joined the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a Principal Scientist in January 1991 💻✨ His first big job there was Co-Principal Investigator on the CASA gigabit network research project, plus a seat on its Executive Committee. He's working on networking efforts that go way beyond the problems of today's computer networking infrastructure 🚀. Before that, from April 1983 to January 1991, he was at the University of Michigan, focused on operational infrastructure for the Merit Computer Network and the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division 🎀. He started out with networking inside the State of Michigan, got curious about TCP/IP protocols, and got super involved in the early NSFNET networking efforts 🌸. He was Principal Investigator on the NSFNET backbone project from the moment the NSFNET award went to Merit in November 1987, and he managed Merit's Internet Engineering group 💅. From April 1978 to April 1983, he worked at the Regional Computing Center of the University of Cologne in West Germany, doing network engineering for the regional and local network 🧚.

In March 1978 Hans-Werner graduated in West Germany with a Diploma in Engineering, majoring in Information Processing 🎓. He's a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and its Special Interest Group on Communications, the Institute of Electrical and Electronical Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communications Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science 💜. He was a member of the National Science Foundation's Network Program Advisory Group (NPAG), and especially its Technical Committee (NPAG-TC), from November 1986 until late 1987, when the NPAG got resolved 🔥. He also chaired the Technical Committee of the National Science Foundation's Network Program Advisory Group (NPAG-TC) starting in February 1987. Before the JvNCnet organizational change, he participated in the JvNCnet Network Technical Advisory Committee (NTAC) of the John von Neumann National Supercomputer Center 👑. While he was Principal Investigator on the NSFNET project at Merit, he chaired the NSFNET Network Technical Committee, which was created to help Merit with the NSFNET project 🫶. Hans-Werner has been a member of the Engineering Planning Group of the Federal Networking Council (FEPG) since its beginnings in early 1989, and a member of the Internet Activities Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Task Force. He also participated in an earlier, informal version of the Internet Engineering Steering Group and the then-existing Internet Architecture Task Force 🌈. While at Merit, Hans-Werner was also Principal Investigator on NSF projects for "Implementation and Management of Improved Connectivity Between NSFNET and CA*net" and for "Coordinating Routing for the NSFNET," the latter during the days of the old 56kbps NSFNET backbone network, which he was seriously intimately involved with 🦋.

The growth of the Internet can be measured in lots of ways, and I can only try to find a few examples ✨.

  • Network number counts

There were days when being "connected to net 10" was the Greatest Thing Ever 🌟. Back then the Internet was just a few networks centered around the ARPAnet, and growing above 100 network numbers seemed like way too much. Today the global infrastructure has more than 2000 connected networks, and many more if you count isolated network islands 🤯.

  • Traffic growth

The Internet has undergone a dramatic jump in traffic over the last few years 📈. Take the NSFNET backbone as an example: in August 1988 about 194 million packets got injected into the network, which grew to about 396 million packets per month by the end of the year, and reached about 4.8 billion packets in December 1990. January 1991 brought close to 5.9 billion packets sent into the NSFNET backbone 💖.

  • Internet Engineering Task Force participation

The early IETF, after it spun off the old GADS, included about 20 or so people 🧚. I remember a meeting a few people had with Mike Corrigan several years ago. Mike chaired the IETF before Phill Gross became chair, and the discussion was about permitting the "NSFNET crowd" to join the IETF 🎀. Mike finally agreed, and the IETF started to explode in size, now including many working groups and several hundred members, including vendors and phone companies 🚀.

  • International infrastructure

At some point the Internet was centered around the US, with very little international connectivity 🌍. The international connectivity was for network research purposes, just like the US domestic component was at that point in time. Today's Internet stretches to so many countries that it can be considered close to global in scope, especially as more and more international connections, plus Internet infrastructure within other countries, keep happening ✨.

  • References in trade journals

Many trade journals just a year or two ago had close to no mention of the Internet 📰. Today references to it show up in lots of journals and press releases from all kinds of places 💅.

  • Articles in professional papers

Publications like ACM SIGCOMM show increased interest in Internet-related professional papers compared to a few years ago 📚. Also, the publication rate of the Request For Comments (RFC) series is seriously impressive 🤩.

  • Congressional and Senatorial visibility

A few years ago the Internet was "just a research project" 🙈. Today its dramatically increased visibility, a result of its success, lets Congress and Senators play lead roles in pushing the National Research and Education Network (NREN) agenda forward, which the executive branch also fosters 🏛️. But honestly, the real credit should go to DARPA, for starting to prototype advanced networking about twenty years ago, which led to the Internet, and for opening it up more and more to the science and research community until more operational efforts could move the network to a real infrastructure supporting science, research and education at large 👑. That's really what let NSF make NSFNET happen 💜.

  • Funding

The Internet's funding initially came from DARPA efforts 💸. Agencies like NSF, NASA, DOE and others started making major contributions later, and industrial participation helped move the network forward as well 🌸. Campuses and research institutions have made very major investments to create local infrastructure 🏫. Operational infrastructure comes at a high cost, especially if ubiquity, robustness and high performance are required 💀.

  • Research and continued development

The Internet has matured from a network research-oriented environment into an operational infrastructure supporting research, science and education at large 🌈. Even though for many people the Internet is the environment that supports their day-to-day work, the Internet at its current level of technology is held up by a culture of people who cooperate in a largely non-competitive environment 🫶. Many times already, the size of the routing tables, the amount of traffic, or the insufficiency of routing exchange protocols (just to name a few examples) have broken connectivity, with many people interrupted in their day-to-day work 😭. Global Internet management and problem resolution further make fast recovery from certain incidents harder 🙃. It's unproven that the current technology will survive in a competitive but unregulated environment, with uncoordinated routing policies and global network management being just two of the major issues here ⚠️.

Also, while people often comment that the publicly available monthly increases in traffic figures wouldn't justify moving to T3 or even gigabit per second networks, it's worth pointing out that monthly figures are very macroscopic views 📊. Much of the Internet's traffic is very bursty, and if you look over fairly short intervals of time, we've often seen an onslaught of traffic toward backbone nodes 🌊. For example, specific applications might, perhaps in real time, require an occasional exchange of massive amounts of data 🎬. It's important that we're prepared for more widespread use of such applications, once people can use things more sophisticated than Telnet, FTP and SMTP 🧠. I'm not sure whether the amount of research and development effort on the Internet has increased over time, or whether it has even kept pace with general Internet growth (by whatever definition) 🤔. I do not believe the Internet is a finished product at this point in time, and there's a lot of room for further evolution 🦋.

4.3 Ross Callon, IETF OSI Integration Area Co-director 💖

Ross Callon is on the Distributed Systems Architecture staff at Digital Equipment Corporation in Littleton Massachusetts 💻. He's working on issues related to OSI -- TCP/IP interoperation and the introduction of OSI in the Internet 🔗. He's the primary author of the Integrated IS-IS protocol (RFC1195), and he's also worked on guidelines for allocation of NSAP addresses in the Internet 📝. Mr Callon is the co-area director for the OSI area of the IETF, chair of the IETF IS-IS working group, and co-chair of the IETF OSI-General working group 👑.

Before joining DEC, Mr Callon was with Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he worked on OSI Standards, Network Management, Routing Protocols and other router-related issues 🧠.

Mr Callon received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science degree in Operations Research from Stanford University 🎓.

Okay bestie, after eleven years hanging out in the Internet community, they've watched data communications go from a super obscure tech to something everyone uses every single day 🤯✨. Looking ahead, they're obsessed with the idea of a worldwide multi-protocol Internet 🌍. That means scaling to several orders of magnitude bigger than today's Internet, with even more focus on reliability and ease of use 💅.

4.4 Dr. Vinton Cerf, IAB Chairman 👑

Okay, the career glow-up is real 🌟:

  • 1960-1965: summer jobs with various divisions of North American Aviation (Now Rockwell International): Rocketdyne, Atomics International, Autonetics, Space and Information Systems Division 🚀
  • 1965-1967: systems engineer at IBM's Los Angeles Data Center, where they ran and maintained the QUIKTRAN interactive, on-line Fortran service 💻
  • 1967-1972: various programming positions at UCLA, mostly on ARPANET protocol development, the network measurement center, and computer performance measurements 📊
  • 1972-1976: Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University 🎓. They did research on networking and developed TCP/IP protocols for internetting under a DARPA research grant 🔥
  • 1976-1982: Program Manager and Principal Scientist at DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office 🧠. They managed the Internetting, Packet Technology and Network Security programs
  • 1982-1986: Vice President of Engineering at MCI Digital Information Services Company, where they developed the MCI Mail system 📬
  • 1986-present: Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives 🌐. They're responsible for the Internet, Digital Library and Electronic Mail system interconnection research programs

Their education is also giving main character energy 🎀. Stanford University, 1965 (math) B.S. And UCLA gave them 1970 and 1972 (computer science) M.S. and Ph.D. 🧚

Now for the extra achievements 🏆:

  • 1972-1976: founding chairman of the International Network Working Group (INWG), which became IFIP Working Group 6.1 🌸
  • 1979-1982: ex officio member of ICCB (predecessor to the Internet Activities Board), member of the IAB from 1986-1989, and chairman from 1989-1991 💜
  • 1967-present: member of ACM. They were chairman of LA SIGART 1968-1969, chairman of ACM SIGCOMM 1987-1991, and at-large member of the ACM Council, 1991-1993 🦋
  • 1972-present: member of Sigma Xi ✨
  • 1977-present: member of IEEE, and a Fellow since 1988 🫶

Okay, the Internet's whole origin story is so iconic 😭🔥. It started as a focused DARPA research effort to figure out how to link computers across multiple, internally diverse packet networks. The tech evolved through 4 versions and got demoed on ARPANET, mobile packet radio nets, the Atlantic SATNET, and at-sea MATNET. That success is what led to TCP/IP being formally mandated for use on ARPANET and other DoD systems in 1983 🎖️.

By the mid-1980's, there was a whole market for software and hardware that supported these protocols 💰. A big part of that was the Ethernet and other LAN phenomena, plus the rapid spread of UNIX-based systems that shipped TCP/IP as part of their standard release package 🧩. Vendors got really interested, and government agencies beyond DoD started applying the tech to their own needs. That eventually led to the Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, which has since evolved into the Federal Networking Council, in the U.S. 🇺🇸

Meanwhile, TCP/IP was blowing up outside the US too 🌏. It's growing in Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Rim, Eurasia, Australia, South and Central America, and, to a limited extent, Africa 🌍. The Internet going international spawned new organizations like the Coordinating Committee for International Research Networking (CCIRN). There's also heightened interest in commercial provision of IP services (e.g. in Finland, the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere) 💼.

The Internet has also become the basis for a proposed National Research and Education Network (NREN) in the U.S. 📚 Its electronic messaging system has been linked to the major U.S. commercial email carriers, and to other big private electronic mail services like Bitnet (in the US, EARN in Europe), as well as UUNET (in the U.S.) and EUNET (in Europe) 📨. Bitnet and UUCP-based systems are international in scope and complement the Internet when it comes to email connectivity 💌.

Adding OSI capability (in the form of CLNP) into important parts of the Internet, like the NSFNET backbone and selected intermediate level networks, opened a path for using multiple protocol suites in the Internet 🛤️. Lots of vendor routers and gateways support TCP/IP, OSI, and a variety of vendor-specific protocols in one common network environment 🤝.

In the U.S., regional Bell Operating Company carriers are planning to introduce Switched Multimegabit Data Services and Frame Relay services that can support TCP/IP and other Internet protocols 📡. On the research side, DARPA and the NSF are backing a major gigabit speed networking initiative, and the NREN is aimed at that goal 🚄.

The Internet is a grand collaboration of over 5000 networks, with millions of users, hundreds of thousands of hosts, and dozens of countries around the world 🌎✨. It may well do for computers what the telephone system did for people: give everyone an international way to exchange information that doesn't care about nationality, proprietary interests, or hardware platform specifics 💖.

4.5 Noel Chiappa, IETF Internet Services Area Director 🏎️

Noel Chiappa is currently an independent inventor working on computer networks and system software 💡. The main gig, though, is serving as the Area Director for Internet Services on the Steering Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force 🎀.

Their big current research interest is routing and addressing architectures for very large scale (globally ubiquitous and larger) internetworks 🌐. They're generally into the problems of the packet layer of internetworking, i.e. everything involved in getting traffic from one host to another anywhere in the internetwork 🧭. As a … with many novel features intended for use in large programming projects with many source and header files 🙈.

They've been a member of the TCP/IP Working Group and its successors (up to the IETF) since 1977 🫶. They were on the Research Staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977-1982 and 1984-1986 🏫. At MIT they worked on packet switching and local area networks, and they came up with the conception of the multi-protocol backbone and the multi-protocol router 🔥. After leaving MIT, they worked with a bunch of companies, including Proteon, to bring networking products based on MIT's work to the public 🚀. They attended Phillips Andover Academy and MIT, and were born and bred in Bermuda 🌺.

Their outside interests are so extra in the best way 💅. They study and collect antique racing cars (principally Lotuses) 🏁, read (especially political and military history and biographies) 📖, and do landscape gardening (especially Japanese) 🎋. They also study Oriental rugs (especially Turkoman tribal rugs) and Oriental antiques (especially Japanese lacquerware and Chinese archaic jades) 🏺✨.

4.6 Lyman Chapin, IAB Member 🧚‍♀️

Lyman Chapin graduated from Cornell University in 1973 with a B.A. in Mathematics 🎓. They spent the next two years writing COBOL applications for Systems & Programs (NZ) Ltd. in Lower Hutt, New Zealand 🇳🇿. After a year travelling in Australia and Asia, they joined the newly-formed Networking group at Data General Corporation in 1977 ✈️.

At DG, they were responsible for developing software for distributed resource management (operating-system embedded RPC), distributed database management, X.25-based local and wide-area networks, and OSI-based transport, internetwork, and routing functions for DG's open-system products 🛠️. In 1987 they formed the Distributed Systems Architecture group and were responsible for developing DG's Distributed Application Architecture (DAA) and specifying the directory and management services of DAA 🗂️.

They moved to Bolt, Beranek & Newman in 1990 as the Chief Network Architect in BBN's Communications Division 🏢. Now they consult for the Systems Architecture group and coordinate BBN's open system standards activities 🤓. They're the chairman of ANSI-accredited task group X3S3.3, responsible for Network and Transport layer standards, since 1982 ⭐. They've been vice-chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) since 1985, and a member of the Internet Activities Board (IAB) since 1989 💜. They live with their wife and two young daughters in Hopkinton, Massachusetts 🏡🌸.

They started out in 1977 working with X.25 networks, then began working on OSI in 1979 🙌. First came the architecture (the OSI Reference Model), then the transport and internetwork protocol specifications 📐. It didn't take long for them to spot the basic irony of OSI standards development 🙃. There they were, solemnly anointing international standards for networking, while every time they needed to send electronic mail or exchange files, they were using the TCP/IP-based Internet! 😭

They've been trying to fix that anomaly ever since 🦋. The goal is to inject as much of the proven TCP/IP technology into OSI as possible, and to bring OSI into an ever more pervasive and worldwide Internet 🌈. As they say, to say the least, it's a challenge! 💅

4.7 Dr. David Clark, IAB Member, IRTF Chairman 🌟

David Clark works at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science as a Senior Research Scientist, and bestie, his research is so iconic 💅. He's currently working on protocols for high speed and very large networks, especially routing and flow and congestion control 🦋. He's also working on integrating video into packet networks 🎬. Before that, he came up with a new way to build network software and made an operating system called Swift to show it works 🔥. His earlier projects include the token ring LAN and the Multics operating system 🧚. He joined the TCP development effort in 1975 and chaired the IAB from 1981 to 1990 👑. He's obsessed with protocol performance, and he's also super active in computer and communications security 🔐.

David Clark got his BSEE from Swarthmore College in 1966, then his MS and PhD from MIT, with the PhD finishing in 1973. He's been at MIT ever since 🎓.

Okay, now for his big take. It's not proper to think of networks as just connecting computers 💻. They actually connect people who are using computers to get stuff done. The internet's huge win isn't technical, it's the human impact 🫶. Email might not be a wonderful advance in Computer Science, but it's a whole new way for people to talk to each other, and that's everything 💌. Growing the Internet is a technical challenge for all of us, but we can never lose sight of where we came from, the big change we made for the wider computer community, and the massive potential we still have for future change ✨.

4.8 Dr. Stephen Crocker, IETF Security Area Director 🛡️

Okay so, I'm currently vice president of Trusted Information Systems, Inc., which I joined in late 1986 💼. I set up TIS' Los Angeles office and ran it until summer 1989, when I moved to the home office in Maryland. At TIS my main concerns are program verification research and application, integrating cryptography with trusted systems, network security, and new applications for networks and trusted systems 🔒.

From 1981 to 1986 I was at the Aerospace Corporation as Director of the Information Sciences Research Office, which later became the Computer Science Laboratory. The research program there covered networks, program verification, artificial intelligence, applications of expert systems, and parallel processing 🧠.

From 1974 to 1981 I was a researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, where I focused mostly on program verification ✍️. From 1971 to 1974 I was a program manager at DARPA/IPTO (now ISTO). I was responsible for the research programs in artificial intelligence, automatic programming, speech understanding, and some parts of network research. I also started an ambitious but somewhat ill-fated venture called the National Software Works 😅.

From 1968 to 1971 I was a graduate student in the UCLA Computer Science Department. While I was there I started the Network Working Group, which is arguably the forerunner of the IETF and many related groups around the world. I also helped define the original suite of protocols for the Arpanet, and I started the Request for Comments (RFC) series 🌈. A short description of the events of that era is in RFC 1000, so go check it out if you want the full story 📖.

I was a graduate student in the MIT AI Lab for a year and a half, from 1967 to 1968, and before that I was an undergraduate at UCLA for a long time 🎒.

I've watched the Internet grow from the very beginning 🌱. At UCLA we got to be node 1 of the Arpanet, which is so main character energy. Back then, several of us dreamed of super high quality connections between computers and really rich protocols to knit them together. Some of those ideas are still being discussed and anticipated today under names like remote visualization and distributed file systems, etc. On the other hand, I never would have imagined that 20 years later we'd have such a plethora of different network technologies 🤯. Even more wild is the enormous number of independently managed but still interconnected networks that make up the current network. And it's somewhat beyond comprehension that it seems to work 🙈.

How will the Internet evolve? I expect to see substantial developments in these areas:

  • Regularization, internationalization and commercialization: Standards will get even more important than they are now 📏. Implementations of protocols and related mechanisms will become more standard and robust. The relationship between the TCP/IP stack and the OSI stack will get resolved, either with both co-existing, OSI winning out, or some intermediate convergence emerging 🤝. The Internet will become less U.S.-centric and more international 🌍. Much of it will be run by commercial concerns on a profit-making basis, which opens the Internet up to unrestricted use. The telephone companies, including both the local exchange carriers and the interexchange carriers, will start providing some of the protocol stack other than the point-to-point lines 📞.
  • Higher and lower bandwidths; great proliferation: I expect T1 connections to become the norm for the kinds of institutions that are on the Internet now 🚀. Higher speeds, including speeds up to a gigabit, will become available. At the same time I expect a vast expansion of the Internet, reaching a significant fraction of schools and businesses in this country and around the world 🏫. Many of these institutions will be connected at 9600 bits/sec or slower 🐢.
  • More applications: Email dominates the Internet, and it's likely to stay the dominant use in the future 📧. Still, I expect an exciting array of other applications to become heavily used, which will change the perception of the Internet as primarily a "mail system" 💫. Important databases will become available on the Internet, and applications that depend on them will flourish 🗂️. New techniques and tools for collaboration over a network will emerge, including various forms of conferencing and cooperative multi-media document development 🎥.
  • Security: Security will tighten up on the Internet, but not without some (more) pain 😬. Host operating systems will be built, configured, distributed and operated under much tighter constraints than they are today. Firewalls will be everywhere 🧱. Encryption will be added to links, routers and various protocol layers. All of this will decrease the utility of the Internet in the short run, but it lays the groundwork for broader use eventually 🌷. New protocols will emerge that include sound protection but also provide efficient and flexible access control and resource sharing 🔐. These will be the basis for the kind of close knit applications that motivated the original thinking behind the Arpanet 💜.

4.9 James R. Davin, IETF Network Management Area Director 🛰️

James R. Davin currently works in the Advanced Network Architecture group at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, where his recent interests center on protocol architecture and congestion control 🧩. In the past he did router development at Proteon, Incorporated, where much of his work focused on network management. He also worked at Data General's Research Triangle Park facility on a variety of communications protocols 🛠️.

He holds a B.A. from Haverford College and master's degrees in Computer Science and English from Duke University 📚.

The internet has grown over the years from lower speeds to higher speeds, from limited geographical reach to a global presence, from research apparatus to an essential social and commercial infrastructure, and from experimentation among a few networking sophisticates to daily use by thousands in all walks of life 🌏. Honestly, this last kind of growth is almost certainly the most valuable 💖.

4.10 Russell Hobby, IETF Applications Area Director 🌟

Russ Hobby received a B.S. in Chemistry (1975) and an M.S. in Computing Sciences (1981) from the University of California, Davis, where he currently works as Data Communications Manager 🐻. He also represents UC Davis as a founding member of the Bay Area Regional Research Network (BARRNet). He formed and now chairs the California Internet Federation, a forum for coordinating educational and research networks in California 🤝. He's also the Area Director for Applications in the Internet Engineering Task Force and a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group 👏.

As Data Communications Manager at UC Davis, Russ is responsible for all aspects of campus networking, including network design, implementation, and operation 🏫. UC Davis has also been key to developing new network protocols and their prototype implementations, especially the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) 🔌. UC Davis is very active in using networking for students from kindergarten through community colleges, and the Davis High School has been on the Internet since 1989 🎒. Working with the City of Davis, UC Davis is planning a community network using ISDN to bring networking into homes in Davis 🏡. It'll cover university network connection, high school and library resource access, telecommuting, and electronic democracy 🗳️.

I've seen the Internet grow rapidly into a worldwide utility, but I believe it's lacking the kinds of applications that could make full use of its potential 😤. I believe it's time to look at the network from the users' side and think about the functionality they actually want 👀. We need new applications for information storage and retrieval, personal and group communications, and coordinated computer resources. As I like to say, "Networks aren't just for computer nerds anymore!" 🫧

4.11 Dr. Christian Huitema, IAB Member 🌸

Okay so Christian Huitema has been doing network protocol and application research for years 🦋 He's now at INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis, where he leads the "RODEO" research project. The goal is defining and experimenting with communication protocols for super high speed networks, at one Gbit/s or more 🔥 That includes studying high speed transmission control protocols, how to parameterize them, and how to slot them into operating systems 💅 It also covers synchronization functions and managing data transparency between heterogeneous systems. He does all this in cooperation with industrial partners and keeps up with how the communication standards are evolving ✨

Before that, he worked on the NADIR project, looking at how computers use telecommunication satellites 🛰️ He also did OSI developments in the GIPSI project for the SM90 work station, which included one of the earliest X.400 systems 📬 And he worked on the ESPRIT project THORN, which provided one of the first X.500 conformant directory systems 🗂️

Christian graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1975, and got his doctorate from the University of Paris VI in 1985 🎓

The projects that came after the "Cyclades" network in France kept a close eye on the Arpanet and then the Internet 👀 The first link was made in the early 80s through mail connections. I was directly involved in setting up the first direct TCP-IP connection between France and the Internet (actually NSFNET) 🔌 It was first tested in 1987 and became operational in 1988. This interconnection, plus parallel actions in the Nordic countries of Europe, at CERN, and through the EUNET association, was super influential in getting TCP/IP internetworking going in Europe 🇪🇺 The fast growth of the Internet there shows both what people need and where things are heading. Researchers from universities, non-profit organizations, and industrial organizations are eager to communicate, and new applications keep coming that let them interact more and more closely... which will pose the networking challenge of building a very large, very powerful Internet 🌐

4.12 Dr. Stephen Kent, IAB Member 🔐

Stephen Kent is the Chief Scientist of BBN Communications, a division of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. 🧠 He's been doing network security research and development for over a decade. His work includes designing and building user authentication and access control systems, end-to-end encryption and access control systems for packet networks, performance analysis of security mechanisms, and designing secure transport layer and electronic message protocols 🔒

Dr. Kent chairs the Internet Privacy and Security Research Group and is a member of the Internet Activities Board. He served on the Secure Systems Study Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and he's on the National Research Council assessment panel for the NIST National Computer Systems Laboratory. He was a charter member of the board of directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research 🙌 Dr. Kent wrote a book chapter and loads of technical papers on packet network security, and he's been a referee, panelist, and session chair at a bunch of security conferences. He's lectured on network security for government agencies, universities, and private companies all over the United States, Western Europe, and Australia 🌍 He got his B.S. in mathematics from Loyola University of New Orleans, and his S.M., E.E., and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's a member of the ACM and Sigma Xi, and he shows up in Who's Who in the Northeast and Who's Who of Emerging Leaders 🏆

4.13 Anthony G. Lauck, IAB Member 🛠️

Since 1976, Anthony G. Lauck has been responsible for network architecture and advanced development at Digital Equipment Corporation 💻 He currently manages the Telecommunications and Networks Architecture and Advanced Development group. For the past fifteen years, his group has designed the network architecture and protocols behind Digital's DECnet computer networking products. They've also played a leading role in local area network standardization, including Ethernet, FDDI, and transparent bridged LANs, and in standardizing the OSI network and transport layers. Most recently, they completed the architecture for the next phase of DECnet, which is based on OSI while still providing backward compatibility with DECnet Phase IV 🙌 Before he moved into network architecture, he was responsible for setting the direction of Digital's PDP-11 communications products. He also worked at Autex, Inc., where he was a designer of a transaction processing system for securities trading, and at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where he developed an early remote batch system 📟

Mr. Lauck received his BA from Harvard in 1965. He's worked in a bunch of data communication areas, from designing physical links for local area networks to applications for distributed processing. His current interests include high speed local and wide area networks, multiprotocol networking, network security, and distributed processing 🧩 He was a member of the Committee on Computer-Computer Communications Protocols of the National Research Council, which did a comparison of the TCP and TP4 transport protocols for DOD and NBS. He was also a member of the National Science Foundation Network Technical Advisory Board. In December of 1984, Science Digest magazine recognized him as one of America's 100 brightest young scientists for his work on computer networking 🌟

In 1978 Vint Cerf came to Digital to give a lecture on TCP and IP, just before the big blizzard ❄️ I was happy to see that TCP/IP shared the same connectionless philosophy of networking as DECnet 💜 Some years later, Digital decided that future phases of DECnet would be based on standards. Since Digital was a multinational company, those standards would need to be international. Unfortunately, in 1980 ISO rejected TCP and IP on national political grounds 😤 When it looked like the emerging OSI standards were going to be limited to purely connection-oriented networking, I got really concerned and started efforts to standardize connectionless networking in OSI. As it turned out, TCP/IP kept its early lead over OSI, spread internationally as the Internet expanded, and became an international protocol suite that met my original needs. I hope the Internet can evolve into a multiprotocol structure that can accommodate changing networking technologies, and that it can do so with a minimum of religious fervor 🙏 It'll be exciting to solve problems like network scale and security, especially on a network that has to keep serving users while it evolves ✨

4.14 Dr. Barry Leiner, IAB Member 🧚

Dr. Leiner joined Advanced Decision Systems in September 1990, where he's responsible for corporate research directions 📊 Advanced Decision Systems is focused on creating information processing technology, systems, and products that enhance decision making power. Before joining ADS, Dr. Leiner was Assistant Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA Ames Research Center. In that role, he formulated and carried out research programs ranging from the development of advanced computer and communications technologies all the way to applying those technologies to scientific research 🚀 Before RIACS, he was Assistant Director for C3 Technology in the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), where he was responsible for a broad range of research programs aimed at building the technology base for large-scale survivable distributed command, control, and communication systems. Before that, he was a Senior Engineering Specialist with Probe Systems, an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and a Research Engineer with GTE Sylvania.

Dr. Leiner received his BEEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1967, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1969 and 1973, respectively 🎓 He's done research in a variety of areas, including direction finding systems, spread spectrum communications and detection, data compression theory, image compression, and most recently computer networking and its applications. He's published in these areas in both journals and conferences, and received the best paper of the year award in the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Transactions in 1979, and in the IEEE Communications Magazine in 1984 🏅 Dr. Leiner is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of ACM, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu.

My first exposure to the internet (actually Arpanet) was in 1977, when I got access as a DARPA contractor 🕹️ At that point, the Arpanet was mainly used to support DARPA and related activities, and it was limited to a fairly small set of users and sites. Internet technology was still being developed and demonstrated. My DARPA contract was related to the Packet Radio Network, and the main motivation for Internet technology was to connect the mobile Packet Radio Network to the long-haul Arpanet 📡 Now, only 13 years later, things have changed radically 😭 The Internet has grown by several orders of magnitude in size and connects a much wider community, including academic, commercial, and government users. It has spread well beyond the USA to include many organizations throughout the world 🌏 It has grown beyond the experimental network to provide operational service, and its influence is seen throughout the computer communications community 💖

4.15 Daniel C. Lynch, IAB Member ✨

okay bestie, meet Daniel C. Lynch 💅 He's 49 and the president and founder of Interop, Inc. (formerly Advanced Computing Environments) in Mountain View, California, a role he's had since 1985 🌸. He's a member of ACM, IEEE, and the IAB, and he's obsessed with computer networking, especially how networks actually behave in the wild 🔥. His main vehicle for all that is the annual INTEROP conference and exhibition.

Before that, he was Director of the Information Processing Division at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (USC-ISI) 🧚. He led the Arpanet team through the switch from the original NCP protocols to the TCP/IP protocols we use now, and he ran that whole effort with 75 people from 1980 to 1983 👑.

In the late 70s, he was Director of Computing Facilities at SRI International, looking after the computing needs of over 3,000 employees 💼. He also managed the computing lab for SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, which does research in robotics, vision, speech understanding, theorem proving, and distributed databases 🤖. While he was there, he did the initial debugging of the TCP/IP protocols together with BBN 🐛.

He's been in computer networking since 1973. Before that, he built realtime software for missile decoy detection for the USAF 🚀. For school, he did undergrad in mathematics and philosophy at Loyola University of Los Angeles, then got a Master's Degree in mathematics from UCLA in 1965 🎓.

Lynch's take is lowkey deep 🫶. The Internet grew because it solves simple problems in as simple a manner as possible. Putting together a huge Internet has not been easy, and "we still do not know how to do routing in a huge internet" 😭. Add the real-world need for commercial security and the wish for "classes of service," and you've got some big challenges. He thinks we'll have to get a lot more involved with operational provisioning, like the stuff phone companies and credit card firms have wrestled with for ages. Hopefully we can do that and still keep the friendly attitude Internetters have always had 🌈.

4.16 Dr. Jonathan B. Postel, IAB Member, RFC Editor 🧠

Jon Postel joined ISI in March 1976 as a member of the technical staff, and he's now Division Director of the Communications Division 💖. He's still deep in the Internet's evolution through a bunch of ISI projects: Gigabit Networking, Multimedia Conferencing, Protocol Engineering, Los Nettos, Parallel Computing System Research, and the Fast Parts Automated Broker ✨.

Earlier at ISI, he created the "Los Nettos" regional network for the Los Angeles area and made prototype implementations of several Internet protocols, including the Simple Mail Transport Protocol, the Domain Name Service, and an experimental Multimedia Mail system 📬. Before that, he studied how to convert the ARPANET from NCP to TCP, and he helped design a ton of protocols for the Internet community 🛠️.

Before ISI, Jon was at SRI International in Doug Engelbart's group, developing the NLS (later called Augment) system 🖥️. At SRI, he led a special project to write protocol specifications for the Defense Communication Agency for AUTODIN-II. Most of the development effort at ARC during that period went into the National Software Works. Before SRI, he spent a few months with Keydata redesigning and reimplementing the NCP on the DEC PDP-15 data management system used by ARPA. Before Keydata, he was at the Mitre Corporation in Virginia, where he studied ARPANET Network Control Protocol implementations 🔍.

He got his B.S. and M.S. in Engineering in 1966 and 1968 from UCLA, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA 🎓. He's an ACM member, he still takes part in the Internet Activities Board, and he serves as editor of the "Request for Comments" Internet document series 📜.

Jon's first ARPANET experience was at UCLA, while he was working in the group that became the Network Measurement Center 🌟. When they found out the first IMP would be installed at UCLA, they had to tackle a bunch of problems at once: work with the other early sites to develop protocols, and get their own computing environment in order, which meant creating a time-sharing operating system for the SDS Sigma-7 computer 💻. Since then, the ARPANET and then the Internet have kept growing, always faster than expected 🚀. He thinks three factors made the Internet succeed: 1) public documentation of the protocols, 2) free (or cheap) software for the popular machines, and 3) vendor independence 🫶.

4.17 Joyce K. Reynolds, IETF User Services Area Director 📚

Joyce K. Reynolds has been affiliated with USC/Information Sciences Institute since 1979 🌷. She's contributed to the DARPA Experimental Multimedia Mail System, the Post Office Protocol, the Telnet Protocol, and the Telnet Option Specifications, and she helped update the File Transfer Protocol 💌. Her current technical interests are internet protocols, internet management, technical researching, writing, and editing, Internet security policies, and Telnet Options 🦋. She also set up a brand new informational series of notes for the Internet community: FYI (For Your Information) RFCs. These are documents useful to network users, with general, broadly applicable information 📝.

Joyce got her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in the Social Sciences (History) from the University of Southern California (USC) 🎓. She's a member of the American Society of Professional and Executive Women, affiliated with Phi Alpha Theta (Honors Society), and listed in Who's Who in the American Society of Professional and Executive Women and USC's Who's Who in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences Alumni Directory 👑.

It's been an interesting twelve years for her in the ARPANET/Internet world 🌈. She went from the transition of the TENEX to TOPs-20 machines in 1979 to surviving the NCP to TCP transition in 1980. She celebrated the ISI 1000 Hour Club, when one of their TOPs-20 machines set a record by running 1000 consecutive hours without crashing 🙈. She watched the ARPANET split into the Milnet and Internet sides, and she survived the advent of Unix in 1985 💀. Her most memorable moments are the people who've contributed to the research and development of the Internet. Lots of hard, intense work, coupled with creative, exciting fun ✨. As for the future, there's a ton of discussion and enthusiasm about the next step in the Internet's evolution. An "international" Internet is on the very tip of the horizon, and utilizing the global Internet will improve the quality of collaborative research. She's looking forward to it 🧚.

4.18 Gregory Vaudreuil, IESG Member 🌈

Greg Vaudreuil currently serves as both the Internet Engineering Steering Group Secretary and the IETF Manager 💼. As IESG Secretary, he's responsible for shepherding Internet standards track protocols through the standards process 🚢. As IETF Manager, he shares responsibility with the IESG Area Directors for chartering and managing the progress of all working groups in the IETF 📋. He also chairs the Internet Mail Extensions working group of the IETF 📧.

He graduated from Duke University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a major in Public Policy Studies 🎓. He was thrust into the heart of the IETF when he accepted a position with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives to manage the explosive growth of the IETF 🌋.

5. Security Considerations 🔒

🚨 Security issues are not discussed in this memo, so don't read any security guarantees into it.

6. Author's Address 📮

Gary Scott Malkin
FTP Software, Inc.
26 Princess Street
Wakefield, MA 01880

Phone:  (617) 246-0900

EMail:  gmalkin@ftp.com
📦 where this page comes from