RFC 1607
A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
RFC 1607: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY ✨
Okay bestie, this one is a whole time-travel mystery 🕰️🔮 It's an Informational RFC from the Network Working Group, written by V. Cerf of the Internet Society and dated 1 April 1994. So yes, it's giving April Fools energy 🃏 The title block doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates.
Status of this Memo 📜
Real talk, this memo is just for information for the Internet community 💖 It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind, so nobody has to implement anything from it. Distribution is unlimited, so share it with everyone 🌸
A NOTE TO THE READER 🫣
Okay, this part is literally so spooky 👻 The letters below were found in September 1993 inside a reverse time-capsule that was apparently sent from 2023. The author can't vouch for whether the letter contents are accurate 😭 Spectral and radiation analysis say the capsule came from a time later than 2020, but that's it. Nobody knows what might happen if readers take actions based on the future history in these documents. The author's final message is literally "I trust you will be particularly careful with our collective futures!" 🥺🫶
THE LETTERS 💌
Letter one: from David Kenter to Jonathan Bradel
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!David is so settled in 🏠🪐 He says he's now in his new offices at the Exobiology Lab at the Interplanetary Space Exploration Agency's base here on Mars. The trip out was uneventful, and he got through a LOT of reading for his three-year term. There's an excellent library at the lab, plus reasonable communications back home thanks to the CommRing satellites that went up last year. The transfer rates are only a few terabits per second, but he says that's usually adequate for the most part 🛰️
He's been running simulations to test different theories of bio-history on Mars 🧬 He attached the output of one of the more interesting runs, and he says the results are best viewed with a model VR-95HR/OS headset plus the peripheral glove adapter 🥽 He also says to find an outdoor location if you turn on the olfactory simulator, because some of the outputs are pretty rank 💀 The big takeaway is that atmospheric outgassing seriously interfered with any potential complex life form development 🌋
They also tried some runs for what would happen if an atmospheric confinement/replenishment system had been in place, but he says those results are too speculative to be more than entertaining right now. People have been talking seriously about terra-forming options, but the economics are still very unclear, and so are the time-frames for any useful results 🌍➡️🔴
David has also been trying new exercises to recover from the long trip out 🤸 He attached a sample neuroscan clip to show the kinds of gymnastics that are possible in this gravity field. He admits his timing is still pretty lousy, but he hopes it'll improve with practice 🙈
His big ask is that Jonathan track down the latest NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT 🔧 He needs some lab gear that isn't available on Mars, and it would be way easier to fabricate with the toolkit. His version is NTK-R5 (2020), and he knows a lot has been added since then.
Then he has a little side note for Therese. He wanted her to see the simulation runs too, and she might coax better results from the EXAFLOP array at CERN if she still has an account there 💻 He says they're still limping along with the 50 PFLOP system that Danny Hillis donated to the agency a few years back 😭
The last bit is the cutest part 🍇 He attached an HD video of the greenhouse efforts to grow grapes from cuttings that were brought out five years ago. He says they're still a long way from '82 Beaucastel 🍷 He also has to get ready for a sampling trip to Olympus Mons, so he's sending this off for now.
Warmest regards, David 🫶
Letter two: from Jonathan Bradel to David Kenter
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!Oops, the headers above are actually from Therese's letter, so I'm keeping this one honest. Jonathan's reply is next 💫
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!Jonathan says thanks for the news and the data, and he's glad David is settled and back at work 🥰 He and Melanie have been making heavy use of the new darkside reflector telescope 🔭 Thanks to the new petabit fiber links that came out last year, they have very effective controls from Luna City ⚡ They've been running synthetic aperture observations by linking the darkside array to the Earth-orbiting telescopes. That gives them an effective diameter of about 200,000 miles, which is absolutely iconic 😭 He can hardly wait to see what they can do with some of the most distant Quasars 🌌
Then the vibes get a little scary 😰 Melanie complained of a recurring vertigo last month. None of the usual treatments helped, so they did a molecular-level brain bioscan. It found an unexpectedly high level of localized neuro-transmitter synthesis, but it's been corrected now with auto-gene therapy 🧬 Phew.
Jonathan attached the latest NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT, like David asked 🧰 This version integrates the Knowbot control subsystem. That lets the NanoSystem be fully linked to the Internet for control, data sharing, and inter-system communication 🌐 He also mentions that the Internet Society negotiated a nice discount for nano-fab services, in case David needs something fancier than what the ISEA folks have at XOB 💸 He could put the NanoSystem on the Solex Mars/Luna run and get it to David pretty quickly 🚀
Keep in touch! 💜 Jon and Melanie
Letter three: from Therese Troisema to David Kenter
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! 🥐 Therese is writing from the Hyatt Geosync, where David's email got forwarded to her from INRIA 🏨 She and Louis are vacationing there for two weeks. She has some free time, so she'll set up a simulation run on her EXAFLOP account 🖥️ They have VR-95HR/OS headsets there for entertainment, but she says they'll work fine for checking the simulation results 🥽
Now the history nerd in her is coming out 📚 She's been researching the development of the Interplanetary Internet and found some rather interesting results. She calls it a kind of paleo-networking effort, since some of the early days reach back to the 1960s. She says it's hard to believe anyone even knew what a computer network was back then 🤯
Did you know the original work on the Internet was intended for military network use? 🪖 It's wild to think about, since it's so different now. 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 bunch of packet networks were built by ARPA and others. That included work by the predecessor to INRIA, IRIA, which developed a packet network called CIGALE. The CYCLADES network operating system was built on top of it 🇫🇷 The French PTT also worked on an experimental system called RCP, which later became a commercial system called TRANSPAC 📞
Therese also says that some seminal work happened in the mid-late 1960s in England, at the National Physical Laboratory. It was on a single node switch that apparently served as the first local area network!! 😭 She can hardly believe all of this happened over 50 years ago 🕰️
A radio-based network was developed in the same 1960s/early 1970s time period, called ALOHANET. It featured use of a randomly-shared radio channel 📡 That 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 Protocol/Internet Protocol"). Back then they were used with devices called gateways, which later became known as "routers" 🚦 The gateways connected packet networks to each other. The combo of gateways and TCP/IP software got implemented on a lot of different operating systems, especially something called UNIX 🐧
The implementations got so trusted that all the computers on the ARPANET, and any networks linked to it by gateways, were required to switch over to TCP/IP at the beginning of 1983 💫 For a lot of historians, 1983 marks the start of global Internet growth. Still, it had its origins in the research effort that started at Stanford University in 1973, ten years earlier 🎓
She's going to read more about this, and if David is interested, she can report on what happened after 1983 📖✨
Last thing: she'll leave any simulation results from the EXAFLOP runs in the private access directory in the CERN TERAFLEX archive 🗂️ David can get to them using the JIT-ticket she attached, which is protected with his public key 🔐
Au revoir, mon ami, Therese 🌷
Letter four: from David Kenter to Therese Troisema
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 HistoryDavid is so happy Therese got a short vacation, since she and Louis work way too hard 🥹 He changed the subject line to match the new thread the discussion is taking. He asks how the whole system got to the size it is now, since it sounds like it started pretty small 🌱
David 💕
Letter five: from Jonathan Bradel to David Kenter
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 HistoryHello everyone! 👋 Jon has been following the discussion with great interest 👀 He remembers an effort in the mid-1980s to connect what people thought were "super computers," and he thinks that had something to do with how the system evolved 🖥️✨ He asks Therese if her research told her anything about that.
Jon 🫶
Letter six, beginning: from Therese Troisema to Jonathan Bradel
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 HistoryJon, 🌸
okay so the US National Science Foundation (NSF) set up 5 super computer centers around the US 🖥️✨ and also gave some seed funding for what they called "intermediate level" packet networks. Those were connected to a national backbone they called "NSFNET" 🌐 The intermediate level nets linked the user community networks (mostly research labs and universities back then) to the backbone that the super computer sites were plugged into. According to my notes, NSF planned to cut funding for the various networking activities over time, because they figured the networks could become self-sustaining 💅 Lots of the intermediate level networks wanted a bigger market, so they turned to industry, and NSF was like, sure, go for it 🙌
The equipment market went absolutely ballistic in the last half of the 1980s 🚀 Routers (the new name for gateways), work stations, network servers, and local area networks were everywhere. That huge equipment boom then created a brand new market in commercial Internet services, and honestly it's giving main character origin story 🎬 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 worldwide and over 2 million computers 🤯 They must have thought this was a pretty big system back then, and tbh it was! At the time it was the largest collection of networks and computers ever interconnected 👑 Looking back from our perspective, though, it 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 got 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 "Collaboratories" 🧑🤝🧑 The whole idea was that people and computers could do all kinds of collaborative work if they had the right networks to link their computer systems, plus the right applications to handle 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
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 HistoryTherese,
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 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 replacing 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 as 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!! 💀 Jon
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 HistoryJon,
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 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 responsibility 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 with 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, possibly at 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 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 🌍💜
Okay so, that brings us up to about 20 years ago, which honestly still feels like a totally different world from where we are now 💫 With over a billion computers in the system and most of the populations of information-intensive countries fully linked, the more technically-astute folks back at the turn of the millennium might have had some inkling of what was in store for the next two decades 🔮
Therese 💖
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-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 HistoryTherese 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. Lowkey iconic. 🔥 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 down to sizes more like what we're used to today ✨ Using pico- and femto- molecular fabrication methods, it has been possible to build very compact, extremely high speed computing and communication devices. It's giving future. 🚀
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're 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 🌈
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-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! 🦋
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📦 where this page comes from
- ietf: rfc1607 1994-04
- 💖 girlified by claude-haiku-5-5 on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms