The NSFNET followed the CSNET, connecting the campuses of several colleges and supercomputing systems with a 56K core in 1986. The NSFNET was the first large-scale implementation of Internet technologies in a complex environment of many independently operated networks, and forced the Internet community to iron out technical issues arising from the …

The Internet was originally designed as a research network, but eventually morphed into a primarily commercial system. While “Internet 2” sounds like it might be a replacement for the Internet, it was really started as a way to interconnect high speed computing systems for researchers—a goal the Internet doesn’t really provide any longer. Dale Fink…

While identity is not directly a networking technology, it is closely adjacent to networking, and a critical part of the Internet’s architecture. In this episode of the History of Networking, Pamela Dingle joins Donald Sharpe and Russ White to discuss the humble beginnings of modern identity systems, including NDS and Streettalk. https://historyofn…

FARNT was a regional consortium of smaller network operators that eventually helped drive the adoption of TCP/IP and the global Internet, as well as helping efforts to commercialize Internet access. Join Donald Sharp and Russ White as Laura Breeden discusses the origins of FARNT, it’s importance in the adoption of early Internet technologies, and t…

The Cisco Technical Assistance Center, or TAC, was as responsible for the growth of computer networking as any technology or other organization. TAC trained the first generation of network engineers, both inside Cisco and out, creating a critical mass of talent that spread out into the networking world, created a new concept of certifications, and …

George Sadowsky was a pioneer in recognizing the importance of networking technology for economic development, particularly in developing economies. He has worked in over 50 countries to bring training and networking infrastructure to the local population. In this episode of the History of Networking, George recounts some of the early, pre-Internet…

European networks from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s underwent a lot of change, bolstered by the rise and fall of America Online, the laying of a lot of subsea cables, and the creation of several organizations, including EARN and RARE, to bolster the spread and use of the Internet. Daniele Bovio joins Donald Sharp and Russ White on this episode…

European networks from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s underwent a lot of change, bolstered by the rise and fall of America Online, the laying of a lot of subsea cables, and the creation of several organizations, including EARN and RARE, to bolster the spread and use of the Internet. Daniele Bovio joins Donald Sharp and Russ White on this episode…

Cable networks account for the majority of the connectivity at the network edge. Given we started with dial-up over plain old telephone lines, and then with DSL, and were promised “ATM to the home,” how did cable networks grab the edge? Rouzbeh Yassini joins Russ White and Donald Sharp to give us the history of cable networks. https://historyofnetw…

Before the large cable providers came on the scene, most people accessed the Internet through dial-up MODEMS, connecting to services like America Online, across plain old telephone lines. The entrance of cable providers, and cable MODEMs, allowed the edge of the Internet to explode, causing massive growth. Join Donald Sharp and I on this episode of…

While identity is adjacent to networking, it is an important part of the network engineering world—and is not well understood. Heather Flanagan joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to talk about SAML, unified identity, and some of the practical aspects of verifying a person’s identity. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/HeatherF-identity.mp3…

Communication Servers designed to support hundreds or thousands of users reached their peak capabilities just as dial-up service access began to recede in importance. In fact, many network engineers today have probably never managed a dial-up communications server, which were once used to connect everything from individual users to services like AO…

Google fascinates network engineers because of the sheer scale of their operations, and their obvious influence over the way networks are built and operated. In this episode of the History of Networking, Richard Hay joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to talk about some past designs and stories of failure and success in one of the world’s largest ope…

Dawit Bekele began his journey with the Internet while at college—but on returning to Africa, he discovered there was very little connectivity. While he was not involved in the initial stages of engineering the Internet in Africa, he began as an early user and proponent of connecting his home continent, and is now part of the Internet Society, help…

GRE was the first tunneling protocol ever designed and deployed—and although it largely been overtaken by VXLAN and other tunnel protocols, it is still in widespread use today. For this episode of the History of Networking, Stan Hanks, the inventor of GRE—and hence the inventor of the concept of tunneling in packet switched networks—joins us to des…

Started as a consulting company, SUSE was one of the first organizations to begin working in the development and commercialization of LINUX. Through the years, LINUX has become the base for much of the IT world, including many of the open source network operating systems. Dirk Hohndel joins the History of Networking to discuss the origins of SUSE L…

Ivan Pepelnjak was a founding member of the first IX in Slovenia twenty-five years ago. He joins us to describe the origins of the Internet, from the first dial-up circuits to the founding of the first IX and local DNS services here on the History of Networking. Ivan is an independent consultant and trainer; his work can be found at https://ipspace…

LINX is one of the first European Internet Exchanges created. Keith Mitchell joins the History of Networking to talk about the origins of LINX, and the important decisions that shaped its success and the IX community throughout Europe. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/Keith+Mitchell++-+LINX.mp3 download…

DNS servers and Internet Exchange Points (IXs) were crucial elements of the early Internet—without these, the entire Internet as we know it probably would not have happened. NETNOD and LINX were two of the earliest IXs in Europe, and NETNOD ran one of the earliest DNS resolvers in Europe, as well. Kurtis Lindqvist, who was involved early in both NE…

In this episode of the History of Networking, Daniel Karrenberg and Mirjam Kuehne join us to discuss their part in the origin of the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. As such, they allocate and register blocks of Internet number resources to Internet service providers (ISPs) and other or…

Each of the seven regional Network Internet Centers (NICs) has a unique origin story reflecting the time in which they were founded, and the operators and regions they represent. David Conrad joins the History of Networking podcast to discuss in the origins of the Asian-Pacific NIC (APNIC) and APRICOT. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/D…

This episode of the History of Networking is a little different. Because it is the first of April, we have a roundtable of several April 1 RFC authors discussing their work, and a short discussion on the history of the April 1 RFC series. The authors we have on the episode are Donald Eastlake, RFC3092, the Etymology of Foo; Richard Hay, RFC5841, TC…

Path Computation Element (PCE) is designed to allow the computation of paths for MPLS and GMPLS Point to Point and Point to Multi-point Traffic Engineered LSPs. Adrian Farrel, who was involved in the early work on designing an specifying PCE, joins us in this episode of the History of Networking to describe the purposes, process, and challenges inv…

In this episode of the History of Networking, Raj Jain joins us to talk about his early work with TCP/IP, DECnet, Frame Relay, and congestion control mechanisms. He is the co-inventor of the DEC-bit scheme for congestion avoidance in computer networks which has been adapted for implementation in Frame Relay networks as forward explicit congestion n…

The Internet Architecture Board “provides long-range technical direction for Internet development, ensuring the Internet continues to grow and evolve as a platform for global communication and innovation.” David Clark joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to discuss the origins of the IAB, and relate his experience in the early days of the Internet. ht…

The early Internet was not only about designing transport protocols, developing control planes, and understanding how to build faster physical transports. Measurement played a huge role in understanding what needed to be changed, what needed to be developed and understanding why the protocols that make the Internet (and other networks) “go” really …

On this episode of the History of Networking, organized through the Association of Computing Machinery, Jennifer Rexford joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to discuss the history of programmable control planes. Dr. Rexford is the Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering at Princeton University in New Jersey. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.…

BSD is one of the first UNIX implementations, and the IP stack in BSD is one of the first widely used open-source implementations of TCP/IP. Rodney Grimes joins us at the History of Networking to talk about the origins of BSD and these first IP implementations. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/Rodney+Grimes+-+BSD.mp3 download…

Interop is the longest running “show” in the networking space—but it didn’t not start as a “show” at all. Dan Lynch, the founder of Interop, joins us at the History of Networking to talk about how Interop really started (hint, it’s in the name). One important lesson to learn through this discussion: it is not enough to have standards or open source…

Many different kinds of backplanes have been used to connect line cards and other components in network devices like routers, switches, and firewalls. The original custom-designed busses gave way to plain Ethernet busses, then to crossbars and Clos fabrics. Along the way more exotic designs, such as virtual meshes on top of toroids have been used, …

Nick McKeown developed the open source P4 language for describing how a switching engine processes packets, allowing engineers to specify and implement customized forwarding to support policy and new protocols in the field. Dr. McKeown joins us on this episode of the History of Networking to discuss the origins of P4, and the motivations behind its…

Sue Hares, cochair of the IDR and I2RS working groups in the IETF, joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to talk about the origins of one of the first open source routing stacks, GateD. Sue was involved in MERIT and the university programs that originated this open source software, and managed its transition to a commercial offering. https://historyofn…

The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is one of the foundational technologies of packet switched networks. TCP not only provides windowed flow control, it also manages the retransmission of data when errors are detected, and sockets for addressing individual applications on a host. Doug Comer was involved in the early development of TCP/IP. ht…

YANG is a data modeling language used to model configuration data, state data, Remote Procedure Calls, and notifications for network management protocols, described in RFC7950. The origins of YANG are rooted in work Phil Shafer did in building an interface system for JUNOS. Phil joins us on this episode of the History of Networking to discuss the h…

The Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP, was originally specified in RFC1067, and most recently in RFC1157. The original intent was to make “all IP and TCP implementations be network manageable”—an early form of providing a machine-readable interface so operators could “automate all the things.” Craig Partridge played a key role in the earl…

Early in the history of the Internet, there were serious discussions about whether IP or CLNS should be adopted. Dave Piscatello joins this episode of the History of Networking to discuss how and why the decision to standardize on IP was made. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/Dave+Piscatello+-+OSI+and+IP.mp3 You can subscribe to the his…

Peter Jones joins the History of Networking to discuss the origins, drivers, and challenges surrounding NBASE-T. While this is a new technology, the work involved in developing the technology and products to make it real reach several years back into the past. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/Peter+Jones+-+NBASET.mp3 You can subscribe t…

In these two episodes of the History of Networking, Dan Grossman joins Donald and I to discuss the history of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). While this is a technology that is no longer widely used, it had a major influence on the networking world. https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/Dan+Grossman+-+ATM+01.mp3https://historyofnetworking.…

Fun fact from this episode of the History of Networking: because of export rules, students in South Korea had to rebuild the TCP/IP stack for the PDP11 and other hosts in order to bring the first IP link up in southeastern Asia. In this recording, Donald and I are joined by Kilnam Chon. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/networkcollectiv…

In this episode of the History of Networking, Donald Sharp and I talk to Luca Martini about the origins of pseudowires—one of the more interesting innovations in the use of MPLS. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/hon-pseudowires.mp3 Outro Music: Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.…

On this episode of the History of Networking, Donald and I are joined by Nathaniel Borenstein, who is the primary author of the original MIME specifications. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/HoN-MIME-Borenstein.mp3 Outro Music: Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed und…

Dave Oran joins Donald and I to talk about the history of DECnet at Digital Equipment—including the venerable IS-IS interior gateway protocol. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/HoN-DecNet-Oran.mp3 Outro Music: Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons…

OpenConfig is an effort amongst many cooperative network operators to define vender-neutral data models for configuring and managing networks programatically. In this episode we talk with Anees Shaikh and Rob Shakir about the roots of the OpenConfig project and where it’s at currently. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollect…

Terry Slattery and Rob Widmar join Donald and I to talk about the history of one of the most ubiquitous elements of network engineering, the Cisco CLI. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/HoN-CLI-Slattery-Widmer.mp3 Outro Music: Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under…

Traffic engineering (TE) is one of the most complex technologies used in large scale networks today. George Swallow joins us for a look at how and why TE was invented, and where some of the ideas came from. https://media.blubrry.com/networkcollective/s/thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/HoN-MPLS-TE-George-Swallow.mp3 Outro Music: D…