features of the internet history · paul baran, an electrical engineer, joined rand in 1959. the us...

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1 IntroductionThe concept of computer networking started in theearly 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy (MIT) with the vision of an “On-line communityof people”. Computers should facilitate communica-tions between people and be a support for humandecision processes. In 1961 an MIT PhD thesis byLeonard Kleinrock introduced some of the earliesttheoretical results on queuing networks. Around thesame time a series of Rand Corporation papers,mainly authored by Paul Baran, sketched a hypotheti-cal system for communication while under attack thatused “message blocks” each of which contained anaddress to identify the destination. In the latter half ofthe 60s, these ideas had got enough momentum forthe U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency– ARPA (later renamed DARPA) – to initiate devel-opment and fund research on this new promisingcommunications technology now known as packetswitching. A contract was awarded in December1968 to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) todevelop and deploy a four node network based on thistechnology. Called the ARPANET, the initial fournodes were fielded one a month from September toDecember 1969. The network quickly grew to com-prise academic research groups across the UnitedStates, including Hawaii, and in 1973 also extendedto Norway and England. During the early 1970s,DARPA developed two alternate implementations ofpacket switched networks – over satellite and groundradio. The protocols to link these three networks andthe computers connected to them, known as TCP/IP,were integral to the development of the Internet. Theinitial nascent Internet, consisting of those three net-works, was first demonstrated in 1977, although ear-lier two network tests had undoubtedly been carriedout. Through independent implementations, extensivetesting, and refinements, a sufficiently mature andstable internet technology was developed (with inter-national participation) and in 1980 TCP/IP wasadopted as a standard for the US Department of

Defense (DOD). It is uncertain when DoD reallystandardized on the entire protocol suite built aroundTCP/IP, since for several years they also followed theISO standards track.

The development of the Internet, as we know it today,went through three phases. The first one was theresearch and development phase, sponsored andsupervised by ARPA. Research groups that activelycontributed to the development process and manywho explored its potential for resource sharing werepermitted to connect to and use the network. Thisphase culminated in 1983 with the conversion of theARPANET from use of its initial host protocol,known as NCP, to the newly standardized TCP/IPprotocol. Then we had the start of the interim phase.All hosts on the ARPANET were required to convertto TCP/IP during early January 1983, but in realitythe conversion lasted until June 1983, during whichtime both the old protocols and the new protocolswere run simultaneously. ARPANET was dividedinto two parts interconnected by a set of filteringgateways. Most defense institutions were attached toone part called MILNET, which was to be integratedwith the Defense Data Network and operated by theDefense Communications Agency (DCA). The other– open – part, still called ARPANET, contained uni-versity institutions, non-defense research establish-ments and a few defense organizations includingDARPA. The newly reconstituted ARPANETremained in operation until 1990, when it was decom-missioned. By that time, responsibility for the openpart was taken over by National Science Foundation(NSF). NSF had created a small experimental net-work which was replace in 1988 by a higher speednetwork called NSFNET. The NSFNET was theresult of efforts by IBM, MCI and MERIT, the latterhaving their contract with NSF. Other organizationsalso provided funding for relevant parts of the Inter-net. And gradually many of the regional parts of thenetwork were privatized. The network was now, in

Features of the Internet historyThe Norwegian contribution to the development

P A A L S P I L L I N G A N D Y N G V A R L U N D H

Paal Spilling is

professor at the

Department of

informatics,

Univ. of Oslo

and University

Graduate Center

at Kjeller

Yngvar Lundh is

an independent

consultant

Telektronikk 3.2004

This article provides a short historical and personal view on the development of packet-switching,

computer communications and Internet technology, from its inception around 1969 until the full-

fledged Internet became operational in 1983. In the early 1990s, the internet backbone at that time,

the National Science Foundation network – NSFNET, was opened up for commercial purposes. At that

time there were already several operators providing commercial services outside the internet. This

presentation is based on the authors’ participation during parts of the development and on literature

studies. This provides a setting in which the Norwegian participation and contribution may be better

understood.

114 Telektronikk 3.2004

principle, open to anyone doing computer scienceresearch and international extensions were soon putin place. The number of attached institutions andusers grew rapidly. The ARPANET technology hadserved its purpose, was now being phased out andreplaced by higher-capacity lines and commercialrouters. This coincided approximately with theappearance of the very first Web-browser. The WorldWide Web was invented at CERN in 1989 and hasproved to be a major contributor to the usefulness ofthe Internet. A few years later, in 1993, the restric-tions on commercial activity in the NSFNET werelifted, and the Mosaic browser was introduced by theUniversity of Illinois. This was the start of the thirdphase, the commercial phase, resulting in an explo-sive growth in geographic coverage, number of users,and traffic volume. Of course, email and file transferhad already been in place for two decades, but the useof web browsers made it easier to use and opened upa larger world of information access on a scale neverbefore seen.

For many years the Internet and its concepts wereneglected by the telecom operators and the otherEuropean research communities. In the last chapterwe attempt to shed light on some of the importantfactors contributing to this effect.

2 The prelude; the inception ofpacket switching

There has been a debate for some time about whoinvented packet switching; was it Kleinrock at MIT,Paul Baran at Rand Corporation, or Donald Daviesat the National Physics Laboratory in England?Donald Davies is recognized as the person whocoined the term packet. We do not take a stand here.We believe all three studied, from a conceptual view-point, different aspects of the store-and-forward tech-nology, a key concept behind packet switching. Weprovide a brief description of their research relevantto packet switching.

Leonard (Len) Kleinrock, a PhD student at MIT,published his first paper on digital network communi-cations titled “Information Flow in Large Communi-cation Nets”, in July 1961 [1]. This was the firstpaper describing queuing networks and analyzingmessage switching. He developed his ideas further inhis 1962 PhD thesis, and then published a compre-hensive analytical treatment of digital networks in hisbook “Communication Nets” in 1964 [2].

After completing his PhD in 1962, Kleinrock becameProfessor at UCLA. There he later established and ledthe Network Measurement Center (NMC), consistingof a group of graduate students working in the area of

digital networks. In October 1968, ARPA awarded acontract to Kleinrock’s NMC to perform ARPANETperformance measurements and identify areas for net-work improvement.

Paul Baran, an electrical engineer, joined RANDin 1959. The US Air Force had recently establishedone of the first wide area computer networks for theSAGE radar defense system, and had an increasinginterest in robust and survivable wide area communi-cations networks. Baran began an investigation intodevelopment of survivable communications net-works. The results were first presented in a briefingto the Air Force in the summer of 1961, and later, in1964, as a series of eleven comprehensive paperstitled “On Distributed Communications” [3, 4].

The series of reports described in remarkable detailan architecture for a distributed, survivable communi-cations network for transport of speech and data. Itwas based on store-and-forward of message units of1024 bits, dynamically adaptive routing, and couldwithstand serious destruction to individual nodes orlinks without loss of end-to-end communications. Atthe time, the technology to implement this architec-ture cost effectively did not exist. Apparently the AirForce did not see the value of this new concept at thattime and did not follow up the recommendations inthe report.

Donald W. Davies at the National Physical Labora-tory (NPL) in England, apparently unaware ofBaran’s ideas, developed similar concepts. He gothis original idea in 1965: to achieve communicationbetween computers by utilizing a fast message-switching communication service [5]. Long messageshad to be split into chunks, called packets, and sentseparately so as to minimize the risk of congestion.This was the same approach taken by ARPA, but theARPANET initially used the term “message switch-ing” and later adopted Davies’ terminology. Thestore-and-forward of packets became known aspacket-switching.

Davies proposed in 1967 a plan [6] for a communica-tions system between a set of terminals and a set ofcomputers. It was based on store-and-forward ofpackets in a mesh of switching nodes interconnectedby high-speed lines. Terminals were to be served byone or more interface computers. These interfacecomputers acted as packet assembly/disassemblybetween the network and the terminals. The practicaloutcome of the NPL activity was a local packet-switched communication network that grew in thecoming years, to serve about 200 terminals and adozen or so computers.

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3 ARPANET; the start of a new eraIn the latter half of the 1960s the packet-switchingconcept was mature enough to be realized in prac-tice. We introduce the four persons most influentialto the creation of ARPANET and subsequently theinternet. Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, around 1960, had thevision of a “Galactic network” and provided themain inspiration. Lawrence Roberts published thenetwork plan in 1967 and led the early developmentof ARPANET. When Roberts left ARPA in 1973,Robert Kahn took over the responsibility for thedevelopment process and brought it to its full fruitionover a period of more than ten years. He was assistedby Vinton Cerf in developing the TCP/IP protocols,the true heart of the internet. In our opinion these twopeople are the main inventors of the internet, butassisted by many individuals and research groups ina great collaborative effort.

Dr. J.C.R. Licklider did research on psychoacousticsat MIT in the late 1950s. He had the unusual educa-tional background as engineer and psychologist, andsaw early the need for computers in the analysis ofhis research results. Licklider joined Bolt, Beranekand Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1957to pursue psychoacoustic research. Here he was givenaccess to one of the first minicomputers, a PDP-1from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Hedeveloped the vision of an “On-line community ofpeople”, expressed in a seminal paper in 1960 called“Man-Computer Symbiosis” [7, 8], in which hedescribed an interactive computer assistant that couldanswer questions, perform simulation, display resultsgraphically, and extrapolate solutions for new situa-tions from past experience. In this way, computerscould facilitate communications between people andbe a support for human decision processes. Thesewere quite futuristic ideas at that time, and was thetrue start of the project that later got named ARPANET.

Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was employed by ARPA in 1962as leader of the division that was later named “Infor-mation Processing Techniques Office” or IPTO. Thisoffice is tasked with initiating and financing ad-vanced research and development in information pro-cessing of vital importance to the American Defense.The military had a long tradition of partnership withuniversity research. Most of the basic research forDOD was performed in the academic arena. In Lick-lider’s days the office funded top-level academic sci-entists called “Principal Investigators”. Licklider leftthe IPTO office in 1964, but had a second term fromJanuary 1974 through August 1975.

Lawrence (Larry) Roberts, after finishing his PhDat MIT in 1958, joined MIT Lincoln Laboratories andstarted research on computer networks. He was

inspired by Licklider’s visions. In February 1965,ARPA awarded a contract to Lincoln Laboratory toexperiment with computer networking. In October1965, the Lincoln Labs TX-2 computer talked to theQ32 computer at System Development Corporation(SDC) in Santa Monica California, via a dial-up1200 bit/s phone line. This was one of the world’sfirst digital network communications between com-puters. The results of this research were presented byMerill and Roberts, at the AFIPS Conference in Octo-ber 1966, in a paper titled “Toward a CooperativeNetwork of Time-Shared Computers” [9]. In Decem-ber 1966 Lawrence Roberts was asked to join ARPAto lead the IPTO effort in developing a wide area dig-ital communications network, which was later namedthe ARPANET.

Larry Roberts based his network plans on the MITresearch performed by Kleinrock, the BBN researchof Licklider, and also on his own experience. He pre-sented his networking plan at the ACM Gatlinburgconference in October 1967 [10]. It contained plansfor inter-computer communications and the intercon-nection of networks. Roberts met with the NPLresearcher Roger Scantlebury during the conferenceand learned about their work and the work of Baran.Later Roberts studied the Baran reports and met withhim. The Baran work did not have any significantimpact on Roberts’ plan, according to Roberts’“Internet Chronology” (http://www.ziplink.net/~lroberts/InternetChronology.html). The NPL paper[6] convinced Larry Roberts to use higher speed lines(50 kbit/s) between the nodes and use the wordpacket.

Larry Roberts left ARPA in October 1973 to becomethe second President of Telenet, providing a commer-cial data communication service based on the X.25standard. He was followed for a brief period by Dr.J.C.R. Licklider as director of the IPTO office. In1979 Telenet was sold to GTE, to become the datadivision of SPRINT.

Larry Roberts has been the recipient of numerousawards. He shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for2001 with Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and LeonardKleinrock for their work on the ARPANET andInternet.

Robert (Bob) Kahn obtained his PhD degree fromPrinceton University in 1964. He then worked withthe Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and subse-quently became Assistant Professor of ElectricalEngineering at MIT. Then he joined Bolt, Beranekand Newman (1966 – 1972), where he was responsi-ble for the system design of the ARPANET, the firstpacket-switched network, and wrote the technical


proposal to ARPA that won the contract for BBN.The research team, led by Frank Heart, proposed touse mini-computers as the switching element in thenetwork. The team consisted of Bob Kahn, SeveroOrnstein, Dave Walden and others. After awardingthe contract to BBN, Bob Kahn wrote the Host –IMP technical specification.

In 1972 Bob Kahn was asked by ARPA to organize ademonstration of an ARPANET network, connecting40 different computers, at the International ComputerCommunication Conference in October 1972, makingthe network widely known for the first time to techni-cal people from around the world [18]. Organizingthe demonstration was a major undertaking, to pushand coordinate all involved parties to get everythingto work reliably in time for the conference. Thedemonstration was a great success.

Bob Kahn moved to ARPA immediately after theconference, initially as program manager withresponsibility for managing the Packet Radio, PacketVoice and SATNET projects. He later became chiefscientist, deputy director and subsequently director ofthe IPTO office. While Director of IPTO, he initiatedthe United States government’s billion dollar Strate-gic Computing Program, the largest computerresearch and development program ever undertakenby the federal government. Dr. Kahn conceived theidea of open-architecture networking. He is co-inven-tor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible fororiginating ARPA’s Internet Program. Dr. Kahn alsocoined the term “National Information Infrastructure”(NII) in the mid 1980s, which later became morewidely known as the “Information Super Highway”.Kahn left ARPA late 1985, after thirteen years. In1986 he founded the Corporation for NationalResearch Initiatives (CNRI). CNRI was created as anot-for-profit organization to provide leadership andfunding for research and development of the NationalInformation Infrastructure. He has been the recipientof numerous awards and received several honoraryuniversity degrees for his outstanding achievements.In 1997 president Clinton presented the US NationalMedal of Technology to Kahn and Cerf.

As President of CNRI, Kahn has continued to nurturethe development of the Internet over the years throughshepherding the standards process and related activities.

Vinton (Vint) Cerf did graduate work at UCLA from1967 until he got his PhD in 1972. ARPA releasedthe “Request for Proposals” in August 1968. As aresult, the UCLA people proposed to ARPA to orga-nize and run a Network Measurement Center for theARPANET project. The team included among others:Len Kleinrock, Stephen Crocker, Jon Postel, Robert

Braden, Michael Wingfield, David Crocker, and VintCerf.

Vint Cerf’s interest in networking was strongly in-fluenced by the work he did at the Network Measure-ment Center at UCLA. Bob Kahn, then at BBN, cameout to UCLA to participate in stress-testing the initialfour-node network, and had a very productive collab-oration with Vint Cerf. Vint did the necessary pro-gramming overnight, and together they did theexperiments during the day.

In November 1972, Cerf took up an assistant profes-sorship post in computer science and electrical engi-neering at Stanford, and was one of the first peoplethere who had an interest in computer networking.The very earliest work on the TCP protocols wasdone at Stanford, BBN and University College Lon-don (UCL). The initial design work was done in VintCerf’s group of PhD students at Stanford. One of themembers of the group was Dag Belsnes from the Uni-versity of Oslo. He did work on the correctness ofprotocol design. The first draft of TCP came out inthe fall of 1973. A paper by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerfon internetting appeared in May 1974 in IEEE Trans-actions on Communications [20] and the first specifi-cation of the TCP protocol was published as an Inter-net Experiment Note in December 1974. Then thethree groups began concurrent implementations of theTCP protocol. So the effort at developing the Internetprotocols was international from the beginning.

Vint Cerf worked for ARPA from 1976 till 1982,having a leading role in the development of theInternet and internet-related technologies. In 1982 hebecame vice president for MCI Digital InformationService, leading the engineering of MCI Mail Sys-tem, the first commercial mail service to be con-nected to the internet. Then, in 1986, he became VicePresident of the Corporation for National ResearchInitiatives (CNRI), a position he held until 1994.Then he joined MCI, and is now senior vice presidentof Technology Strategy.

Vint Cerf has been the recipient of numerous awards,both nationally and internationally. In 1997, PresidentClinton presented the US National Medal of Technol-ogy to Cerf and Kahn.


4 ARPANET; the research anddevelopment process

Here we go briefly through the research and develop-ment process, from the point in time where therequirements were formulated and the first researchcontracts were awarded, till the network was opera-tional and covered the continental USA and with two“tentacles” – to Hawaii and to Norway, and fromthere onwards to England.

The planned network consisted of two main compo-nents:

• The packet-switches or nodes (implemented onminicomputers), should be interconnected in amesh network by means of high-speed telephonelines and 50 kbit/s modems, to permit alternativeroutes between any sender-receiver pair. The inter-face between a node and a host was standardized toenable hosts of different makes and operating sys-tems to connect to the network.

• Each host computer was connected to its dedicatednode (communications front-end). The software inthe hosts should permit resource sharing and sup-port person-to-person communications.

To implement the plan, ARPA awarded contracts tothe following institutions in the last quarter of 1968:

• Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Boston;Frank Heart led the group with responsibility todevelop the packet-switching nodes (called Inter-face Message Processors, or IMPs), deploy them,and to monitor and maintain the network;

• University of California Los Angeles (UCLA);Professor Len Kleinrock led the group with respon-sibility for performance studies of the network bymeans of simulation and real measurements;

• Network Analysis Corporation (NAC); HowardFrank and his team with responsibility for develop-ing the network topology subject to cost and relia-bility constraints, and for analyzing the networkeconomics;

• Stanford Research Institute (SRI); to establish aNetwork Information Center (NIC) as part of DougEngelbart’s group.

The initial four IMPs were fielded at the end of 1969.The first one was installed at UCLA in September.Due to Len Kleinrock’s early theoretical work onpacket switching and his focus on network analysis,design and measurements, his Network MeasurementCenter (NMC) was selected to be the first host on the

network. The next node was installed at SRI in Octo-ber. Doug Engelbart led a project called “Augmenta-tion of the Human Intellect” at SRI, which includedthe early hypertext system NLS. NLS was the firstadvanced collaborative oN-Line text System [11],and included many of the modern text editing func-tions like mouse, cut-and-paste, hypertext, and a win-dow-based user interface. In fact, many of the vision-ary concepts demonstrated by Engelbart in 1968really became practical many years later when per-sonal workstations interconnected in networksbecame economically feasible. Doug Engelbart alsohad a journaling system under development. It wasintended to be the basis for the Network InformationCenter (NIC). Dick Watson was the leader of thistask initially.

Soon after SRI was on the network, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock’s group atUCLA to SRI.

Subsequently, in 1972, NIC was established as a sep-arate project at SRI, with Elisabeth (Jake) Feinler asleader. NIC should maintain hostname-to-addressmapping tables (in use in 1970) and be a repositoryfor network-related reports and documentation(Requests for Comments, etc).

Two other IMPs were then installed, one at UC SantaBarbara and one at the University of Utah. These twogroups did research in visualization; visualization ofmathematical functions at Santa Barbara and 3-Dvisualization at Utah.

A key feature of the network was to use dedicatedcomputers, called packet switches, interconnected ina mesh network and responsible for the transport ofdata in the form of packets. The network should berobust against link and/or node failures. Hence themesh network should provide alternative routes whenforwarding packets, to circumvent failures in the net-work.

Another key feature of ARPANET was the use of anetwork control center – NCC. NCC had the abilityto monitor each node in the network, start and stopnode interfaces, start and stop nodes, perform diag-nostic tests of individual nodes and lines, and down-load new software into nodes from NCC. This madeARPANET a very powerful laboratory for studyingand developing networking technology, all withoutrequiring personnel to travel to all the greatly sepa-rated sites. It should be noted that NCC served twopurposes, to be an efficient tool in the developmentprocess and to manage and maintain the network. Itwas always an important goal in the development


process to arrive at a technology that would not needcentralized control.

While the performance of the network was analyzedand measured, the Network Working Group led bySteve Crocker at UCLA worked intensely to finishdesigning the host-to-host protocol called “NetworkControl Program” (NCP) [12]. NCP was part of thenode software and provided a standardized interfaceto the attached hosts. The design was completed inDecember 1970, and was then implemented andinstalled in the increasing number of nodes during the1971/72 period. This enabled the development of thelong-awaited user services (host applications) like“Telnet”, File transfer (FTP), and electronic mail.Ray Tomlinson at BBN implemented the initial elec-tronic mail system on the ARPANET, using the nowwell-known address notation user@host [13]. Animproved mail management program was writtenusing TECO macros by Larry Roberts in 1972, forreading, storing, forwarding and sending mail.

After the initial test period, the ARPANET started togrow [14], see Figure 1. It spanned across to the EastCoast in December 1970, with a total of 13 packet

switches with numerous attached hosts. By 1975 itconsisted of about 50 IMPs and between 150 and 200hosts, permitting up to four hosts per IMP. The net-work interconnected defense establishments, andresearch institutions and universities with defensecontracts scattered all over the USA. The continentalpart of the network had two “tentacles”, one toHawaii and one to Kjeller/Norway and onwards toLondon/England. As can be seen from Figure 1, allIMPs, excluding those in Hawaii, Norway and Lon-don, were interconnected with at least two neighborIMPs for reliability purposes. In 1975, the operationsof the continental part of ARPANET was transferredby ARPA to the Defense Communications Agency,while the responsibility for policy, further researchand the international extensions continued to remainwith ARPA.

5 Internetting was part of the visionfrom the very beginning

In parallel with the ARPANET development in the70s, ARPA also initiated and funded development ofmobile communications for tactical purposes basedon portable radio units and packet-switching tech-nologies, and packet switched satellite communica-tions for wide area coverage.

Before he left the ARPA office, Larry Roberts hadinitiated the development of a packet switched satel-lite network (SATNET) by funding BBN to build theground station nodes, the satellite IMP. When BobKahn moved to ARPA in late 1972, he initiated thedevelopment of a communicatitons network basedon mobile radio-based units, called the Packet RadioNetwork (PRNET). Later, when Larry Roberts leftARPA, Bob Kahn took over the management of theARPANET project. He also significantly changedthe nature of the packet satellite effort – the originalsatellite node was split into three units: the IMP,the SIMP and a gateway (now router) in between.Although this was relatively straightforward techni-cally, it was a non-trivial accomplishment politicallyand required the internet architecture to guide it.

The intention was to interconnect PRNET and SAT-NET with ARPANET. The ARPANET was viewedas a terrestrial backbone network. The PRNET was abroadcast radio network interconnecting geographi-cally distributed clusters of packet-radio units, whileSATNET was believed to be a means to interconnectwidely dispersed ARPANET-like networks, forexample located on different continents.

The PRNET development was mainly done as a col-laborative effort among many parties and led by BobKahn. The packet radios were built by Collins Radio

Figure 1 Some of the early stages of ARPANET

December 1969

(a)

(c)(d)

(b)

September 1971 August 1972

September 1974

December 1970


in the Dallas area, the packet radio stations were builtby BBN, and the whole system was assembled andtested in the San Francisco Bay Area, with SRI Inter-national as the leading party. The first field tests werestarted in 1975 [15]. A forerunner to the PRNET pro-ject was the radio-based Aloha system, conceived byProfessor Abramson and developed at the Universityof Hawaii by Norman Abramson, Frank Kuo andRichard Binder [16] with funding from ARPA. Thepurpose was to provide access for user terminals, ini-tially within range of the university, but later scat-tered over the Hawaiian archipelago, to a centralcomputing facility at the University of Hawaii. Itmade use of a common inwards radio channel, sharedon a packet basis between users in a random accessmanner. Another common radio channel was used forthe outwards direction to broadcast the response fromthe central computer to the various user terminals.The system became operational in 1970. The SAT-NET project was delayed till 1975/76 due to tariffand regulatory problems with INTELSAT that werelater solved by Bob Kahn [17]. The project had eightcollaborating partners, including Norway and Eng-land, and made use of one 64 kbit/s channel in theIntelsat IV satellite system shared between threeground stations – one in USA, one in England, andone in Norway (actually located at Tanum in Swe-den). Sweden took no part in the collaboration.

6 How did Norway get involved?There were several contributing factors leading up toinviting Norway to participate in the collaborativeeffort. The main initiating factor was probably LarryRoberts’ idea to connect ARPANET with the networkat NPL in England. We provide a brief descriptionof these factors, subjectively presented in order ofimportance, as we saw it. Thereafter we mention thekey persons and the work involved, in the USA(ARPA), England, and in Norway, in getting the col-laboration established and operational. In addition,we also had the NORSAR project which made work-ing with Norway desirable, since it already had a2.4 kbit/s line to the US that could be upgraded.

In late 1970 ARPANET covered a main part of conti-nental US with about 13 nodes. ARPA now showedinterest in linking ARPANET with the network atNPL. Larry Roberts made a proposal to DonaldDavies regarding the linking [18]. The proposal fromRoberts suggested that the UK’s share in the collabo-ration should be to provide a line from NPL to NOR-SAR at Kjeller. This was impossible for NPL to han-dle. England had just applied for membership in theEU. And NPL, as a governmental institution, had toturn its focus on European research issues. The resultwas that Donald Davies had to turn down the pro-

posal from Larry Roberts. It is also worth mentioningthat in a memo from Vint Cerf in 1973, a plan to linkup with CYCLADE in France was discussed. But itwas never realized.

Professor Peter Kirstein of University CollegeLondon (UCL) had expressed interest in joiningARPANET. Since Donald Davies was unable toaccept Larry Roberts’ proposal, Kirstein came up witha research plan that included the attachment of a largemainframe computer to ARPANET, to monitor andmeasure the academic traffic over the link to USA,via Tanum, and to participate in the planned satelliteproject [18]. The network topology now required aline from London to NORSAR, and Roberts sug-gested that the UK’s share in the collaboration shouldbe to provide a line from UCL to Kjeller. DonaldDavies supported this plan. ARPA accepted it, andwas prepared to install a TIP at UCL. Peter Kirsteinwas able to persuade British Telecom (BT) to offerfree of charge a 9.6 kbit/s line to Kjeller, initially forone year. This was sufficient for Peter Kirstein to tellRoberts to proceed with the plan, and in September1973 the UCL-TIP became operational on theARPANET. In 1974, the British Ministry of Defence(MoD) took over the cost of the line to NORSAR;somewhat later BT also offered free of charge a48 kbit/s line from UCL to the British ground stationat Goonhilly for the packet satellite connection andthe British part of the uplink to the satellite. BobKahn worked on the procurement of the packet satel-lite connection and made all the arrangements for theUK participation with John Taylor, then of theBritish MoD.

In 1965 contacts were established between ARPA’sNuclear Monitoring Research Office (NMRO) andthe Norwegian Defence Research Establishment(NDRE). A seismic detection facility was underinstallation at Billings in Montana, USA, and latersimilar installations were made at other places (Iran,Alaska and Korea). The close proximity to USSRmade Norway an attractive location for a seismicdetection facility, in connection with “The Compre-hensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty”. Director FinnLied, research supervisor Karl Holberg, and researchscientist Yngvar Lundh participated on behalf ofNDRE. The result was the establishment of NORSAR(the NORwegian Seismic ARray), that became opera-tional in 1970.

NORSAR was funded by the Research Council ofNorway (NTNF at that time) with additional financialsupport from ARPA. The main processing center, theSeismic Data Analysis Center (SDAC) was locatedin Virginia. There were leased lines to all detectionfacilities from SDAC. The line from NORSAR to


SDAC went originally via the British satellite groundstation at Goonhilly and an underwater cable toNorway. When the Nordic satellite station at Tanumbecame operational in 1971, the line from SDAC wasrelocated to go via Tanum. The line was paid for byARPA. Until 1973, the line had a capacity of only2.4 kbit/s but was upgraded to 9.6 kbit/s thereafter.

So the main two reasons for inviting NDRE and theNorwegian Telecommunications Administration(NTA) to participate in the further development ofpacket switching were:

• The development of packet-switched satellite com-munications would profit from Norwegian partici-pation. The NORSAR array was seen to be a majorpotential user of the network. It was also assumedthat this work would be of interest to Norway as alarge shipping nation.

• The collaboration between ARPA, UCL andNDRE would make it substantially cheaper to linkup both UCL and NDRE to ARPANET, whenmaking use of the NORSAR – SDAC line.

Some other minor arguments may also have con-tributed to inviting NDRE to join:

• Previous contacts and the establishment of NOR-SAR in 1970 had contributed to a good relationshipbetween the ARPA office and NDRE.

• Yngvar Lundh of NDRE had been on a sabbaticalat MIT in 1958 in the same laboratory and at thesame time as Larry Roberts completed his PhD.They got to know each other. Years later LarryRoberts started to work for ARPA.

Larry Roberts, at that time the current director of theIPTO office at ARPA, and Bob Kahn visited NDREin the early fall of 1972 to discuss a possible partici-pation by NDRE in the further development of thepacket switching technology. Many aspects of thisnew form of communication were discussed at themeeting, with relations to a possible future Norwe-gian participation. Among other things, Roberts andKahn pointed out wireless communications, and morespecifically satellite communications, as importantfor Norway as a large shipping nation. They recom-mended that NDRE should attend the upcomingICCC meeting later in 1972, where a presentationand demonstration of ARPANET were to take place.Prior to the Norway meeting ARPA had contactedNTA – The Norwegian Telecommunications Admin-istration (now Telenor), but they declined to partici-pate.

Yngvar Lundh attended the ICCC meeting in Wash-ington DC [19] and was convinced of the great poten-tial in the applications of this technology. He decidedto join the development and participate in the plannedmultiple-access packet-switched satellite project. Hehad moral support from the director Finn Lied and theresearch supervisor Karl Holberg. Lundh establisheda small research group at NDRE, consisting of him-self and a few master students. He started to partici-pate in the regular ARPA project meetings. On 15June 1973 a terminal-IMP (TIP), on loan fromARPA, was installed on the premises of NORSAR.This location was selected for two reasons. Firstly, itwas important to have the TIP outside the restrictedarea of NDRE to permit other Norwegian groups toparticipate in the project. Secondly, to have easyaccess to the NORSAR-SDAC line for multiplexingthe TIP and NORSAR traffic over that line. The linecapacity was upgraded from 2.4 kbit/s to 9.6 kbit/s.

Paal Spilling started to work for NDRE in 1972 as aresearch scientist. He was a former nuclear physicistand joined full time with Lundh’s efforts in 1975. Hehad no knowledge in data communications and proto-cols and was given time to educate himself – partlyby following university courses and partly by practi-cal trials and errors. Paal Spilling became a highlyneeded addition of qualified manpower to Lundh’sgroup. One of his first assignments was to work inKirstein’s group at UCL for two months, for a flyingstart. UCL was at that time ready to start testing theirimplementation of the early version of the InternetProtocol, TCP. Since then, Paal has been a majorcontributor both to the development of Internet itselfand to other aspects of computer communications inNorway.

Bob Kahn, while at ARPA’s IPTO office, was eagerto get the satellite project started. The idea was to usea fixed 64 kbit/s SPADE channel in the INTELSATIV satellite, with one ground station at Tanum inSweden, one at Goonhilly in England, and one atETAM in West Virginia in USA. The SPADE chan-nel would be used in a time-shared modus betweenthe three ground stations in a modus called “Multi-destination half Duplex”. It was assumed that eachground station operator would pay for its part of theuplink to the satellite. This was a modus operandi theINTELSAT organization could not handle at thattime. As other telecom operators, they were used tothe mode “Single Carrier per Channel”, which meantthat the two end-points of a channel or line had to beowned by the same customer/operator. It took BobKahn between one and two years to convince INTEL-SAT to change their policy, to permit the new way ofoperating the channel and the ground stations; thisincluded also a new tariff for this operational modus


[17]. The satellite project – SATNET – therefore wasdelayed until 1975/76.

In parallel with Bob Kahn’s effort to convinceINTELSAT, Yngvar Lundh had discussions with theResearch Department of NTA (NTA-R&D – nowTelenor R&D) about possible participation. Finallyhe was able to persuade them to participate in theplanned satellite project, but only as observer. BobKahn had argued strongly that the line from Kjellerto Tanum should have a capacity of at least 50 kbit/s,since it would transport traffic between USA andLondon, NORSAR and NDRE. He was afraid that alow capacity of that line might constrain the perfor-mance too much and thus bring the packet switchingtechnology in discredit. NTA-R&D was now willingto provide free of charge two lines from Kjeller toTanum, a 48 kbit/s line and a 9.6 kbit/s line. Thehigher-capacity line should be used for the SATNETexperiments, while the 9.6 kbit/s line would replacethe Norwegian part of the existing line betweenNORSAR-TIP and the SDAC-IMP in Virginia. Theinstallation order went out on December 23, 1976. Inaddition, NTA permitted a satellite-IMP (SIMP) to beinstalled inside the Tanum ground station, and to pro-vide free of charge the 64 kbit/s satellite uplink. Thisagreement was initially for one year, but was laterprolonged till the end of 1980.

In connection with the Norwegian participation therewere plans to attach NORSAR’s two IBM-360 sys-tems and RBK’s (Regneanlegget Kjeller-Blindern)Cyber-74 to NORSAR-TIP in addition to NDRE’scomputer laboratory. NORSAR’s two systems wenton the air in 1977, about four years after NORSAR-TIP was installed, while the Cyber-system was neverattached.

In 1975 Yngvar Lundh started planning the attach-ment of NDRE’s computer laboratory to NORSAR-TIP. When Paal Spilling was back from the two-month stay at UCL he started the detailed planningon how to connect NDRE’s SM-3 computer to NOR-SAR-TIP. Towards the summer of 1976 the connec-tion was working. This effort will be described inChapter 8.

Some further details of the developments in Comput-ers and Communications were reported in [20].

7 From ARPANET to INTERNETThe initial internet concepts were published in May1974 [21] by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Based on thetechnology behind the three networks, ARPANET,PRNET and SATNET, all funded by ARPA, BobKahn got the vision of an open architecture network

model: any network should be able to communicatewith any other network, independent of individualhardware and software requirements. It included anew protocol, replacing the NCP used in the ARPA-NET, and gateways (later to be termed routers) forthe interconnection of networks.

The design goals for the interconnection of networks,as specified by Kahn, were:

• Any network should be able to connect to any othernetwork via a gateway;

• There should be no central network administrationor control;

• Lost packets should be retransmitted;

• No internal changes in the networks should beneeded in order to enable their interconnection.

The original paper described one protocol, calledTransmission Control Program (TCP). It was respon-sible both for the forwarding and the end-to-end reli-able transport. In the following we will describe themain events converting ARPANET into being partof the INTERNET.

The initial three contracts to develop TCP wereawarded by ARPA to Stanford University (SU),where Vinton Cerf was a new assistant professor, toBBN (Ray Tomlinson) and to Peter Kirstein’s groupat University College London (UCL). As mentionedpreviously, the Stanford group was responsible fordeveloping the initial specifications for TCP. Theearly implementations at SU and UCL were field-tested between one another in 1975 to support thework on the specifications. As a result of extensivetesting, the TCP specifications went through severaliterations. It also turned out that the TCP protocolwas not modular enough to support certain protocolrequirements, such as those needed for packet voice(real-time requirements). Speech traffic has sufficientredundancy, so it is far less serious to lose a speechpacket now and then, than to retransmit lost packetsby the TCP protocol and thereby increase the play-out delay at the receiving side. It was decided inMarch 1978 [22] to split TCP into two parts. One part(IP – the Internet Protocol) was responsible for thenetworking aspects such as addressing, routing andforwarding, while the other part (TCP – TransmissionControl Protocol) was responsible for end-to-endrequirements – mainly reliability and flow control.The splitting permitted the development of a simpletransport protocol, called the User Datagram Protocol(UDP), interfacing with IP and living side-by-sidewith TCP.


After the IP-TCP split, other parties started imple-menting TCP/IP under popular operating systemssuch as TENEX, TOPS20, and to integrate it withcommunication services like TELNET, FTP andemail. BBN’s version of TCP/IP was integrated intoBerkeley’s ARPA-supported work on UNIX. BBNalso did the initial work to develop internet gateways.

So early in the 1980s a mature suite of protocols hadbeen developed. Simultaneously several high-speedlocal area networks (LAN), graphical workstationsand IP routers had been developed within theresearch community. All the necessary ingredientswere now available to make the internet technologyproliferate. In addition the SATNET experiment wascompleted, and the system was now being used on asemi-operational basis to interconnect ARPANETwith LANs at UCL and NDRE. Two new Europeanpartners were attached to SATNET. DFVLR (Ger-man Air and Space Research Institute) was attachedto SATNET in the summer of 1980, via the satelliteground station in Raisting. A little later the researchinstitute CNUCE in Pisa, Italy, was also attached viaa ground station in Italy.

ARPA now initiated a transition plan to graduallyconvert the communications software in all importantARPANET hosts over to the internet suite of proto-cols. This transition was to be completed and thetransition in place by January 1, 1983. This actually

happened over a period of several months in early1983. Many of the hosts were then moved offARPANET and reconnected to LANs, as well asmany new workstations. ARPANET then served as abackbone, inter-connecting the collection of LANs,see Figure 2. This we call the INTERNET with capitalletters. The backbone was still managed by BBNunder contract with ARPA, and institutions wantingto connect to the INTERNET needed permissionfrom ARPA. This effectively limited the growth ofthe INTERNET for some time. In 1983 the internettechnology was sufficiently mature, and the wholecommunity had converted to TCP/IP. This enabledthe Defense Communication Agency (DCA) to splitoff all defense-related organizations into MILNETand integrate it with the Defense Data Network.

This was done to support non-classified defense oper-ational requirements. The other part of ARPANET,still called ARPANET, supported the needs of thegeneral research community. This open part waseventually taken over by National Science Founda-tion (NSF) (once their NSFNET had been establishedaround 1985) and other funding parties, and regionalinternets were gradually privatized or new ones estab-lished.

A first step in the process was to split ARPANETinto approximately two halves that were intercon-nected by a set of filtering routers, see Figure 2. The

Figure 2 A map of the INTERNET around 1986


filtering routers would prevent unauthorized commu-nications initiated in the open part to penetrate intothe closed MILNET. Electronic mail was consideredharmless, and was permitted to flow freely both waysbetween MILNET and ARPANET. This was the firstexample of what later became known as “firewalls”.

NSF agreed to fund part of the infrastructure neededin the academic environment for the interconnectionof the Super-computer sites and to provide accessfrom universities to these facilities. This infrastruc-ture consisted of leased lines and routers. This was amore flexible, higher-speed solution than ARPANET,and the ARPANET became obsolete after a shortwhile. It was completely phased out in 1990. TheInternet’s structure as we know it today started then.

This transition took away the strict control performedby ARPA regarding permission to connect to theInternet. So from now on we spell the Internet withsmall letters. Academic institutions, research organi-zations and even research departments belonging toindustrial organizations, not only in the US but alsoin Europe, were permitted to connect to the Internet.NSF and European research funding shared the costof several leased lines between key centers in Europeand USA. The initial main Internet sites in Europewere The Center for Mathematics and Computer Sci-ence (CWI) in Amsterdam and CERN in Geneva,Switzerland. “Internets” grew up in most Europeancountries. In Scandinavia the four Nordic countriesDenmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden joined forcesand interconnected their growing national academicinternets via NORDUnet, with the hub in Stockholmand from there leased lines to CWI in Amsterdam andto CERN. This increased the growth-rate, with theresult that the whole Internet approximately doubledin size every 12–18 months, and in 5–6 years timecovered 50 plus countries and more than 20 millionusers. This development is important, however, butnot part of our presentation.

The current Internet is not owned or operated by oneorganization. The many pieces of it are owned bydifferent organizations and operated in a distributedfashion. It is therefore surprising how well it doesfunction. This must primarily be ascribed to therobustness of its protocols and routing mechanisms.

One of the motivations behind the introduction ofpacket switching was the need to share expensive andscarce computer resources among a large and geo-graphically distributed set of users. Such resourcescould for example be editors, program compilers anddebuggers, programs for scientific calculations andvarious database applications like document archiv-ing and retrieval. Hence two of the early services

being provided in ARPANET were TELNET andFTP. TELNET provided means to interface a localterminal with a program/application in a remote hostcomputer and make use of the concept of communi-cating virtual terminal entities in the local and remotecomputer and a negotiation procedure to select theright terminal options. FTP provided the ability totransfer files to and from a remote computer, eitherin binary or character-oriented mode. In addition tothese two services, electronic mail was also provided,and was soon to become the dominating service inARPANET, and later in the Internet. During the 70s,these services were steadily refined as experience wasgained in using them. These services have essentiallybeen the same since they were standardized in 1982.

As the Internet grew in size and more stored informa-tion/documents became available online, one neededhelp in locating documents – searching for titlesand/or keywords. Services such as “archie” and“gopher” were developed, and later “The Wide-AreaInformation Servers” (WAIS) permitting natural lan-guage searches among standardized database servers.

A very important boost to the Internet communitywas provided by the “World-Wide Web”. Originallyit was developed in 1989–91 by Tim Berners-Lee atCERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics,and released in 1991. The purpose was to provide theresearch staff with a universal means to disseminatetext, graphical information, figures and databaseinformation. It makes use of the concept of hypertext,i.e. non-sequential text. This concept in the form ofthe MEMEX machine, was first described by Van-nevar Bush in 1945 in the Atlantic Monthly article“As we may think”, and later refined as a conceptby Ted Nelson in the 1960s. It was Ted Nelson whocoined the term ‘hypertext’. Another early contributorto the development of hypertext systems was DouglasEngelbart, who had demonstrated working hypertext-links in a prototype application (NLS) at StanfordUniversity in 1968.

“Clicking” on one such link to a reference empha-sized in a document automatically opens a new con-nection to that reference. It may be anywhere in thenet, possibly in another computer in a different coun-try. The referenced document is retrieved and pre-sented on the user’s terminal, all in a seamless fash-ion. The “language” used is the “HyperText MarkupLanguage” – HTML – a subset of the “Standard Gen-eralized Markup Language” – SGML. It is used totag the various pieces of a document, so as to specifyhow it should be presented on the screen.

Two popular front-end clients – “browsers” –emerged. One called Mosaic, distributed free of


charge from the National Center for SupercomputingApplications – NCSA, in 1993/94. The other,Netscape, was the commercial version of Mosaic.These Web browsers have turned out to provide themost viable service on the Internet, and really set offan explosion in the traffic volume.

8 The Norwegian contributions tothe Internet development

This chapter provides a short summary of the Nor-wegian contributions to the collaboration with theARPA community.

The first Norwegian “host” on ARPANET

The part of the computer laboratory at NDRE rele-vant to our packet switching activities consisted ofa computer named SM-3, produced by KongsbergVåpenfabrikk. It had 64 kB of memory, one punch-card reader, a paper tape reader, and a fast lineprinter. No hard disk, no network interface, and nooperating system. Programs were written on IBMpunch cards, then assembled and linked, and thedebugged and loadable version punched out on papertapes to ease later loading of working programs.Assembler, linker and loader also had to be read infrom paper tapes.

The first task for Paal Spilling was to make a multi-tasking operating system for SM-3. Via the collabora-tion with ARPA, he got hold of a technical reportdescribing the ELF operating system, developed atSRI for the PDP-11/45 [23]. This was a good guide-line and a good help in the understanding of a multi-tasking system. The PDP-11/45 was a much moreadvanced system than the SM-3. Hence only the rudi-ments of the ELF functional constructs were applica-ble. After a substantial period of trials and errors,Spilling finally had a robust and reliable multi-task-ing system, with process scheduling, process-to-pro-cess communications, buffer management, and inter-rupt handling.

The work to get the SM-3 computer connected to theARPANET node at NORSAR started around summer1975, but was interrupted for two months bySpilling’s visit to UCL. The physical distancebetween the computer laboratory at NDRE and NOR-SAR-TP required us to make use of the “Very DistantHost Interface” (VDH-interface) on NORSAR-TIP[24]. An SM-3 VDH-interface was built. PaalSpilling had to design and program the correspondingdriver. The driver was integrated with the newlydeveloped multi-tasking system. After an intensivedebugging phase, the interface was operating cor-rectly and reliably. As a final test of the VDH-inter-face and the multi-tasking system, Spilling performed

a set of round-trip time measurements between SM-3and a number of nodes in the ARPANET. Theseresults were consistent with similar results performedelsewhere. Spilling also measured some specific fea-tures of the NCP protocol. The NCP protocol wasrunning in all ARPANET nodes at that time, and wasresponsible for fragmentation of messages into pack-ets at the entry node and reassembly of the packetsinto the original message at the destination node beforepresentation of the message to the attached host.

TCP implementation and testing

As mentioned previously, Paal Spilling stayed at Uni-versity College London (UCL) in September andOctober of 1975. There he had the pleasure of partici-pating in the first transatlantic tests of TCP. The testswere conducted between two independent implemen-tations, one done at Stanford University (ProfessorCerf’s group) and one at UCL (Professor Kirstein’sgroup). It was very exciting to observe that these twoimplementations were able to establish connectionsand exchange data, after some hectic debugging.Later, to demonstrate the robustness of the TCP pro-tocol, the line between LONDON-TIP and NOR-SAR-TIP was taken down for 10 – 15 minutes in themidst of transferring data between UCL and Stanford.Then the line was brought up again, and the two endsof the TCP connection continued happily the transferfrom where they had stopped, without losing data.

Back at NDRE, Spilling and a colleague started theimplementation of the early version of TCP [21, 25]on the SM-3 computer. After about half a year ofwork, it was decided to stop the implementation andmove over to a more modern system – the NorwegianNORD-10 computer. Looking back, this was proba-bly not a good decision. It would have been better tocomplete our implementation to get the satisfactionand experience in fulfilling this task. Starting to workwith the NORD-10 computer, it turned out to be moredifficult than expected. We had to get acquaintedwith a new operating system, design and build a newVDH-interface, and implement the driver under thenew operating system (SINTRAN). This was not atrivial task. Then, starting on the design and imple-mentation of TCP in the SINTRAN operating systemturned out to be difficult too. SINTRAN had a veryprimitive process-to-process communications (signal-ing) system. If a process received two signals, oneafter the other, the first one was overwritten and lost.Hence this was useless, and we had to invent somehacks to circumvent the problem. It was also next toimpossible to convince the software group at NorskData, responsible for the SINTRAN operating sys-tem, that this was an important deficiency of theiroperating system. It took a few years before that wasappreciated and corrected. But then it was too late for


us. In addition SINTRAN was a complicated system,and made the implementation of TCP cumbersome.And after some time the work had to be stopped,unfortunately.

The SATNET project

In the time period 1976 through 1979, NDRE washeavily involved in the development of SATNET.The purpose of the SATNET project was to explorethe feasibility of operating a 64 kbit/s SPADE chan-nel in the INTELSAT system, common to a set ofground stations, in a packet switched modus. As men-tioned previously three ground stations were involvedin the project, one at Etam in West Virginia on theUS East Coast, one at Goonhilly at the English WestCoast, and the third one at the Nordic satellite groundstation at Tanum in Sweden, see Figure 3. To enablethe packet-switched operation of the satellite channel,so-called Satellite-IMPs (SIMPs) were installed in theground stations – interfacing with the SPADE chan-nel equipment [26]. Each SIMP was then intercon-nected, via a leased line, with a gateway computer –the ETAM-SIMP with a gateway at BBN in Boston,the Goonhilly-SIMP with a gateway at UCL, and theTanum-SIMP with a gateway at NDRE. The otherinterface of each gateway was connected to anARPANET node. As mentioned previously, the linefrom NDRE to Tanum and the satellite uplink werekindly offered free of charge by the NorwegianTelecommunications Administration (NTA) for theduration of the project. The capacities of the linesbetween the SIMPs and the gateways were in theorder of 50 kbit/s.

The SATNET research program, organized by BobKahn much as Larry Roberts had done for ARPANET,was performed as a joint effort between Linkabit Cor-poration in San Diego, University of California inLos Angeles (UCLA), Bolt, Beranek and Newman(BBN) in Boston, Communications Satellite Corpora-tion (COMSAT) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Univer-sity College London (UCL), and NDRE in Norway[20]. Linkabit had the project’s technical leadership.BBN was responsible for the development of theSIMPs, including the various channel-access algo-rithms the participants wanted to test out. The projectparticipants met about four times a year, with themeeting location circulating among the participatinginstitutions.

The Norwegian contingent was headed by YngvarLundh, with Finn-Arve Aagesen and Paal Spilling aswork force. Aagesen was responsible for performingsimulation studies of the most promising channelaccess algorithm, the “Contention-based, Priority-Oriented Demand Access” algorithm (CPODA). PaalSpilling developed management software on the

SM-3 computer, to control artificial traffic generationin the SIMPs, and to fetch data collected in theSIMPs during measurements. Since the SM-3 com-puter did not have any storage medium, the easiestsolution was to dump the measurement data out onthe fast line printer. The analysis of the measurementsthen had to be performed by hand. Several accessalgorithms were studied experimentally, amongothers TDMA, Reservation-TDMA, and C-PODA[27, 28]. Measurements and simulations were alsoperformed by Kleinrock’s Network MeasurementsGroup at UCLA. Mario Gerla was a key person here.

Packet speech experiments and

demonstrations

NDRE participated in packet-speech experiments per-formed in 1978 – 1979 in collaboration with, amongothers, MIT Lincoln Laboratories just outside Boston.The packet speech activity was part of the SATNETproject. Lincoln Lab had developed a speech vocoder(voice coder and decoder), under contract with ARPA,providing a stream of 2.4 kbit/s digitized speech. The

Figure 3 Network configuration for the SATNET and packet speechexperiments

Intelsat IV A

SATNET

Etam TanumGoonhilly

BBN UCL

NDRE

Terminal

NDRE-host-

SDAC London-T Norsat-T

ARPANET

v

Lincoln ISI UCLA

S S S

G G G

V

V

1 1 1

V = Vocoder

S = SIMP

G = Gateway

T = TIP

I = IMP


vocoder was interfaced with the PDP-11/45 at NDRE,with a similar arrangement at MIT Lincoln Lab, seeFigure 3, and later also at UCL. The PDP-11/45 actedthen not as gateways, but as speech packet assemblyat the sending side and packet disassembly and play-out via the vocoder at the receiving side. In additionthe PDP-11/45 contained a conference control pro-gram, developed by Lincoln Lab, that handed overthe “floor”, in a FI-FO queue manner, to the partiesindicating their whish to talk.

Paal Spilling performed a set of measurements toexamine the profile of packet-speech traffic [29]. Theprogramming of the PDP-11/45, performed in con-nection with the experiments, is a good example ofresource sharing, one of the driving forces behind theearly development of packet switching. The computerwas located close to Spilling’s office. The program-ming tools and the source code for the conferencecontrol program was located at a TOPS-20 machineat Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in Los Ange-les. Using a terminal in his office connected to NOR-SAR-TIP (see Figure 3), Spilling could log on to thecomputer in Los Angeles, write the necessary modifi-cations to the control program, and have it compiledand loaded across the network into the PDP-11/45next door. The downloading was facilitated by across-network debugger (X-NET), also in the TOPS-20 machine, and enabled Spilling to debug the modi-fied control program loaded into the PDP-11/45. Thiswas an exciting and fascinating experience.

NDRE participated in several packet-speech demon-strations. At one of the regular project meetings, heldat UCL, Yngvar Lundh made use of the conferencefacility and could participate in the meeting fromNorway simultaneously with someone at LincolnLab, i.e. three-way Internet speech conference. Thequality of the speech when compressed to 2.4 kbit/swas noticeably impaired, but packet transmissionthrough this early Internet connection worked finein real time.

A large packet-speech demonstration in 1983 is worthmentioning. Paal Spilling had then moved over toNTA-R&D. Speech traffic was exchanged betweenan airplane-carrier in the Pacific Ocean off the Cali-fornian coast and NTA-R&D at Kjeller. The commu-nications went via a PR-network, involving the air-plane-carrier, an airplane flying in the vicinity of theship, and a PR-node at SRI attached to the INTER-NET, then across the INTERNET to the East Coast,then across SATNET via the Tanum ground station toNTA-R&D. The purpose of the demonstration was toshow high-ranking military personnel onboard theairplane-carrier the feasibility of communicatingthrough an interconnection of different networks

(subnets), the plethora of sophisticated techniquesinvolved, and the usability of the Internet for commu-nicating data and digitized speech.

In 1979/80 Paal Spilling had leave of absence fromNDRE, and stayed with SRI International in MenloPark, California working on the ARPA-funded PacketRadio Network (PRNET). There he made a proposalto improve the software architecture in the PR-nodes[30] to have a better logical layering of the programstructure, performed experiments on packet-speechperformance with QoS-control [31], and suggested a“Busy Tone” method to overcome the “hidden termi-nal” problem in wireless communications [32].

Spilling was back at NDRE in the last quarter of1980. SATNET was now considered operational,and used to interconnect local networks at UCL andNDRE with ARPANET. UCL was also using it forthe total academic service traffic between the UK-SRCnet and ARPANET. Spilling made a proposal tothe Research Council of Norway, and obtained fund-ing for purchasing an LSI-11/23 computer. Throughhis ARPA connections he got all necessary softwarefrom Dave Mills [33] at the University of Delaware.This software package had the nickname “Fuzzball”,and contained the TCP/IP suite of protocols. The LSI-11/23 was interfaced with a Proteon Token-Ring net-work, together with the PDP-11/45. Hence this com-puter was the first real Norwegian Internet host.Spilling had obtained a class B network address(128.39.0.0) for this network, from the NetworkInformation Center (NIC).

Spilling and Lundh had no luck in convincing themanagement of NDRE to continue the packet-switch-ing effort. Apparently the internet technology, includ-ing Packet Radios, was too premature both for themanagement of NDRE and for the NorwegianDefense.

9 The first Norwegian InternetPaal Spilling left NDRE in the summer of 1982 tostart working for the Research Department of NTA.Being inside NTA, this enabled Spilling to create thefirst Norwegian internet and make that a part of theInternet.

NDRE showed no interests in exploiting the knowl-edge and experience obtained in the collaborationwith the ARPA community. Paal Spilling thereforeattempted to create interests among the research peo-ple at NTA-R&D, in spite of Yngvar Lundh’s previ-ous attempts. As a result of this attempt, Spilling wasinvited to move over to the R&D-department by oneof its research supervisors. He did so at the end of the


summer of 1982, with the hope to be able tostrengthen the Norwegian effort. Unfortunately thisdid not happen – with one exception. We will comeback to this below.

In agreement with ARPA and NDRE, all internet-related equipment was moved over to NTA-R&D, sothat the collaboration could continue from this newlocation, but now without participation from NDRE.NTA was at that time a state-owned monopoly. Beinginside NTA gave Spilling several opportunities. Thefirst action was to purchase a VAX-750. Through hisARPA connection Spilling got permission to acquirethe Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system(4.1 bsd), although NTA-R&D had to pay a signifi-cant fee to ATT. The VAX was connected to a Pro-teon Ring network, the same with the PDP-11/45gateway to SATNET. In getting the UNIX system upand running, Spilling had very good help from HelgeSkrivervik, and from Tor Sverre Lande at the Depart-ment of Informatics at the University of Oslo.

From 1983/84 there was a growing interest at NTA-R&D in getting access to the Internet services. Theparadox was that this interest did not result in anyinterest in collaborating with the Internet community.There was also a desire to get access to the ATT-ver-sion of UNIX, hence a Pyramid machine runningboth versions of the UNIX operating system was pur-chased and installed. The Ringnet was now replacedby an Ethernet. In addition the PDP-11/45 gateway toSATNET was replaced by a Butterfly machine fromBBN (both hardware and software), on loan fromARPA. We now provided terminal access to thesetwo UNIX machines, so everyone in the researchstaff could get access to the standard Internet ser-vices. We also bought a few SUN and PERQ work-stations, but they were at that time too expensive tobe for everyone. In a few years’ time the whole labwas Ethernet-cabled and most people had their ownworkstations.

There was also a growing interest at the universitiesin Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim, to get access toInternet services. Being inside NTA-R&D, thisenabled Spilling to set up a 9.6 kbit/s line to theDepartment of Informatics at the University of Oslo.The line was terminated at the VAX at NTA-R&Dand at the VAX at Department of Informatics. TheSLIP protocol was used here to interconnect the twomachines. Later, in 1984/85, we installed own-devel-oped gateways (routers), based on equipment fromBridge Communications Inc, where Judy Estrin wastechnical director – a former student of Vint Cerf atStanford and with whom Paal had carried out the firstTCP tests a decade earlier. Through this connectionwe were able to get the software development tools

used by Bridge Communications. This enabled KjellHermansen, the only person besides Spilling atNTA-R&D interested in cooperating with the ARPAcommunity, to develop an IP-router package for theBridge boxes. When the router was operating reli-ably, Spilling requested NTA-R&D to set up lines tothe universities in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim – andwith our home-built routers at each end of the lines.A few years later the Bridge routers were replaced bycommercial ones from Cisco. This was the first Nor-wegian academic internet, see Figure 4. It was man-aged for some years by Spilling. UNINETT, the aca-demic network operator funded by the Department ofEducation, took over the network in 1987/88, after asubstantial pressure from a strong group of academicusers requiring Internet access.

In the beginning there was no Domain Name Server.The mapping between host names and addresses wasdone via a local host file in each computer. The origi-nal host file was maintained by SRI-NIC. Every newhost on the Internet had to be reported to NIC. And atregular intervals (daily or so), one had to pull over thehost file from NIC and install it at the right place inthe Unix file system. The development of DNS inNorway started in 1985. Jens Thomassen at theDepartment of Informatics at the University of Oslowas responsible for maintaining the Norwegiandomain (.no), on behalf of NTA-R&D.

It is worth mentioning that there was an ongoingdebate for some time in the UNINETT communitywhether the transport network should be based on theIP protocol, international standards like X.25, or evenDECNET. This continued for probably a few years,until it was obvious that internet communicationswas the salient technology to focus on.

NTA-R&DBergen

Gwy

Gwy

Gwy

Gwy

Gwy

Gwy

Gwy

Trondheim

Oslo

Figure 4 The Norwegian Internet around 1986


10 Other technology driversIn addition to the ARPA-sponsored research, othervery important research activities gave a significantcollective momentum to the development of the Inter-net. In the following we will mention those which wefeel are the most important ones.

Bob Metcalfe outlined in his PhD thesis at Harvardthe basic idea for Ethernet. It was an extension of theAloha concepts developed by Norman Abramson atthe University of Hawaii. After obtaining his degree,Metcalfe joined XEROX-PARC in 1973, the researchcenter of XEROX in Palo Alto. He had the vision of“small” powerful personal workstations (Altos) inter-connected in high-speed local networks called Ether-nets. It is highly likely that this vision was inspiredby Doug Engelbart’s work on the NLS-system. Theinitial work on Ethernet was demonstrated in 1973[34]. A set of such Ethernets would later be intercon-nected into a company-wide network, spanningXEROX offices scattered all over continental US.The personal workstations should have the capabilityto be moved from one network and plugged intoanother one, following its owner on his/her journeyaround in XEROX. Therefore each workstation wasprovided with a unique Ethernet address, which couldbe used to locate and address its owner. When ARPAinitiated the work on TCP/IP, XEROX-PARC joinedin the experimentation and participated in the devel-opment process for some years until the internet con-cepts were mature enough for them to specify andimplement their own internet protocol suite. In1977/78 XEROX had implemented a company-widenetwork interconnecting about 25 Ethernets via a setof gateways and leased lines. Amazingly XEROX, asa commercial company, did not see any businesspotential in this technology at that time.

A little later, in 1979, IEEE started the standardiza-tion work on local-area networks (LAN). XEROX,DEC and INTEL (DIX) joined forces and proposed a10 Mbit/s Ethernet standard. Due to the large amountof fielded Ethernet interfaces and the significantweight of the DIX effort, the hardware/physical layerpart of the international standard was made compati-ble with the DIX proposal [35].

Another very important contribution to the usabilityand popularity of the TCP/IP suite of protocols wasthe further developments and refinements of theUNIX operating system done initially by Bill Joy atBerkeley, also under contract with ARPA. The hard-ware platforms used were VAX-750 and VAX-780.Part of this work included the integration of theTCP/IP suite of protocols, developed by BBN, intothe UNIX system [36]. To make the protocol packageuser-friendly, flexible and efficient, it was found nec-

essary to develop a set of support functions surround-ing the protocol suite. It was also relatively easy tomake device drivers for a variety of popular networkinterfaces, such as Ethernet, Proteon-Ring,ARPANET and X.25.

This work was very successful and has been an exam-ple for very many other implementations of the proto-col suite in other operating systems. Since only asmall part of the UNIX system depends on the com-puter’s hardware, it was relatively straightforward toport the system to other hardware configurations. TheBerkeley version of UNIX was made available to uni-versities free of charge and, for a fee to AT&T andapproval from ARPA, to non-educational researchorganization, not only in the US but also in Europe.

The flourishing of TCP/IP implementations at manyplaces in the US and Europe provided a large basisfor field tests and experimentation. Hence TCP andIP and the accompanying services like TELNET, FTPand email were steadily refined and improved. It wastherefore a mature, efficient and user-friendly set ofprotocols that ARPA proposed as a standard for theAmerican Defense in the middle of 1980 andapproved as a standard in mid 1982.

In the late 70s and early 1980s Stanford Universityhad an ARPA supported project to develop a meansof supporting VLSI design. It was to be connected toa nascent Stanford University Network. Here, underthe leadership of Forest Baskett and Andres Bechtol-sheim, they developed a Motorola-68000-based CPUcard and a frame buffer based display system. As aspin-off from this project, a few people left to start asmall company called SUN Microsystems which alsoinvolved Bill Joy from Berkeley. They ported anearly version of the Berkeley version of UNIX ontothis hardware and developed a graphical windowuser-interface to go with it, and offered this as a com-mercial product under the name SUN-1 in 1982. Thiswas supported by ARPA and managed by Bob Kahn.A little later another group formed a small companycalled CISCO, offering IP routers based on the sameCPU card from SU, also with support from Bob Kahnat ARPA.

11 From Resource Sharing toInformation Sharing

One driving force behind the development of packet-switching networks was to share expensive resourceslike computers, software, and communication facili-ties, as efficiently as possible among a large group ofusers. With the proliferation of PCs and services likethe web, the resource sharing got another meaning –the sharing of information.


At the time when this evolution started, computerswere expensive, software programs were expensive,and communication lines were expensive. Much ofthe initial research focused on bridging the geograph-ical distances between the users at their terminals,and the computers with the valuable programs theywanted to use. Hence those expensive resourcesneeded to be shared among as many users as possible,and in such a way that the users should not need tophysically move to the computers to have their jobsdone. When email came into practical use, thisbecame the dominating service – still rather central-ized, but accessible from geographically distributedterminals. It is worth mentioning that Yngvar Lundhand Paal Spilling had their mailboxes on a host com-puter at Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in LosAngeles, and accessed from terminals connected toNORSAR-TIP. Keeping the resources centralizedmade the administration and maintenance of theresources straightforward and easy.

Then came the period with affordable minicomputers,where sets of terminal users were clustered aroundgeographically distributed but networked computers.Computers were still too expensive to be affordableas single-user workstations.

Later, with the proliferation of PCs, each user gotenough computing power for the daily work. Theresources were now distributed, which resulted in amore cumbersome administration and maintenance ofthese resources. In essence it was only the networksthat were shared among the users.

When the Web was developed and commerciallyavailable (1991/92), coinciding in time with the lift-ing of the restriction on commercial usage of theInternet, we saw an explosion in geographical cover-age, in number of users, and in traffic volume. Nowthe Internet gradually turned into an information shar-ing network. Information could now be stored at anylocation in the network. With the use of powerfulsearch engines and the Web with the hyper-links, theInternet is acting as a gigantic repository of informa-tion transparently accessed by the user via point-and-click in the Web browser.

12 EpilogWhy was it so difficult to create interest among Nor-wegian (and European) computer scientists for thisnew ARPANET/Internet technology? And did Norwaybenefit from its participation?

In December of 1973, half a year after NORSAR-TIPwas installed, a Norwegian ARPANET committeewas established to promote and coordinate possible

Norwegian participations in ARPA activities. It con-sisted of members from the Research Council of Nor-way, NORSAR, RBK, NTH (later NTNU), and NTA-R&D. A condition for connecting to NORSAR-TIP,or making use of its terminal service, was that thisshould contribute to the furthering of the technologyand be beneficial to both ARPA and NDRE. Thecommittee encountered two main problems. One wasthe uncertainty about the future of ARPANET. LarryRoberts had left the IPTO office in 1973, and Dr.J.C.R. Licklider took over as director. He neededtime to be informed and make a decision regardingthe future of ARPANET. Hence it took a whilebefore the future was known. In July 1975 the conti-nental part of ARPANET was transferred to theDefense Communications Agency (DCA), whileIPTO continued to be responsible for the internationalengagements. The other problem for the committeewas the various upcoming European competing com-munication initiatives, similar to what Donald Daviesexperienced in England. The committee did not comeup with any constructive proposals, and dissolveditself in 1975.

This is just one example of the difficulty in creatingresearch interests for the internet technology. Formany years the Internet and its concepts wereneglected by the telecom operators and the Europeanresearch community. Due to the tremendous popular-ity, growth and global coverage of the Internet, thetraditional telecom operators had more or less unwill-ingly been forced to accept reality and offer Internetaccess. We will attempt to shed light on some of thefactors contributing to this effect.

Competitions between alternatives

Simultaneously with the growth of the ARPANET inthe 1970s, we saw the emergence of other similarcompeting communication concepts, like CYCLADE[37] in France presented by Pouzin in 1973, the Euro-pean Informatics Network (EIN) [38] presented in1976, and the CCITT’s Orange Books [39] contain-ing the X.25 standards published 1977. In 1983 theInternational Standards activities presented the “Ref-erence Model for Open Systems” [40] and then insuccession a set of layered communication protocols.The dominating feature of X.25, and the ISO stan-dards in general, was the virtual circuit principle, incontrast to the flexible packet and datagram modesof operation in the ARPANET and later the Internet.A virtual circuit in the packet switched arena is theequivalent to end-to-end circuit established in thetelephone network. The dominant part of the Norwe-gian research community, including NTA-R&D wasfor a long time convinced that packet communica-tions had to be based on virtual circuits.


The TCP/IP family of protocols was

expected to be replaced by international

standards

The management at NDRE and NTA-R&D, and theNorwegian communication research community atlarge did not believe in the Internet technology beforethe end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. Ingeneral most communication experts believed thatthe TCP/IP suite of protocols eventually would bereplaced by internationally agreed standards. So whenwe attempted to create interests for participation inthe further development of this technology, theresponses were negative.

Skepticism to defense matters

At the time Norway entered the development activi-ties, there was a general antipathy against everythingconnected with defense matters, and especially withUS defense. This antipathy was of course not reducedby the fact that participation in the activities andusage of the communications network had to beapproved by ARPA.

International standards development

The national authorities and the academic communi-ties believed strongly in international standards. Itwas relatively easy to obtain funding for participationin standards activities. This was less committing/demanding than the hard practical work that went onin the ARPA community. Standards were worked outon paper within a study period of four years, andwhen ready accepted more or less without practicalexperience. Later, when standards were to be imple-mented and tested out, deficiencies were surelydetected and the standards had to be revised, and thenre-proposed as standards in the next study period. Incontrast the ARPA research went via implementa-tions, testing, modifications, more testing and refine-ments, and when mature enough and sufficiently sta-ble, finally adopted as standard. This included also aset of support functions like “name to address map-ping”, “service type to service-access-point map-ping”, and “IP address to MAC address mapping”, tomake the combined protocol layers work efficientlyand user friendly.

When the ISO standards came out in the middle andlatter half of the 1980s, after a substantial work effort,a set of standards had been defined for each layer inthe reference model. These standards included manyoptions. Before the standards could be implemented,one had to make use of workshops to prepare andagree on the options to use in practice.

This took quite a while. It is worth mentioning thatthe options agreed upon made the ISO standards, for

all practical purposes, functionally equal to the Inter-net protocols.

Agreed international standards were not openly avail-able. They had to be purchased for a certain fee. Incontrast, all Internet protocol specifications andrelated documentations were freely available.

The American dominance

A very important contribution to the usability andpopularity of the TCP/IP suite of protocols was therefinements of the UNIX operating system done atBerkeley. This work included the integration of theTCP/IP suite of protocols into the UNIX system. Thiswork was very successful, and has been an examplefor very many other implementations of the protocolsuite under other operating systems. The Berkeleyversion of UNIX was made available to universitiesfree of charge and, for a fee, to AT&T and approvalfrom ARPA, to non-educational research organiza-tion, not only in the US but also in Europe. Unix wasfor years the dominating system used in higher edu-cation and in research. Hence a whole new generationof higher educated people were exposed to and influ-enced by Unix and internet technology and services.

The development of computers and their softwarewas dominated by American companies. The TCP/IPsuite of protocols was part of the software systemsdelivered with the computers. There was no incentiveby the software companies to spend money on imple-menting other standards, unless someone paid for it.So this was also a major factor gradually making theTCP/IP suite of protocols a de facto communicationsstandard.

Did Norway benefit from the Internet

cooperation with the ARPA community?

The opportunities provided to Spilling when hemoved over to NTA-R&D in mid 1982 enabled him(1984/85) to establish a small Norwegian Internet,interconnecting informatics departments at the uni-versities in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim, and NTA-R&D. The network at NTA-R&D was intercon-nected, via the Nordic satellite ground station atTanum and SATNET, with ARPANET in the US.This implied that influential academic research peo-ple could make use of Internet services and commu-nicate with colleagues in the US, and experiencedthat this form of communications worked well andprovided a set of reliable, effective, and attractiveservices.

A few years later (1987/88) the academic communi-cations network UNINETT was established, intercon-necting, in the first instant, informatics departments atthe main Norwegian universities. As mentioned pre-


viously, there was a debate in the UNINETT commu-nity regarding transport network technology – X.25,DECNET, and IP. But gradually the experience withand the increasing desire to use Internet servicespaved the way for UNINETT to provide this kind ofcommunications. In the beginning as some sort ofhybrid network, but later converted to a pure IP-basednetwork when the situation had ripened sufficiently.UNINETT gradually evolved to encompass all highereducational institutions in Norway.

The knowledge and experiences gained in participat-ing in the ARPA projects led to the establishment ofa computer communications research group and anearly curriculum in computer communications at theDepartment of informatics at the University of Oslo.This effort were initiated by Yngvar Lundh and PaalSpilling, and gradually led to the establishment ofsimilar activities at all universities in Norway.

In the late 80s, all Nordic countries had installed aca-demic Internets. The operating organizations com-bined forces and created NORDUnet. It intercon-nected the academic networks in Norway, Sweden,Finland, and Denmark, with the main hub in Stock-holm. From there leased lines were installed to CERNand CWI in the Netherlands and later directly to theUS.

The Nordic countries have the highest percentage ofInternet users in the world. This is in part due to theearly exposure to this technology, first in the aca-demic world and later in the public sector. NTA(Telenor) was among the first telecom operators,around 1994/95, in Europe to be convinced to offerInternet access to customers. This is certainly due tothe close exposure to this technology over a longperiod of time at NTA-R&D.

AcknowledgementsThe authors are very grateful to Bob Kahn and PeterKirstein for providing valuable comments on variousparts of this article.

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Paal Spilling obtained his cand.real. degree in physics from the University of Oslo in 1963. In January 1964

he started on a PhD program at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, and finished his degree in sum-

mer 1968 in experimental low-energy neutron physics. Subsequently he joined the nuclear physics group at

the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In January 1972 Spilling started to work for the

Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE) at Kjeller, and from end 1974 he got involved with the

ARPA-funded research program in packet switching and internet technology under the leadership of Yngvar

Lundh. He was in 1979/80 visiting scientist with SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where he worked

on the Packet Radio program. Spilling left NDRE in August 1982 to join the Research Department of the

Norwegian Telecommunications Administration (NTA-RD), also at Kjeller. Subsequently he established the

first internet outside USA, interconnected with the US internet. At NTA-RD Spilling worked with communica-

tions security and the combination of internet technology and fiber-optic transmission network. In 1993

Spilling became professor at Department of informatics, University of Oslo and University Graduate Center

at Kjeller.

email: [email protected]

Yngvar Lundh is Electrical Engineer from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, 1956. He worked as

research engineer at Norwegian Defence Research Establishment until 1984, then as engineer in chief at

NTA/Telenor. From 1996 he has been running his own consulting company. He was guest researcher at MIT

1958–59, with Bell Labs 1970–71, and part time professor of computer science at the University of Oslo

from 1980. Lundh concentrated on development of new technologies in electronics, computing, automation

and telecom. He initiated and headed research groups for that and was dedicated to the possibilities for new

industry in Norway. Computer production (Norsk Data) and digital switching (“Node technique” STK/

Alcatel), electronic mail in Norway and other enterprises were among the results.

email: [email protected]

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