ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished
(2022/03/01)
- Reference: 1646117950
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_hard/
- Source link:
Early internet pioneer Jack Haverty has described the early structure of the internet as experimental – and said not much has changed since.
Haverty was a protégé of Professor JCR Licklider in the early '70s, when he worked on the then brand new ARPANET. He is widely credited with developing File Transfer Protocol, the RFC format still used for internet standards, and one of the world's first email systems. A contemporary of the likes of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, Haverty later joined Oracle in the '90s and worked alongside folks like Tim Berners-Lee, establishing linkages between web servers and databases.
TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction was 'Wait: it's not done yet'
The way Haverty told it, that process was deeply inelegant, with many efforts being abandoned and others set in stone without much notice.
And yesterday he delivered a keynote speech at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT). He reminisced that the internet as we know it came to be sometime around the end of 1981, when attention shifted to network operation and making internetworking technology that could provide a reliable 24/7 service.
"At one of the quarterly meetings Vint Cerf came in and dropped a bombshell on us: he said TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction, or at least my reaction, was 'Wait: it's not done yet. We have this long list of things we still have to figure out'," Haverty recalled in his speech.
[1]
The technology was out of developers' hands before they felt ready to let it go.
[2]
[3]
Haverty said the teams he worked with always expected to fix and polish their work – not just build on top of what he referred to as an "experiment."
"There's all sorts of operational issues that we went through and developed but they haven't made it into the real world,” he said.
[4]Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400
[5]Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies
[6]Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?
[7]IT advice fuelled by beer is the best IT advice of all, right?
[8]UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died
In a subsequent role as internet architect at Oracle, Haverty found himself working to add resilience to TCP, which at the time interpreted slow data transfers as unwanted duplicates.
Since leaving Oracle, he's become, by his own description, just a user.
[9]
"I'm now just one of billions of users. So I don't really know what's going on inside the networks now and I haven't really paid much attention literally for several decades," said Haverty.
After a friend elicited his help for a poorly functioning app, he started looking at how the modern internet works.
"We found, much to my surprise, that things like TCP dump, Wireshark, Ping and Traceroute and all those kind of tools that I used to use back in the '80s and '90s still work," said Haverty.
[10]
And his friend's problem? Data travelling long distances arrived at varying speeds, wreaking havoc on the app's ability to function – the same problem he encountered at Oracle.
"The conclusion I draw from all this is the internet is amazing. None of us ever thought that it could possibly last this long or grow this big," said Haverty, who then added his major point: that just like 50 years ago, the internet should all just work, but the reality is it still doesn't.
"There's still a long list of things that have to get done," he said. Some, such as refinements to TCP he was keen on in the 1990s, remain placeholders.
The entire speech can be viewed below. ®
[11]Youtube Video
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/apple_innovation_seems_strangely_familiar/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/online_safety_bill_dorries/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/russia_information_security/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/demon_internet_founder_dies/
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[11] https://youtu.be/U5m101sM1hI?t=2845
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Haverty was a protégé of Professor JCR Licklider in the early '70s, when he worked on the then brand new ARPANET. He is widely credited with developing File Transfer Protocol, the RFC format still used for internet standards, and one of the world's first email systems. A contemporary of the likes of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, Haverty later joined Oracle in the '90s and worked alongside folks like Tim Berners-Lee, establishing linkages between web servers and databases.
TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction was 'Wait: it's not done yet'
The way Haverty told it, that process was deeply inelegant, with many efforts being abandoned and others set in stone without much notice.
And yesterday he delivered a keynote speech at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT). He reminisced that the internet as we know it came to be sometime around the end of 1981, when attention shifted to network operation and making internetworking technology that could provide a reliable 24/7 service.
"At one of the quarterly meetings Vint Cerf came in and dropped a bombshell on us: he said TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction, or at least my reaction, was 'Wait: it's not done yet. We have this long list of things we still have to figure out'," Haverty recalled in his speech.
[1]
The technology was out of developers' hands before they felt ready to let it go.
[2]
[3]
Haverty said the teams he worked with always expected to fix and polish their work – not just build on top of what he referred to as an "experiment."
"There's all sorts of operational issues that we went through and developed but they haven't made it into the real world,” he said.
[4]Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400
[5]Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies
[6]Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?
[7]IT advice fuelled by beer is the best IT advice of all, right?
[8]UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died
In a subsequent role as internet architect at Oracle, Haverty found himself working to add resilience to TCP, which at the time interpreted slow data transfers as unwanted duplicates.
Since leaving Oracle, he's become, by his own description, just a user.
[9]
"I'm now just one of billions of users. So I don't really know what's going on inside the networks now and I haven't really paid much attention literally for several decades," said Haverty.
After a friend elicited his help for a poorly functioning app, he started looking at how the modern internet works.
"We found, much to my surprise, that things like TCP dump, Wireshark, Ping and Traceroute and all those kind of tools that I used to use back in the '80s and '90s still work," said Haverty.
[10]
And his friend's problem? Data travelling long distances arrived at varying speeds, wreaking havoc on the app's ability to function – the same problem he encountered at Oracle.
"The conclusion I draw from all this is the internet is amazing. None of us ever thought that it could possibly last this long or grow this big," said Haverty, who then added his major point: that just like 50 years ago, the internet should all just work, but the reality is it still doesn't.
"There's still a long list of things that have to get done," he said. Some, such as refinements to TCP he was keen on in the 1990s, remain placeholders.
The entire speech can be viewed below. ®
[11]Youtube Video
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Yh3821HwC4--SI3HSv7CZgAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/apple_innovation_seems_strangely_familiar/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/online_safety_bill_dorries/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/russia_information_security/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/demon_internet_founder_dies/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Yh3821HwC4--SI3HSv7CZgAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[11] https://youtu.be/U5m101sM1hI?t=2845
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Phil O'Sophical
Ah yes, marketing selling the prototype as a product. We've all been there.
Still, hardly surprising that it's unfinished, 50 years on and they're still taking Requests For Comments :-)
Doctor Syntax
It doesn't even have to have got as far as a prototype before marketing not only sell it but demand a demo.
jake
A friend swears that about three months ago he overheard a marketing wonk tell a customer "Of course it runs in the Cloud! It's Vapo(u)rware!" ...
dinsdale54
A line I have repeatedly used in presentations when referring to underdeveloped/incomplete products and technologies is :
"Runs best on powerpoint"
Ansuz
If you're interested in watching the video - scroll to 28 minutes in, that's when it actually starts.
The rules of software... for new players
DevOpsTimothyC
No fix is every temporary. A fix is always permanent until the next permanent fix comes along.
There is never time for documentation after something is delivered. If you want documentation you need to write it while building / testing
There is no such thing as a prototype. There is only the final production version! This may be replaced in the future
What you plan will never be delivered. You'll be lucky if you can get close
Re: The rules of software... for new players
Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells
> There is no such thing as a prototype. There is only the final production version! This may be replaced in the future
There will be an attempted rewrite for v2 which will be abandoned due to scope creep. v2 will be skipped and the prototype will go back to being v3.
Re: The rules of software... for new players
Lon24
I hear Microsoft have now turned that up to 11.
As I've been saying in this forum for years ...
... The Internet is nothing more than an insecure research platform gone mad.
When we built this thing, we knew there were issues, even pre-BARRNet and NSFnet. It was not ready for prime-time back then, and it's still not ready for prime-time. We tried to keep the corporate world out of it because of this, but we we naive. We failed. We apologize.
I'm 99.9% certain that I can speak for us, especially seeing as TINU.