network working group history everything that was issued between april 1969 and march 1987.

"At UCLA we scrambled to build a host-IMP interface. SDS, the builder of the Sigma 7, wanted many months and many dollars to do the job. Mike Wingfield, another grad student at UCLA, stepped in and offered to get interface built in six weeks for a few thousand dollars. He had a gorgeous, fully instrumented interface working in five and one half weeks. I was in charge of the software, and we were naturally running a bit late. September 1 was Labor Day, so I knew I had a couple of extra days to debug the software. Moreover, I had heard BBN was having some timing troubles with the software, so I had some hope they'd miss the ship date. And I figured that first some Honeywell people would install the hardware -- IMPs were built out of Honeywell 516s in those days -- and then BBN people would come in a few days later to shake down the software. An easy couple of weeks of grace.

BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30. They arrived with the IMP, wheeled it into our computer room, plugged it in and the software restarted from where it had been when the plug was pulled in Cambridge. Still Saturday, August 30. Panic time at UCLA ..."

internet meeting notes, 15 August 1977.

Postel: An address is just a string of bits, with each address parser consuming part of the string, to give a gateway an address reserve one value of the set of values representable in the bits the gateway parses, that reserved value means "here".

Kirstein expressed concern about the address space in the individual networks. Also concerned about translations necessary when going between datagram and virtual call networks.

Cerf: Does the way a thing is named specify the way one gets to it? Especially if a thing is multi-hommed?

Shoch: One way is all gates are in the same net and have exactly one address. Another way is that a gateway has distinct host address on each net it is connected to.

Cerf: If the gateway control center has to talk to the gateway and the gateway has two names, which name does the control center use?

Shoch: Someone has to take responsibility for choosing.

Jacobs: Where do the global unique names come from?

Postel: They are external. We always have a unique description, usually by location, for objects. The gateway control center will have to have for each gateway a unique (external) name, and associated with that a list of internal addresses.

Making Standards the IETF Way