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RFC1607 - A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

王朝other·作者佚名  2008-05-31
窄屏简体版  字體: |||超大  

Network Working Group V. Cerf

Request for Comments: 1607 Internet Society

Category: Informational 1 April 1994

A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Status of this Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo

does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of

this memo is unlimited.

A NOTE TO THE READER

The letters below were discovered in September 1993 in a reverse

time-capsule apparently sent from 2023. The author of this paper

cannot voUCh for the accuracy of the letter contents, but spectral

and radiation analysis are consistent with origin later than 2020. It

is not known what, if any, effect will arise if readers take actions

based on the future history contained in these documents. I trust

you will be particularly careful with our collective futures!

THE LETTERS

To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

Date: September 8, 2023 08:47.01 MT

Subject: Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

Hi Jonathan!

I just wanted to let you know that I have settled in my new

Offices at the Exobiology Lab at the Interplanetary Space

EXPloration Agency's base here on Mars. The trip out was

uneventful and did let me get through an awful lot of

reading in preparation for my three year term here. There

is an Excellent library of material here at the lab and

reasonable communications back home, thanks to the CommRing

satellites that were put up last year here. The transfer

rates are only a few terabits per second, but this is

usually adequate for the most part.

We've been doing some simulation work to test various

theories of bio-history on Mars and I have attached the

output of one of the more interesting runs. The results are

best viewed with a model VR-95HR/OS headset with the

peripheral glove adapter. I would recommend finding an

outdoor location if you activate the olfactory simulator

since some of the outputs are pretty rank! You'll notice

that atmospheric outgassing seriously interfered with any

potential complex life form development.

We tried a few runs to see what would happen if an

atmospheric confinement/replenishment system had been in

place, but the results are too speculative to be more than

entertaining at this point. There has been some serious

discussion of terra-forming options, but the economics are

still very unclear, as are the time-frames for realizing

any useful results.

I have also been trying out some new exercises to recover

from the effects of the long trip out. I've attached a

sample neuroscan clip which will give you some feeling for

the kinds of gymnastics that are possible in this gravity

field. My timing is still pretty lousy, but I hope it will

improve with practice.

I'd appreciate it very much if you could track down the

latest NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT. I have need of

some lab gear which isn't available here and which would be

a lot easier to fabricate with the tool kit. The version I

have is NTK-R5 (2020) and I know there has been a lot added

since then.

Therese,

I wanted you to see the simulation runs, too. You may be

able to coax better results from the EXAFLOP array at CERN,

if you still have an account there. We're still limping

along with the 50 PFLOP system that Danny Hillis donated to

the agency a few years back.

The attached HD video clip shows the greenhouse efforts

here to grow grapes from the cuttings that were brought out

five years ago. We're still a long ways from '82

Beaucastel!

Gotta get ready for a sampling trip to Olympus Mons, so

will send this off for now.

Warmest regards,

David

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

Date: September 10, 2023 12:30:14 LT

Subject: Re: Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

David,

Many thanks for your note and all its news and interesting

data! Melanie and I are glad to know you are settled now

and back at work. We've been making heavy use of the new

darkside reflector telescope and, thanks to the new petabit

fiber links that were introduced last year, we have very

effective controls from Luna City. We've been able to run

some really interesting synthetic aperture observations by

linking the results from the darkside array and the Earth-

orbiting telescopes, giving us an effective diameter of

about 200,000 miles. I can hardly wait to see what we can

make of some of the most distant Quasars with this set-up.

We had quite a scare last month when Melanie complained of

a recurring vertigo. None of the usual treatments seemed to

help so a molecular-level brain bioscan was done. An

unexpectedly high level of localized neuro-transmitter

synthesis was discovered but has now been corrected by

auto-gene therapy.

As you requested, I have attached the latest

NanoConstructor ToolKit from MIT. This version integrates

the Knowbot control subsystem which allows the NanoSystem

to be fully linked to the Internet for control, data

sharing and inter-system communication. By the way, the

Internet Society has negotiated a nice discount for nano-

fab services if you need something more elaborate than the

ISEA folks have available at XOB. I could put the

NanoSystem on the Solex Mars/Luna run and have it to you

pretty quickly.

Keep in touch!

Jon and Melanie

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

Date: September 10, 2023 12:30:14 UT

Subject: Re: Hello from the Exobiology Lab!

Bon Jour, David!

I am writing to you from the Hyatt Geosync where your email

was forwarded to me from INRIA. Louis and I are here

vacationing for two weeks. I have some time available and

will set up a simulation run on my EXAFLOP account. They

have the VR-95HR/OS headsets here for entertainment

purposes, but they will work fine for examining the results

of the simulation.

I have been taking time to do some research on the

development of the Interplanetary Internet and have found

some rather interesting results. I guess this counts as a

kind of paleo-networking effort, since some of the early

days reach back to the 1960s. It's hard to believe that

anyone even knew what a computer network was back then!

Did you know that the original work on Internet was

intended for military network use? One would never guess it

from the current state of affairs, but a lot of the

original packet switching work on ARPANET was done under

the sponsorship of something called the Advanced Research

Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense back in

1968. During the 1970s, a number of packet networks were

built by ARPA and others (including work by the predecessor

to INRIA, IRIA, which developed a packet network called

CIGALE on which the CYCLADES network operating system was

built). There was also work done by the French PTT on an

experimental system called RCP that later became a

commercial system called TRANSPAC. Some seminal work was

done in the mid-late 1960s in England at the National

Physical Laboratory on a single node switch that apparently

served as the first local area network! It's very hard to

believe that this all happened over 50 years ago.

A radio-based network was developed in the same 1960s/early

1970s time period called ALOHANET which featured use of a

randomly-shared radio channel. This idea was later realized

on a coaxial cable at XEROX PARC and called Ethernet. By

1978, the Internet research effort had produced 4 versions

of a set of protocols called "TCP/IP" (Transmission Control

Protocol/Internet Protocol"). These were used in

conjunction with devices called gateways, back then, but

which became known as "routers". The gateways connected

packet networks to each other. The combination of gateways

and TCP/IP software was implemented on a lot of different

operating systems, especially something called UNIX. There

was enough confidence in the resulting implementations that

all the computers on the ARPANET and any networks linked to

the ARPANET by gateways were required to switch over to use

TCP/IP at the beginning of 1983. For many historians, 1983

marks the start of global Internet growth although it had

its origins in the research effort started at Stanford

University in 1973, ten years earlier.

I am going to read more about this and, if you are

interested, I can report on what happened after 1983.

I will leave any simulation results from the EXAFLOP runs

in the private Access Directory in the CERN TERAFLEX

archive. It will be accessible using the JIT-ticket I have

attached, protected with your public key.

Au revoir, mon ami, Therese

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

Date: September 10, 2023 17:26:35 MT

Subject: Internet History

Dear Therese,

I am so glad you have had a chance to take a short

vacation; you and Louis work too hard! I changed the

subject line to reflect the new thread this discussion

seems to be leading in. It sounds as if the whole system

started pretty small. How did it ever get to the size it is

now?

David

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

Date: September 11, 2023 09:45:26 LT

Subject: Re: Internet History

Hello everyone! I have been following the discussion with

great interest. I seem to remember that there was an effort

to connect what people thought were "super computers" back

in the mid-1980's and that had something to do with the way

in which the system evolved. Therese, did your research

tell you anything about that?

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

Date: September 12, 2023 16:05:02 UT

Subject: Re: Internet History

Jon,

Yes, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) set up 5

super computer centers around the US and also provided some

seed funding for what they called "intermediate level"

packet networks which were, in turn, connected to a

national backbone network they called "NSFNET." The

intermediate level nets connected the user community

networks (mostly in research labs and universities at that

time) to the backbone to which the super computer sites

were linked. According to my notes, NSF planned to reduce

funding for the various networking activities over time on

the presumption that they could become self-sustaining.

Many of the intermediate level networks sought to create a

larger market by turning to industry, which NSF permitted.

There was a rapid growth in the equipment market during the

last half of the 1980s, for routers (the new name for

gateways), work stations, network servers, and local area

networks. The penetration of the equipment market led to a

new market in commercial Internet services. Some of the

intermediate networks became commercial services, joining

others that were created to meet a growing demand for

Internet access.

By mid-1993, the system had grown to include over 15,000

networks, world-wide, and over 2 million computers. They

must have thought this was a pretty big system, back then.

Actually, it was, at the time, the largest collection of

networks and computers ever interconnected. Looking back

from our perspective, though, this sounds like a very

modest beginning, doesn't it? Nobody knew, at the time,

just how many users there were, but the system was doubling

annually and that attracted a lot of attention in many

different quarters.

There was an interesting report produced by the US National

Academy of Science about something they called

"Collaboratories" which was intended to convey the idea

that people and computers could carry out various kinds of

collaborative work if they had the right kinds of networks

to link their computer systems and the right kinds of

applications to deal with distributed applications. Of

course, we take that sort of thing for granted now, but it

was new and often complicated 30 years ago.

I am going to try to find out how they dealt with the

problem of explosive growth.

Louis and I will be leaving shortly for a three-day

excursion to the new vari-grav habitat but I will let you

know what I find out about the 1990s period in Internet

history when we get back.

Therese

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

From: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

Date: September 13, 2023 10:34:05 LT

Subject: Re: Internet History

Therese,

I sent a few Knowbot programs out looking for Internet

background and found an interesting archive at the Postel

Historical Institute in Pacific Palisades, California.

These folks have an incredible collection of old documents,

some of them actually still on paper, dating as far back as

1962! This stuff gets addicting after a while.

Postel apparently edited a series of reports called

"Request for Comments" or "RFC" for short. These seem to be

one of the principal means by which the technology of the

Internet has been documented, and also, as nearly as I can

tell, a lot of its culture. The Institute also has a

phenomenal archive of electronic mail going back to about

1970 (do you believe it? Email from over 50 years ago!). I

don't have time to set up a really good automatic analysis

of the contents, but I did leave a couple of Knowbots

running to find things related to growth, scaling, and

increased capacity of the Internet.

It turns out that the technical committee called the

Internet Engineering Task Force was very pre-occupied in

the 1991-1994 period with the whole problem of

accommodating exponential growth in the size of the

Internet. They had a bunch of different options for re-

placing the then-existing IP layer with something that

could support a larger address space. There were a lot of

arguments about how soon they would run out of addresses

and a lot of uncertainty about how much functionality to

add on while solving the primary growth problem. Some folks

thought the scaling problem was so critical that it should

take priority while others thought there was still some

time and that new functionality would help motivate the

massive effort needed to replace the then-current version 4

IP.

As it happens, they were able to achieve multiple

objectives, as we now know. They found a way to increase

the space for identifying logical end-points in the system

as well increasing the address space needed to identify

physical end-points. That gave them a hook on which to base

the mobile, dynamic addressing capability that we now rely

on so heavily in the Internet. According to the notes I

have seen, they were also experimenting with new kinds of

applications that required different kinds of service than

the usual "best efforts" they were able to oBTain from the

conventional router systems.

I found an absolutely hilarious "packet video clip" in one

of the archives. It's a black-and-white, 6 frame per second

shot of some guy taking off his coat, shirt and tie at one

of the engineering committee meetings. His T-shirt says "IP

on everything" which must have been some kind of slogan for

Internet expansion back then. Right at the end, some big

bearded guy comes up and stuffs some paper money in the

other guy's waistband. Apparently, there are quite a few

other archives of the early packet video squirreled away at

the PHI. I can't believe how primitive all this stuff

looks. I have attached a sample for you to enjoy. They

didn't have TDV back then, so you can't move the point of

view around the room or anything. You just have to watch

the figures move jerkily across the screen.

You can dig into this stuff if you send a Knowbot program

to concierge@phi.pacpal.ca.us. This Postel character must

have never thrown anything away!!

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

CC: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

CC: "Troisema" <rm1023@geosync.hyatt.com>

From: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

Date: September 15, 2023 07:55:45 UT

Subject: Re: Internet History

Jon,

thanks for the pointer. I pulled up a lot of very useful

material from PHI. You're right, they did manage to solve a

lot of problems at once with the new IP. Once they got the

bugs out of the prototype implementations, it spread very

quickly from the transit service companies outward towards

all the host computers in the system. I also discovered

that they were doing research on primitive gigabit-per-

second networks at that same general time. They had been

relying on unbelievably slow transmission systems around

100 megabits-per-second and below. Can you imagine how long

it would take to send a typical 3DV image at those glacial

speeds?

According to the notes I found, a lot of the wide-area

system was moved over to operate on top of something they

called Asynchronous Transfer Mode Cell Switching or ATM for

short. Towards the end of the decade, they managed to get

end to end transfer rates on the order of a gigabyte per

second which was fairly respectable, given the technology

they had at the time. Of course, the telecommunications

business had been turned totally upside down in the process

of getting to that point.

It used to be the case that broadcast and cable television,

telephone and publishing were different businesses. In some

countries, television and telephone were monopolies

operated by the government or operated in the private

sector with government regulation. That started changing

drastically as the 1990s unfolded, especially in the United

States where telephone companies bought cable companies,

publishers owned various communication companies and it got

to be very hard to figure out just what kind of company it

was that should or could be regulated. There grew up an

amazing number of competing ways to deliver information in

digital form. The same company might offer a variety of

information and communication services.

With regard to the Internet, it was possible to reach it

through mobile digital radio, satellite, conventional wire

line access (quaintly called "dial-up") using Integrated

Services Digital Networking, specially-designed modems,

special data services on television cable, and new fiber-

based services that eventually made it even into

residential settings. All the bulletin board systems got

connected to the Internet and surprised everyone, including

themselves, when the linkage created a new kind of

publishing environment in which authors took direct re-

sponsibility for making their work accessible.

Interestingly, this didn't do away either with the need for

traditional publishers, who filter and evaluate material

prior to publication, nor for a continuing interest in

paper and CD-ROM. As display technology got better and more

portable, though, paper became much more of a specialty

item. Most documents were published on-line or on high-

density digital storage media. The basic publishing

process retained a heavy emphasis on editorial selection,

but the mechanics shifted largely in the direction of the

author - with help from experts in layout and

accessibility. Of course, it helped to have a universal

reference numbering plan which allowed authors to register

documents in permanent archives. References could be made

to these from any other on-line context and the documents

retrieved readily, possiblyat some cost for copying rights.

By the end of the decade, "multimedia" was no longer a

buzz-Word but a normal way of preparing and presenting

information. One unexpected angle: multimedia had been

thought to be confined to presentation in visual and

audible forms for human consumption, but it turned out that

including computers as senders and recipients of these

messages allowed them to use the digital email medium as an

enabling technology for deferred, inter-computer

interaction.

Just based on what I have been reading, one of the toughest

technical problems was finding good standards to represent

all these different modalities. Copyright questions, which

had been thought to be what they called "show-stoppers,"

turned out to be susceptible to largely-established case

law. Abusing access to digital information was impeded in

large degree by wrapping publications in software shields,

but in the end, abuses were still possible and abusers were

prosecuted.

On the policy side, there was a strong need to apply

cryptography for authentication and for privacy. This was a

big struggle for many governments, including ours here in

France, where there are very strong views and laws on this

subject, but ultimately, the need for commonality on a

global basis outweighed many of the considerations that

inhibited the use of this valuable technology.

Well, that takes us up to about 20 years ago, which still

seems a far cry from our current state of technology. With

over a billion computers in the system and most of the

populations of information-intensive countries fully

linked, some of the more technically-astute back at the

turn of the millennium may have had some inkling of what

was in store for the next two decades.

Therese

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To: "Therese Troisema" <ttroisema@inria.fr>

CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <jbradel@astro.luna.edu>

From: "David Kenter" <dkenter@xob.isea.mr>

Date: September 17, 2023 06:43:13 MT

Subject: Re: Internet History

Therese and Jon,

This is really fascinating! I found some more material,

thanks to the Internet Society, which summarizes the

technical developments over the last 20 years. Apparently

one of the key events was the development of all-optical

transmission, switching and computing in a cost-effective

way. For a long time, this technology involved rather

bulky equipment - some of the early 3DV clips from 2000-

2005 showed rooms full of gear required to steer beams

around. A very interesting combination of fiber optics and

three-dimensional electro-optical integrated circuits

collapsed a lot of this to sizes more like what we are

accustomed to today. Using pico- and femto- molecular

fabrication methods, it has been possible to build very

compact, extremely high speed computing and communication

devices.

I guess those guys at Xerox PARC who imagined that there

might be hundreds of millions of computers in the world,

hundreds or even thousands of them for each person, would

be pleased to see how clear their vision was. The only

really bad thing, as I see it, is that those guys who were

trying to figure out how to deal with Internet expansion

really blew it when they picked a measly 64 bit address

space. I hear we are running really tight again. I wonder

why they didn't have enough sense just to allocate at least

1024 bits to make sure we'd have enough room for the

obvious applications we can see we want, now?

David

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Final Comments

The letters end here, so we are left to speculate about many of the

loose ends not tied up in this informal exchange. Obviously, our

current struggles ultimately will be resolved and a very different,

information-intensive world will evolve from the present. There are a

great many policy, technical and economic questions that remain to be

answered to guide our progress towards the environment described in

part in these messages. It will be an interesting two or three

decades ahead!

Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Author's Address

Vinton Cerf

President, Internet Society

12020 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 270

Reston, VA 22091

EMail: +1 703 648 9888

Fax: +1 703 648 9887

EMail: vcerf@isoc.org

or

Vinton Cerf

Sr. VP Data Architecture

MCI Data Services Division

2100 Reston Parkway, Room 6001

Reston, VA 22091

Phone: +1 703 715 7432

Fax: +1 703 715 7436

 
 
 
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