Subject: Re: Blast from the past

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 18:20:46 -0500

In message <[email-masked]>, Brian E Carpenter writes:
>Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>> 
>> At 10:30 PM -0500 1/24/01, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> >PS: Those of you with sharp eyes will notice that everything has a class A
>> >address!
>> 
>> ...and that some of those addresses still work, and appear to be used
>> by folks directly related to the original owners. If only URLs could
>> be so persistent...
>
>However, I have to observe that this strange thing called ARPANET
>appears to be using private addresses :-)

And I assume there were ALGs to translate between NCP and TCP hosts...

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb

---

From: "Peter Ford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:52:49 -0800

Ah, dual stacks, a time tested transition strategy.  But there was some
Application Layer Gateway cruft (ALG) although not at the level of
sophistication and beauty of a NAT ...

From RFC 801:

Because all hosts can not be converted to TCP simultaneously, and
   some will implement only IP/TCP, it will be necessary to provide
   temporarily for communication between NCP-only hosts and TCP-only
   hosts.  To do this certain hosts which implement both NCP and IP/TCP
   will be designated as relay hosts.  These relay hosts will support
   Telnet, FTP, and Mail services on both NCP and TCP.  These relay
   services will be provided  beginning in November 1981, and will be
   fully in place in January 1982.

   Initially there will be many NCP-only hosts and a few TCP-only hosts,
   and the load on the relay hosts will be relatively light.  As time
   goes by, and the conversion progresses, there will be more TCP
   capable hosts, and fewer NCP-only hosts, plus new TCP-only hosts.
   But, presumably most hosts that are now NCP-only will implement
   IP/TCP in addition to their NCP and become "dual protocol" hosts.
   So, while the load on the relay hosts will rise, it will not be a
   substantial portion of the total traffic.

---

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:17:35 -0500

Can people *please* trim the CC list on this thread - and in particular, make
sure to remove "Info-Explorer"? I'm so tired of getting three copies of
everything...

	Noel

---

From: Lawrence Landweber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 16:33:00 -0600 (CST)

In the 1980s we ran an X.400 to SMTP-RFC822  mail 
gateway at Wisconsin.  This was during the height of the 
Internet / OSI protocol wars. 

Earlier, we also ran a BITNET to Internet mail gateway. 

Both used software developed at Wisconsin (an IBM VM 
internet protocol implementation (WISCNET) for VM for 
the latter and a BSD Unix implementation of the ISO/OSI 
protocols for the latter). Address format, protocol
tranlations and option handling were a challenge.