    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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 1]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 2]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

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

       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

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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 3]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 4]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 5]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

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

       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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 6]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

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

       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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 7]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       "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

    Cerf                                                            [Page 8]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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!!

    Cerf                                                            [Page 9]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                           [Page 10]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                           [Page 11]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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

    Cerf                                                           [Page 12]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

       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!

    Cerf                                                           [Page 13]

    RFC 1607              A View from the 21st Century          1 April 1994

    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
       EMail: vinton_cerf@mcimail.com

    Cerf                                                           [Page 14]