[ih] ARPANet anniversary

[jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: "Bernie Cosell" <bernie at fantasyfarm.com>

    > the first message sent over the net was, of course, nowhere *NEAR*
    > that ... The net, itself, had been up and running for a little while by
    > that time. ... first saw the light on the imp lights-panel tell him
    > that the SRI IMP had just come up, which to my view would _really_ be
    > when the ARPAnet first came alive.

As a systems person, I have a somewhat different perspective. Yes, the event
you mention was a very important milestone, but to me, the most significant
milestone would have been something that exercised the entire system, and did
_what the system was intended to achieve as an overall goal_: i.e. have a
packet go from the source host, through the host and IMP host->Imp interface
pair, across the network, out the Imp->host interface pair on the other side,
and into the destination host.

Something I'm curious about, though: how much of this stuff was all
demonstrated internally at BBN, first? E.g. I would have guessed that the
first frame (for want of a better word to differentiate IMP-IMP datagrams
from host-host datagrams) sent from one IMP to another happened at BBN? Or
was there insufficient hardware/testbed stuff to do that, and in fact the
first IMP-IMP frames sent actually were sent between the SRI and UCLA IMPs?
Did BBN have any host-IMP host interfaces (and hosts) they could play with,
or were the host interfaces at the user sites the first ones actually plugged
in and tried?

	Noel