[ih] invention of multicast addressing

[jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)]

What about Yogen Dalal's PhD thesis?  The first (that I know of) 
distributed spanning tree algorithms for multicast?  When I get home, 
I will check to see but I may be able to point to some mid- to late- 
70s discussions of it.  Although the title of Yogen's thesis says 
broadcast, I remember it as multicast, i.e. less than all!

But you may be on to something with the Irvine ring?

At 13:20 -0400 2010/05/07, Craig Partridge wrote:
>Hi folks:
>
>I'm trying to nail down when the concept of a "multicast address" came about
>(just a little citation in a larger paper I'm writing).
>
>In 1976 in the original Ethernet paper, there was unicast and broadcast.
>
>In 1978, in their survey of local networks, Clark, Pogran and Reed mention
>in passing that Mockapetris is playing around with bit wildcarding that
>permits multiple addressees using one address.
>
>In the 1980 Ethernet specification there are Ethernet multicast 
>addresses as we
>know them today.
>
>Digging a bit deeper from references in later papers, it appears that
>Mockapetris, Lyle and Farber may have proposed a form of multicasting in 1977
>(IFIP Congress paper of August 1977 that I don't have).
>
>That suggests that someone saw the Mockapetris-Lyle-Farber idea, simplified it
>and put it into the 1980 Ethernet standard (where it sat unused for several
>years...).  But I can find no trail... Anyone got insights?
>
>Thanks!
>
>Craig