rfc1607.txt

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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" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "David Kenter" <[e-mail]>
   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



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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



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   To: "David Kenter" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "Jonathan Bradel" <[e-mail]>
   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


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   To: "David Kenter" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   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



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   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




























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   To: "Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Jonathan Bradel" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "David Kenter" <[e-mail]>
   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" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "Jonathan Bradel" <[e-mail]>
   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











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   To: "Jonathan Bradel" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "David Kenter" <[e-mail]>
   CC: "Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   From: "Therese Troisema" <[e-mail]>
   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



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