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Ask HN: Where can one learn about the history of the internet and the protocols?

287 points by joddystreet ↗ HN
I would like to read about the initial proposals, email exchanges, discussions, about why any specific technology or protocol was built, who all were involved - designer, funders, contributors, etc. History, timeline, discussions, proposals - accepted & rejected, ideas - accepted & rejected, philosophy, restrictions. In general I would like to read about all the technologies, but want to start with the internet and the TCP stack (protocols).

73 comments

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jonjacky
Here is an overview from the people who created it:

https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br...

An internet timeline, 1957 -- 2017:

https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

The recent article linked here reviews some of the important early papers about the Internet and alternatives:

http://named-data.net/publications/main/

A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade, Report no. 4799, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a115440.pdf

The Wikipedia article on Arpanet has many many links to its technical and political history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

The Arpanet was the immediate predecessor of the Internet, and was built and operated by many of the same people. Arpanet did not use the TCP protocol, but experience with Arpanet very much informed the design of TCP.

jonjacky
Then if you really want to get into the details you could begin working through the RFCs:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.html

in contrast to this, a brief and lively history is the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

voltagex_
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1118.txt is one such historical record.

Implementing something like DNS, however, requires jumping between multiple documents and understanding what's deprecated and extended by each.

jmiserez
It’s super-annoying to read an RFC and not know about the newer updates or that it has been superseded altogether. And source code that mentions RFC 822 when it’s been superseded twice. Unfortunately the old RFCs are never updated with links to the newer ones.

However, I just saw that rfc-editor.org actually lists these links between them, e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2822 has links to both 822 and to 5322.

artie_effim
Came here to say this. Learning BNF ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form ) and knowing how to go to the roots have helped me more than once in my career (started as tester, moved to security engineer, then net engineer, then CISSP, then ISSO, then HIPPA SPO -- now senior sec engineer at top10 UNI)

Here is a good site to see what obsoletes and is superseded by what. https://www.potaroo.net/ietf/html/rfcindex.html

nurettin
I have no idea what those acronyms mean, (UNI is University?) But that is an excellent resource for internet RFCs, thanks.
yodon
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but from a historical perspective The Cuckoo's Egg does a wonderful job of capturing what the state of networking was in the late 1980's
yathern
Definitely highly recommend! Also check out what Clifford (if I remember his name correctly) is up to these days! He sells Klein bottles and builds little robots to help him. Definitely someone I want to be when I grow up haha.
8bitsrule
Clifford Stoll. Interesting character. (Book is 1989; ISBN 0-385-24946-2)
no_protocol
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

By Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684832674

--

I read the Audiobook version of this book. It presents a narrative of the development of the very early stages of the internet. I enjoyed it. I think it would also have been fine in print or ebook formats. It is not too long and seems to present the events in a mostly linear fashion.

You'll get a great overview of the names, organizations, and machines that were used in this period.

erikbye
The book is a decent read. Like you said, it linearly presents the companies and people involved, mostly ARPA and BBN. Not a technical book, so don't expect anything in-depth on protocols, more like analogies laypeople can understand.

Excerpt:

To avoid sounding too declarative, he labeled the note “Request for Comments” and sent it out on April 7, 1969. Titled “Host Software,” the note was distributed to the other sites the way all the first Requests for Comments (RFCs) were distributed: in an envelope with the lick of a stamp. RFC Number 1 described in technical terms the basic “handshake” between two computers—how the most elemental connections would be handled. “Request for Comments,” it turned out, was a perfect choice of titles. It sounded at once solicitous and serious. And it stuck.

“When you read RFC 1, you walked away from it with a sense of, ‘Oh, this is a club that I can play in too,’” recalled Brian Reid, later a graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon. “It has rules, but it welcomes other members as long as the members are aware of those rules.” The language of the RFC was warm and welcoming. The idea was to promote cooperation, not ego. The fact that Crocker kept his ego out of the first RFC set the style and inspired others to follow suit in the hundreds of friendly and cooperative RFCs that followed. “It is impossible to underestimate the importance of that,” Reid asserted. “I did not feel excluded by a little core of protocol kings. I felt included by a friendly group of people who recognized that the purpose of networking was to bring everybody in.” For years afterward (and to this day) RFCs have been the principal means of open expression in the computer networking community, the accepted way of recommending, reviewing, and adopting new technical standards.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1

SmellyGeekBoy
> I read the Audiobook version of this book.

Slightly OT, but this concept really intrigued me.

aasasd
Books with denser technical content get difficult in the audio form, though it's probably a matter of habit―but generally audiobooks are a great way to consume narrative material: I think I got through around thirty books in the past seven months. Walks, shopping and house chores are much more productive on the brain front now.

Pro tip: VLC lets you speed up the audio. 1.3x to 1.5x is no problem with many narrators.

aphextron
> "Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today [1998], twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net."

The scale of the web today is truly staggering. The entirety of Yahoo era internet users would be a single celebrity's Twitter followers now. It's no wonder things felt so much more intimate and real back then. It really was a qualitatively different time and place.

WalterGR
twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net."

Facebook alone has two orders of magnitude (2 billion) more users than 1998 had in its entirety.

Crazy.

pfd1986
I know you said read but I found the Internet History Podcast very enlightening and fun to listen to: https://pca.st/miqr
mattl
It’s an interesting show but really ought to be the web history podcast.
mkay3131
Try Kurose's "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach". The points you mention are not the focus of the book but get touched on the way, plus it's extremely accessible. I vividly remember reading it as a CS student and being happy that I finally reached a satisfactory level of understanding on the topic.
dedalus
Inventing the Internet (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-internet) is a fantastic place to start

Innovations in Internetworking (https://www.amazon.com/Innovations-Internetworking-Artech-Te...) is a great collection of papers that help you understand the original thinking behind each protocol

The Elements of Networking Style (https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Networking-Style-Animadversi...) explains why you see only 4 layers in the real Internet while ISO slices it into 7 and all the fun parts os standard bodies while retaining a unique sense of satire

charlesholbrow
I've been reading "where wizards stay up late" which is a great history of the internet being built. It's less focused on protocols, but a really valuable read for telling the story.
phodo
Follow the RFCs. Even if don’t read them in their entirety, you will have a frame of reference from which to dive deeper.
godelmachine
"The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols" is what you are looking for →

http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf

Excellent summary of the same by Adrian Colyer →

https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/01/22/the-design-philosophy-of...

You can also read "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson to get acquainted with how it gained momentum.

jimpudar
Reading the design philosophy was a life changing experience for me. It's really incredible how much we take this incredible system for granted.
kevin_thibedeau
Even more interesting would be an in depth analysis of the OSI protocols and comparison to their IP equivalents. The actual technical details of OSI are largely absent from the internet and hard to search since IP lifted it's terminology.
8bitsrule
This short, 1995 history of the web (a timeline) may prove handy.

http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/robert_cailliau_sp...

Edit: Here's one from Tim Berners Lee circa 1993-4.

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TimBook-old/History.html

siosonel
This book [1] by Robert Cailliau and James Gillies is very approachable, entertaining, and somewhat comprehensive.

Edit: The book has lots of historical details about competing early technologies such as the OSI vs TCP/IP, C vs well-structured languages, Archie/WAIS/Gopher, attempts from different parts of the world such as AlohaNet in Hawaii and Minitel in France. That's just a sampler, but the story telling does not get too bogged down with too much details and moves along at a quick pace.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Web-was-Born-Story/dp/0192862073

contingencies
Start with the basics - TCP/IP Illustrated - Volume 1: The Protocols. Then read RFCs for each protocol, and other 'meta' RFCs on best practices. Then read histories.
mrisoli
A few years ago I took this MOOC: https://www.coursera.org/learn/internet-history

It was great for me because it was very light in coursework and easy, so it was a good gateway drug to MOOCs, unlike the more advanced classes which I often dropped halfway due to lack of time.

The content itself is very good, includes some old videos and interviews with some of the people who worked on internet technology in the 80s and 90s, and even does a quick explanation of some concepts of computer networks(TCP/IP, ethernet, etc).

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rdednl
An awesome book is Where wizards stay up late: the origins of the internet.
tonyg
You will find an interesting point of view on these matters presented in:

  "Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals"
  by John Day
  Prentice-Hall 2008
  ISBN 0-13-225242-2
rcarmo
Every now and then I read some of the early RFCs to remind myself of how nice it is today, and yet how much sheer fun it must have been to craft some of the protocols, so I recommend those as extra reading material - no need to read specific ones in sequence, just search for them as topics arise.

Having lived through the original yellow-coax Ethernet years and filled out actual site registrations with the infamous "ICBM Address" field, there is a lot that I can directly relate to.

AndyMcConachie
I've read an absurd number of Internet histories. And I think one of the problems with studying the history of the Internet is that it very quickly grew up and out of the small group of people who got it started, and thus writing its history must take into account the increasing number of perspectives that chronologically track its development. Also, it can be very difficult to disambiguate the history of the Internet with that of general computing. The Internet developed and continues to develop both simultaneously influencing, and being influenced by, the development of general computing. Sometimes just reading the changelog of a particular old piece of infrastructure software(BIND, AT&T UNIX) can reveal more to you than reading about the Internet specifically.

I could throw tons of links here, but below are a couple that provide detailed accounts that people may find interesting.

RSSAC023: History of the Root Server System. I'm biased because I helped edit this a little ;)

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov1...

Chapter 3 of my friend Ashwin's dissertation. It's IMO a very well written and accessible social history of the Internet.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/ashwin-...

Really old messages on the namedroppers ML like this. If someone could figure out how to view all messages on namedroppers I would be eternally grateful.

https://marc.info/?l=namedroppers&m=95837667426457&w=2

kmxm
The link to the dissertation is not working for me…
pieterr
Just remove the %3E percent cruft after the .pdf
MisterTea
Looks like some copypasta got in there. Delete the angle bracket at the end.
paidleaf
You can start with an introductory overview ( Chuck Severance's Internet History on coursera ) and then search the RFCs, books and material afterwards for a more detailed view.

The coursera course is great because it covers the internet from inception to today and includes interviews with individuals who made great contributions along the way. It is impressive the people who he was able to track down and interview.