7/31/2019 Early Days of APRANET

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7/31/2019 Early Days of APRANET

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The Early Days of the ArpanetBy Peter T. Kirstein

Arpanets first access control

In September 2003, University College London (UCL)had had their Arpanet terminal interface processor (TIP)for only six weeks. There was a major networks meetingin Brighton, which was the first public demonstration ofinternational usage.

Immediately after the meeting, I had an Arpanet proj-ect meeting at UCL and then invited all the attendees tomy house for dinner. There were at least a dozen attend-ees, including most of the developers of the TIP softwarefrom BBN. Of course, all of them were suffering with-drawal symptoms because they had not been onto thenet for a whole week, so they lined up to get on myhome system. Although they could dial in easily, theycould not get any further because the TIP requested

a password. The BBN developers were particularlyastounded; their software did not at the time have anyaccess control, so they could not understand this request.

At UCL, we were very concerned about security. I hada DEC PDP-9 host and had found a security hole in theirsoftware. For a fraction of a second, after users connectedin but before they had time to do anything else, it waspossible to seize the session and force it to go throughour host. We had used this to request that the user putin a password, before we released the connection andlet the normal software continue. I believe that this wasthe first network-level access control on the Arpanet!

The first use of the Arpanet by a head of state

Toward the end of 1975, DARPA was worried that in-ternational usage of the Arpanet would raise questions

in the US Congress or Senate and asked me to keep a

low profile. I agreed, of course, in principle. In January1976, the Queen was opening a new building in theBritish Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvernin England. The British were starting a collaboration be-tween US and British defense contractors on the newADA language. As part of that, a link between RSREand UCL, and hence into the Arpanet was being estab-lished, and it was arranged that the Queen would inau-gurate the link.

During the preparation for this event, I was told thatthe provision of the link between RSRE and UCL wasgiven the second highest priority of any link by thethen carrier, the British Post Office. The only activitywith higher priority was repairing telephone exchanges

in Northern Ireland that were blown up by the IRA! Weintended that the link would be inaugurated by theQueen logging in to an account at ISI in Los Angelesand sending a welcome e-mail. The only accountsI had at ISI were in my own name, so I requested anaccount for her called HM EII because to use another ac-count would be lese majeste(i.e. the crime of violatingmajesty). (This is the only time I have used that phrasecompletely correctly!)

When the event happened, all considerations of a lowprofile were forgotten. All the relevant DARPA officials,from the director downward, wanted to participate inthe eventeven though it was at 6:00 a.m. EST.

Readers may contact Peter T. Kirstein at P.Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk.

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