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interlocked signalling (with the "there's-your-bit", "ready-for-next-bit" lines), and were essentially identical (except that LH was a TTL interface, whereas DH used differential pair). Nothing about a host-IMP interface using LH or DH looked anything like an IMP-IMP connection. VDH was totally different; it looked a lot more like the IMP-IMP protocol. VDH operated over a modem, and so VDH hosts could be a long way from their IMP (hundreds of miles in some cases, IIRC). The protocol between the modem interface on the host and that on the IMP was identical to the IMP-IMP protocol for that application. I.e. the VDH host-IMP connection shared the physical, and some of the data link, protocol specifications of the IMP-IMP interface.
626:, for coordinating this improvement as it would have been difficult to achieve otherwise! One suggestion for simplification proposed in the section below: merging the Program article into a section of the Protocol article (which is a fairly standard approaching to redirecting on Knowledge (XXG)). The advantage is there is then only one version of the content to read and maintain. In addition, I think this makes it easier to use the correct expansion of NCP for the context. For example, before I saw this discussion, I already changed a few links to
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originally, it was expanded in the late 70s to 4,096 hosts (ref: BBN 1822). So I'm deleting that whole weird sentence based on the BSDTalk interview. As a practical matter, TCP/IP incorporates bits of both NCP and the BBN 1822 protocol, and the latter did indeed reside on a special purpose box (the IMP). That must be the source of the confusion.
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of WP to have verifiable content, but I think there's sometimes too much focus on the details of the citation stuff, and not on the spirit. Some random people on the
Internet flaming on some random list; no, not good; - but that is a whole different kettle of fish from a discussion between a group of
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some contemporaneous evidence for that expansion (and there are books that give it too, e.g. Hafner). But note that that RFC is well after protocol development of the NCP stack (except some applications like email) stopped; and well after TCP was almost done; TCP-4 was in in
September 1978. 'NCP' was
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because they relate to the early years when it meant the latter. Merging the article would mean the words used in the article can simply be linked without worrying about which article it goes it. Hopefully consensus is this proposal is a logical improvement rather than, say, repeating content on two
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point-point links. And as for the "the transition meant a loss of functionality and increased complexity in TCP/IP", that's complete crap. TCP/IP operates from a completely different design philosophy, one suited to building an 'internet' (in the technical sense) out of a wide array of underlying
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If you look at the NCP as described in the
Protocol Handbook, it is obvious that it runs on the same host as the rest of the protocol stack. And, incidentally, I saw many examples of that (including Unix implementations). While it is true that NCP (and the whole ARPANET) was limited to 256 hosts
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Also, when I wrote "usually connected to the IMP using another kind of interface, with different physical, data link and network layer specifications", that's because of the rare VDH (Very
Distant Host) interfaces. Local Host and Distant Host (LH and DH) used custom bit-serial interfaces with
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The text as I found it was very confusing; it was talking about the lower layers (physical, data link) being implemented on the IMP, versus the host, and I think that's wrong. The IMP-host interface, as spec'd in 1822, included all three (physical, data-link, and network), and the host had to
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meaning of 'NCP'). Confusing, I know; we just recently sorted out what happened, ourselves. At Steve
Crocker's request, I have volunteered to fix all this here. I think I'm going to move the contents related to 'NCP the protocol' (which may be this entire page) to
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I know there's a citation there to a Day presentation (which, ironically enough, has a quote from me on the cover page), but whoever added this text (and, I assume, the reference) completely misunderstood Day's presentation (if that's what it's based on), because
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Perusal of the first thirty Google hits on "Network
Control Protocol" suggested that it iss not often confused with the RFC36 context of NCP and so I deleted that sentence. The link to the BSDTalk Interview doesn't seem to work quite right but I have left it for
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from a group of people who were there at the time is more trust-worthy anyway. (The number of times I have seen errors in articles/books written long afterwards on some history, by people who were not there... it's a long list.)
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OK, done. I wound up bodily moving the whole page to 'Network
Control Protocol (ARPANET)', since almost all the existing content related to the protocol, and I wanted to keep the edit history with the content.
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mailing list is not a good source; 'internet-history' is somewhat different; all the contributors to that discussion were there at the events being described (notably Steve
Crocker, who is the person who
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I tried to make clear that ARPANET NCP executed on a host rather than a "specialized processor". RFC36 seems to make the host residence of NCP clear. I inserted the link to RFC36 in further reading.
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IEN-11; "Internetting or Beyond NCP"; 21-Mar-77 (not super clear cut, but years before the first use of "Network
Control Protocol" as an expansion of "NCP" - in RFC-772, from September 1980)
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365:. And I can't be bothered to fix it; I've given up on trying to keep Knowledge (XXG) content accurate. Someone else might want to tilt at this particular windmill, though.
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If you read the thread there, you will see that the first RFC that contains the 'Network
Control Protocol' expansion for 'NCP' was RFC-772, from September 1980. So there
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are now both disambiguation pages, since there are multiple computer/networking things that use those names, so this will help in the future. I carefully looked through
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348:"provide a slightly different service ... by forming a network of networks" - the ARPANET was a single network, and its constituent data-carrying parts were
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498:. We have unfortunately lost Jon Postel and Mike Padlipsky, but the other participant in the discussion on 'internet-history' was Alex McKenzie, who
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is different from the ARPANET Network Control Protocol and the "Network Control Program(s)" that implemented that protocol on ARPANET hosts.
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So I did get around to looking for early examples of the use of "NCP" to refer to the protocol, and here's what I've found:
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technologies. All the "complexity" in TCP (sequence numbers, timeouts, checksums, etc) is there for a good reason, and
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Are you going to try to use the internet-history mailing list as a source for this? That could be a problem. ~
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Presumably by "the use of NCP by IBM" you're referring to the use of the initialism "NCP" by IBM, because the
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on Knowledge (XXG). If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
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I'm tired of seeing this erroneous content; since nobody has seen fit to fix it, I will just dike it.
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on 14 August 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see
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that implemented the ARPANET protocols; when TCP was created as an alternative, the acronym 'NCP'
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RFC-772; I have yet to dredge through IEN's, etc to find a cite for that sense of "NCP", though.
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clarified that 'NCP' (meaning 'Network Control Program'), originally referred to the
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But none of this is about NCPs, so this is really the wrong place for this anyway...
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for the original meaning/expansion. Comment now, if you think this has issues.
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from the host-IMP protocols, so I have modified the text to say that directly.
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IEN-52; "Some Thoughts About the Multiplexing Issue in Networks"; 11-Aug-78
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to be able to communicate with an IMP. I suspect that what the author was
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This article says nothing about the use of NCP by IBM. See my comments at
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The last part of the 'Transition' section is completely confused. NCP
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the term 'Network Control Program', in RFC-33). I am happy with the
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NCP are now mentioned in notes at the top of the page ("hatnotes").
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No need for a separate article, this text can be a section in the
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changed to 'Network Control Protocol' (as more appropriate to the
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Start-Class Computer networking articles of Unknown-importance
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is an existing disambig page), and create new content at
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recent discussion on the internet-history mailing list
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340:'Transition' section nonsense
148:This article is supported by
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