Homework 1 - Clark Reaction

This and future "reaction" assignments are graded on a simple scale: checkplus (insighful, 5pts), check (acceptable, 4pts), checkminus (substandard, 3pts), or fail (incomplete or unacceptable, 0pts). Late submissions are not accepted.

(1) Read David Clark's Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, paying particular attention to sections 1 through 7. You can just skim sections 8 - 12.

(2) By 9pm on Wednesday, write and submit a short reaction describing:

1. One or two ideas in the paper you thought were most interesting, insightful, or novel, and why you thought so;
2. and one or two points in the paper you think are wrong, misguided, outdated, or lacking, and why you think so.

(3) Around 10pm on Wednesday, all of the reactions will be posted on the course web site. Please read them before Friday's lecture and be prepared to discuss in class.

Be concise: Your reaction should be no more than a few sentences, e.g. about one-third to one-half page of single-spaced text.

Know your audience: Write as if your smart peers will read it. You should consider this as a discussion with your classmates, all of whom (should) have also read the paper already. There is no need to rephrase or summarize the ideas in the paper. Avoid filler text. Don't bluff: Your reaction will be posted for all the class to see.

Context is important: The author of the article was one of the chief architects of the Internet. But that doesn't make his arguments or viewpoints correct. Also, when reading and reacting to the paper, keep in mind that it was written in 1988: there were about 60,000 hosts connected to the Internet (today Worcster alone has far more than that, and the Internet has well over billion hosts), Internet viruses and worms had just been invented, the web didn't exist yet (forget gmail, social media, youtube, and zoom, since even simple static web pages and web browsers were still 3 years in the future), Google was still a decade away. There were no mobile apps, nor even smartphones, since even bulky brick-like handheld mobile phones were still in the research and development phase. Some towns still relied on human switchboard telephone operators. So what was the Internet used for in 1988? Text-based login to remote systems (modern ssh is a descendent of this, just adding cryptography); Email, which surprisingly was created before the Internet and was already 16 years old at this point; USENET discussion forms, a sort of text-based reddit-style system accessed through a palin-text email-like interface; human-friendly domain names, like "whitehouse.gov", though this was relatively new; and aside from larger corporations, governments, and universities, and those employees and researchers who could connect to these through the phone system, there was essentially no public access to the Internet--the first commercial dial-up access provider didn't start offering public access until a year later, in 1989.

Submissions

Submit your plain text response here.