Portions of a thread on the CMU CS general bboard about changing the Arpanet protocol over from NCP to TCP/IP are below. This was retrieved from vax backup tapes by Jeff Baird while searching for the original bboard post in which Scott Fahlman invented the smiley :-).
For more context you can view the full contents of the bboard from the October 1982 spice vax (cmu-750x) backup tape, which spanned the dates 16-Sep-82 to 21-Oct-82, and the full contents of the bboard from the 1982 year-end g vax (cmu-780g) backup tape, which spanned the dates 25-Nov-82 to 31-Dec-82.
25-Sep-82 13:16 Rudy Nedved at CMU-10A ARPANET down on October 1st. On Saturday October 1st, from 12:00 to 16:00 EDT, the entire ARPANET will not forward NCP traffic and will only forward TCP traffic. In other words, the ARPANET service for CMUC, CMUA and CMUB will not work during this short four hour time period. ARPANET connections established before this time period will either timeout or be aborted. EtherNet, DECNet and Front End service will be unaffected. ARPANET mail service will be delayed for at least four hours. = 25-Sep-82 14:12 Rudy Nedved at CMU-10A ARPANET down. Correction: October 1st is a Friday. I thought the ARPANET people were going to be nice about it and disable NCP during the weekend. = 02-Oct-82 10:35 David Lamb at CMU-10A DOD Arpanet newsletter DOD Arpanet Newsletter #16 appears as TEMP:ANWS16.TXT[C410DL10] on CMUA and /usr/lamb/anws16.txt on CMUG. This note talks about the cutover to IP/TCP on January 1, 1983. I copied it from the SCORE bboard. =
(Gap here from 21-Oct-82 to 25-Nov-82 between backup tapes)
10-Dec-82 11:26 Howard Wactlar at CMU-10A Mail service problems As a result of the new ARPAnet protocols going into place by January 1, many installations, including CMU, have been extending and reimplementing their mail programs and servers. Until adequately debugged, some of these will produce ill-formed, truncated, and misdirected mail. If you should be the recipient of such you should inform both GRIPE and the individual who is identified as the sender. You should forward the message without change as long as its content is not considered to be confidential. Your cooperation will help stabilize the network in the minimum of time. = 12-Dec-82 19:58 Rudy Nedved at CMU-10A ArpaNet experiment 13-Dec-82 On Monday, 13-Dec-82, the ArpaNet Management will conduct a 48-hour TCP-only (new protocol) experiment. For the entire two days, NCP packets (old protocol) will be rejected by the IMPs. The standard network communication services (mail, ftp, telnet) will be affected as follows: communication with NCP-only hosts will be completely unavailable; communication with TCP hosts will continue to be available from CMU-CS-A and CMU Unix sites only; communication between the CMU sites will continue to be available via the local ethernet. Communication services on CMU-CS-A will be mail to and from TCP hosts and TCP telnet from TCP hosts only. = 23-Dec-82 18:49 Howard Wactlar at CMU-CS-A CMU IP/TCP Status As of January 1, 1982, a new Internet and Transmission Control Protocol (IP/TCP) will go into effect on the ARPAnet as a replacement for the Network Control Protocol (NCP) currently in use. After this date any hosts not yet implementing the new protocol will effectively go off of the network. The result of adopting the new protocols, however, is the formation of a new ARPA Internet consisting of many current ARPAnet hosts along with a large number of new systems on local networks at the various ARPA sites. The local CMU-CS/RI 3Mb ethernet is attached to the ARPA Internet via a PDP-11/40 "gateway" system (CMU-GATEWAY) which is connected to both our ethernet and the ARPAnet and which routes packets back and forth between the two. . The state of IP/TCP support on the various CS/RI operating systems is as follows: . Vax/UNIX: Fully supported using IP/TCP software imported from BBN. This includes MAIL, TELNET and FTP service. . TOPS-10: Partially supported. MAIL and incoming TELNET service is available via a "protocol translation" Vax which pretends to be CMU-CS-A (and eventually CMU-CS-B when it is converted to a KI-10 processor) to the outside world and performs the appropriate conversions to function across the local network. FTP service is available only by using a Vax as an intermediate relay host to/from which files may be shipped before/after sending/retrieving them via the Internet. Outgoing TELNET service will not be supported until the full IP/TCP implementation which is under development elsewhere for TOPS-10 is made available for use. At the present time we are the only TOPS-10 site supporting any type of TCP access. . TOPS-20: Not yet supported. A joint DEC/BBN IP/TCP implementation was released by DEC on December 15. It has been imported and is currently awaiting installation into our system. We expect this to be completed by the end of January. . Vax/VMS: Not yet supported. An implementation is being imported from Tektronix but we expect that it may need a moderate amount of effort to convert for our ethernet environment. There is currently no estimate of when this software will be available for use. . CAVEATS: Although the ARPAnet protocol translation effort has been underway for many years and January 1, 1983 deadline is almost upon us, the conversion effort is far from complete at all sites. We expect a significant degradation in ARPAnet communication lasting for several months as the new protocols go into use in a production enviroment network-wide and the various implementations are "shaken down" with respect to each other. . As of today, we have reasonably stable communication with only a handful of sites (BBN, ISI, PURDUE, RUTGERS, NPRDC) largely as a result of the as yet apparent inability of most of the others to communicate via the new protocols. We do expect that as the January 1st deadline approaches many additional sites will come on-line with the new protocol support, but we have no way of knowing how many sites this will involve. We are extremely interested in hearing about any and all communications problems encountered with accessing other sites after January 1st. Please report any problems to Gripe and we will attempt to resolve them as best we can. = 31-Dec-82 23:11 Ken Wertz at CMU-CS-A TCP reminder This is a reminder that the ArpaNet will begin using IP/TCP exclusively effective 1-Jan-83 00:01. You should re-read Howard Wactlar's bboard message of 23-Dec-82 for details about CMU's network status and likely side-effects of this transition. =