Oh, those early Internet days

 Walt Underwood has been a long-time reader of this blog, and has graced us with a couple of comments for recent posts.  See 'comments' at the bottom.   I used to be able to 'see' these comments without extra steps, but apparently now you need to click on them.

Anyway, Walt was the original designer for what became the HP Internet in 1985, recruiting Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning, who had been managers of the SRI Arpanet node before they joined HP.  Bert, in fact, managed Doug Engelbart and his merry band, and sold them all to TimeShare which in turn was bought by McDonnell-Douglas.   I had purchased rights to that system for HP prior to the work we started.  

Walt shared this morning that "When they (Bert and Tony) presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, the folks there didn't quite know what to do with them. All the other papers were research systems and they were reporting on actual use!

"The best paper on the beginnings of the HP Internet was only published in an internal HP conference in 1987 (European Software Engineering Productivity Conference, Böblingen). Luckily, I have a copy. Here it is.  This particular paper is by T.W. Cook and Walt Underwood, with the opening shown below the citation.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e5zi4807u353wmpr8ipwr/hp-internet.pdf?rlkey=r8phrssu9rbu4lctspy1pts4b&st=p1c38rio&dl=0

Another backgrounder for all of this that is a 'blast from the past' was noted in my HP blogpost from February 2010:  https://hpphenom.blogspot.com/2010/02/cisco-day.html 

I did an article in 2016 for the Computer History Museum magazine, Core, pp. 46-51, about Sandy, but I don't mention that HP was their first customer in it:

https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/core-2016.pdf

Turns out that Bert told me about this little company, Cisco, which had a cool router, and we should look at it.  Also turns out, we looked, and I signed the first commercial order for Cisco Inc.   Moreover, HP was Cisco's only commercial customer for 27 months, until Boeing signed in (and that, I believe, was instigated by Dave Packard, who was on the Boeing board for years).   There is a cute story about how Bert got to know the Cisco folk--it wasn't through either SRI or Stanford, but instead through his wife's travel agency (which Bert helped with), because Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack used them for travel, and. on occasion had some 'interesting requests'.