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Interview of Robert Rosenthal Interview of Robert Rosenthal Interviewed by: James Pelkey Recorded May 4, 1988 Washington, DC CHM Reference number: X5671.2010 © 2020 Computer History Museum Interview of Robert Rosenthal James Pelkey: When did you get involved in this industry? Robert Rosenthal: I got involved in 1969, fresh out of school and looking for a job. Pelkey: Where did you go to school? Rosenthal: University of Maryland. Came to work at NBS on a project that was just starting up with the Arpanet. NBS was the fourth node on the Arpanet, and I helped procure the TIP that we installed here. I started working indirectly with people like Len Kleinrock to figure out how to measure the performance of the network. Pelkey: And this point in time, did they provide you the connection device of the TIP to the Arpanet, or did you have to build one? Rosenthal: No, we worked closely with BBN and Larry Roberts to try to scope it, and BBN, of course, developed all of the design work and the integration of the ARPA network, and our focus was on the performance measurement of interactive terminal traffic on networks like the Arpanet. The UCLA mindset was how to look at the subnet and measure the performance of the infrastructure that supports the packets that are being switched. Our focus was to try to look at, model, and measure what the end user viewed and perceived. Pelkey: Which is very different. Rosenthal: A very different mindset; the focus being the service that's provided to the end user. In our case, the end user is the government, so we went about building instrumentation to do that. There's lots of NBS publications, NBS technical notes, many of them I authored, and many of the documents were published in IEEE conferences throughout the '70s. So I sort of cut my eye teeth at the beginning of packet switching technology. People like Willis Ware from RAND spent innumerable hours with us, helping us understand what it was that we were really trying to do, so it was a lot of fun. Pelkey: That was a very exciting period. Rosenthal: In 1975, '76, a couple of us got together and thought about how we might build a local network technology that would be suitable for use in the federal government, and we were very familiar with some of our friends at Xerox PARC. We had numbers of conversations with Bob Metcalfe, John Shoch and David Boggs - - Pelkey: This was in '74, '75? Rosenthal: '75, '76 as I recall, but I'm not really sure of the dates. We went ahead and implemented some techniques that were loosely based on CSMA/CD, as we know it today, but certainly quite different. We had followed the ALOHA activity in the early '70s. We knew what we didn't want to do based on some of the performance models that came out of that. So we went ahead and implemented a technology based on new microprocessor chips at the time, 6502s. I don't know if you remember that chip. CHM Ref: X5671.2010 © 2020 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 24 Interview of Robert Rosenthal Pelkey: That Apple II. Rosenthal: And we built a local area network that's still in use today on this campus, and had the unique attributes of having a single power supply, fanning out to up to eight RS-232 connectors, which at the time was completely different from the Xerox approach of building an Alto like workstation concept, supported by a local network technology. Pelkey: So yours was a -- Rosenthal: Our concept was take really dumb terminals, give them to employees all over the bureau of standards, and let them get access to the few very large hosts that we had available. We had a very large 1108 at the time at NBS. We also had a number of machines in our Boulder facility, and we were able to build gateways, and so forth, between NBS Gaithersburg and NBS Boulder, and explore how users at dumb terminals, character at a time kinds of terminals, could gain access to the resources that could be shared from these large hosts. So we implemented this network and for a long time it had a growth curve of -- Pelkey: Does Jerry Bowen get any of the credit when it got implemented? Rosenthal: Well, we actually let an RFP after we got three boards designed in one of my labs, and we got them designed, implemented, working and debugged, and then we let an RFP. Pelkey: What year was this, do you recall? Rosenthal: I think it was '77, '78 when we finally let a contract. A small company in Florida bid on it -- a couple companies bid on it, but a small company in Florida won the RFP -- Pelkey: Do you recall the company? Rosenthal: No, I don't remember its name. They just started mass producing the component parts and stuffed the board, and we just started putting these devices in all over this campus. There's about a thousand devices connected together on this campus right now. People are still using NBSNET, and I got so excited about all of this that I thought it would be a good idea to put a workshop together, so I called everybody I knew in local area networking. A lot of people at MITRE had done a lot of broadband activity; CSMA/CD broadband concepts were being formulated. We were not interested in that at all because of the overhead of supporting a broadband backbone, so our focus was baseband technology. It's worth saying -- we got together with MITRE because of the context -- because the Air Force was real interested in this stuff as well, and so NBS and the MITRE Corp. sponsored the first local area networking symposium. I think it was the first -- it was a workshop just for local area networks. It was the first time. I was the chairman of that workshop, put it together. Pelkey: May of '79? CHM Ref: X5671.2010 © 2020 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 24 Interview of Robert Rosenthal Rosenthal: Actually, it was the one before that. There was an invited workshop here at NBS. Fifty people were invited. Pelkey: Now was this one of the three that there were around the country before they had the one at the Copley? Rosenthal: I wasn't aware there were three. I knew there was one. We had about 50 people invited to NBS, and I have the document in my office. I thought it was 1977, the end of 1977. It was in the winter of '77. Pelkey: Would it be possible to get a copy of -- Rosenthal: Well, I only have one copy. You can look at it, but you can't have it. I'll dig that out. The result of that workshop was NBS's feeling that there was some serious work to do in local network technology, so myself and a guy named Norman Meisner -- M E I S N E R -- I can double check that name and look it up for you, but we put together, the both of us put together the Copley Plaza two day workshop, and I had what I thought was a good idea, and actually it was, that if MITRE could publish the proceedings, it would be a very nice document. If the government had to publish it, it would be pretty ratty looking. I don't know it you've seen that document. Pelkey: Oh, it's a nice looking document. Rosenthal: Oh, great, so you know it. So Norman and I -- Pelkey: I've got a copy of the index, actually. Rosenthal: So Norman and I were co-chairman, and we got on the horn and invited all our friends. I think Bob Metcalfe came to that one - - Pelkey: Jerry Saltzer. Rosenthal: Yeah, we had a wonderful time. The bottom line, from my perspective, was recognition in the federal community that there was something -- a big wave was coming, and we better get out act together and get prepared for it. So I put together a number of proposals to find a mechanism and an approach for doing what we do well here at NBS, and what we're chartered to do here at NBS, namely: develop federal information processing standards, assist other agencies deploy technologies that support those standards, and conduct appropriate research so that we're at the leading edge. So I put together a huge laboratory to study the performance of local area networking technologies. I was the chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications at the time, and a good friend of mine, Maris Graube had a great idea, that we need a voluntary standards effort. I talked to our management people here, and we all thought that, if we had a voluntary standards organization in place, the government could leverage off of that, and simply adopt standards that industry was willing to implement. Now that's key. That's real important. CHM Ref: X5671.2010 © 2020 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 24 Interview of Robert Rosenthal Pelkey: It is, and I want to come back to that. If I might, thought, before we get into that, come back to this conference, because I'm led to believe that this conference was a watershed. Rosenthal: It was a turning point, absolutely. Pelkey: You say that you had this conference in '77. Rosenthal: It was a very small workshop, and 'invited only' kind of thing.
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