Abstract
In 1974, the Cyclades project network moved from the “model” phase to something concrete, operational. “Cigale then worked perfectly. But the French telecommunications administration had decided that it had no future and that everything had to be bet on RCP, the future Transpac. Although it was dedicated to data exchanges, it was more like a traditional telephone network: it made it much easier to collect taxes. Consequently, any research to develop another technology was considered inappropriate”, writes Christian Huitema in “Et Dieu créa l’Internet”—And God created the Internet, about the end of the Cyclades project. “For the PTT, now under the supervision of the Industrial Affairs Department, the idea of the datagram itself was utterly unacceptable: with this system, there is no way to ensure that the packet has arrived at its destination. It wasn’t very “clean”, it was better to use circuits”, says Louis Pouzin, shrugging his shoulders.
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Notes
- 1.
Christian Huitema, “Et Dieu créa l’Internet”, Eyrolles, 1995.
- 2.
INRA’s weekly gazette, “Code Source”, celebrating the Institute’s 40th anniversary in 2007, writes: “In 1975, was France’s industrial policy carried out at the Ministry, rue de Grenelle, or at the headquarters of the powerful Compagnie Générale d’Electricité, rue de La Boétie? Some do not hesitate to wonder given how much sway the CGE seems to have had for more than 10 years over everything to do with high-tech industries and their development in France.”
- 3.
Charles Hargrove. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, “Politique étrangère,” n°1, 1986.
- 4.
“Le plan Calcul, l’échec d’une ambition”, Tristan Gaston-Breton, Les Echos, July 20, 2012.
- 5.
ENA: National School of Administration.
- 6.
Alain Beltran and Pascal Griset, “Histoire d’un pionnier de l’informatique: 40 ans de recherche à l’INRIA”, EDP Sciences, 2007.
- 7.
The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. The service was introduced commercially throughout France in 1982 by the PTT. From its early days, users could make online purchases, train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, receive mail, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the Internet. Technically, Minitel refers to the terminals, while the network is known as Télétel. https://www.minitel.org/
- 8.
“La France en réseaux”, Valérie Schafer, Nuvis, 2012.
- 9.
Today, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
- 10.
“Internationalizing the Internet: The Co-evolution of Influence and Technology”, Byung-Keun Kim, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005.
- 11.
“Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet”, Julien Mailland, The Atlantic, June 16, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/minitel/530646/
- 12.
“Minitel: Welcome to the Internet”, Julien Mailland et Kevin Driscoll, MIT Press, 2017. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minitel
- 13.
At the same time, Bernard Nivelet, who had left for Cyclades in the USA, was urgently called back to IRIA following a “serious air conditioning accident”, which caused a “dust cloud” that had covered the engine room of the Computer Center.
- 14.
- 15.
“La France en réseaux”, Valérie Schafer, Nuvis, 2012.
- 16.
POUZIN, Louis—The network business, Monopolies and entrepreneurs. ICCC 76, Toronto (Ca.), Aug. 1976, p. 563–567.
- 17.
IFIP is the organizer of the International Conference on Computer Communication.
- 18.
The Ministry of Industry.
- 19.
Letter from André Danzin to Louis Pouzin, October 25, 1977.
- 20.
Rapport Nora-Minc sur l’informatisation de la société, La documentation française, 1978. http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/154000252/index.shtml
- 21.
He became the CFO of CII-Honeywell-Bull in 1981.
- 22.
“Le rapport Nora-Minc. Histoire d’un best-seller”, Andrée Walliser, revue “Vingtième Siècle”, n°23, July–September 1989.
- 23.
“Code Source”, “L’hebdomadaire des 40 ans de l’INRIA”, “Louis Pouzin: le cœur de Cyclades”, March 2017, p. 21.
- 24.
Decree No. 79-1158 of 27 December 1979—“Création d’un institut national de recherches en informatique et en automatique (INRIA), établissement public à caractère administratif, placé sous la tutelle du ministre de l’industrie” https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000519325
- 25.
“L’agence de l’informatique entend être essentiellement au service des utilisateurs”, Le Monde, 5 February, 1981.
- 26.
“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication”, IEEE, May 1974. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf
- 27.
- 28.
In July 1978, when Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol that serves as the basis for the Internet, he documented the project in document IEN 48, referring to “The catenet model for internetworking”. https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien48.txt
He writes in the introduction: “The term “catenet” was introduced by L. Pouzin in 1974 in his early paper on packet network interconnection”. The document in question is dated May 1974: “A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks”, L. Pouzin, Proceedings of EUROCOMP, Bronel University. https://books.google.fr/books/about/A_Proposal_for_Interconnecting_Packet_Sw.html?id=VYr1tgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
It was in preparation for the conference (at the Eurocomp) from which this paper was drawn that Louis Pouzin first described the Catenet—in March 1974, in document INWG60.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
“OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t”, Andrew L. Russell, IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
- 33.
“Louis Pouzin, pionnier de l’Internet”, Éric Albert, July 2, 2013, Le Monde. https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2013/07/01/louis-pouzin-pionnier-de-l-internet_3439915_651865.html
- 34.
“The Work of IFIP Working Group 6 .1”, Alex Curran and Vinton Cerf, 1975.
- 35.
“Oral History of Vinton (Vint) Cerf”, interviewed by Donald Nielson, November 7, 2007, Computer History Museum/ http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/04/102658186-05-01-acc.pdf
- 36.
“Et la France ne créa pas l’Internet—récit d’un beau gâchis”, Laurent Mauriac and Emmanuèle Peyret, March 27, 1998, Libération.
- 37.
“Oral History of Vinton (Vint) Cerf”, interviewed by Donald Nielson, 7 November, 2007. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/04/102658186-05-01-acc.pdf
- 38.
Interview with Bob Kahn, 5 January, 2017.
- 39.
“The Cyclades and Internet network: what opportunities for France in the 1970s?”, Valérie Schafer, CHEFF, séminaire Haute Technologie, March 14, 2007, https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/schafer-reseau-cyclades.pdf
- 40.
- 41.
“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication”, IEEE Transactions on Communications COM 22, 5 May, 1974. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall08/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf
- 42.
“How the internet was invented”, Ben Tarnoff, The Guardian, 15 July, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/15/how-the-internet-was-invented-1976-arpa-kahn-cerf
- 43.
ALOHAnet, developed in 1970 by the University of Hawaii to enable data communications between the islands, was based, for example, on radio transmissions.
- 44.
“La gouvernance du Net par les Etats-Unis n’est plus justifiée”, Charles de Laubier—Les Echos, “Grand angle avec Louis Pouzin”, June 21, 2008.
- 45.
Jon Postel, “NCP/TCP Transition Plan, RFC 801”, ISI, Network Working Group, November 1981.
- 46.
Interview with Anne Pouzin, 24 August, 2018.
- 47.
“Code Source”, “L’hebdomadaire des 40 ans de l’INRIA”, “Louis Pouzin: le cœur de Cyclades”, March 2017, p. 22.
- 48.
Petite biographie de Louis Pouzin et Jon Postel—SIGCOMM awards 1997, http://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-awards/postel-and-pouzin-award-details
- 49.
- 50.
Interview with Anne Pouzin, 24 August, 2018.
- 51.
The “Pouzin Society”: http://pouzinsociety.org/
- 52.
Interview with Rémy Pouzin, 4 July, 2018.
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Lebrument, C., Soyez, F. (2020). The End of Cyclades (1980–1989). In: The Inventions of Louis Pouzin. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34836-6_6
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