Fuzzball router

Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet.^[1] They were DEC PDP-11 computers (usually LSI-11 personal workstations) loaded with the Fuzzball software written by David L. Mills (of the University of Delaware).^[2][3] The name "Fuzzball" was the colloquialism for Mills's routing software. The software evolved from the Distributed Computer Network (DCN) that started at the University of Maryland in 1973.^[3][4] It acquired the nickname sometime after it was rewritten in 1977.^[3]

Six Fuzzball routers provided the routing backbone of the first 56 kbit/s NSFNET,^[5][6] allowing the testing of many of the Internet's first protocols.^[7] It allowed the development of the first TCP/IP routing protocols,^[8] and the Network Time Protocol.^[9] They were the first routers to implement key refinements to TCP/IP such as variable-length subnet masks.^[10]

See also

• Interface Message Processor

References

1. Malamud, Carl (1992). "Round 1: from INTEROP to IETF". Exploring the Internet: a technical travelogue. Prentice Hall. p. 88. ISBN 0-13-296898-3.
2. "Fuzzball: The Innovative Router". The Internet: Changing the Way We Communicate. NSF. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017.
3. Mills, D.L. (August 1988). The Fuzzball (PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 88 Symposium. Palo Alto, CA. pp. 115–122.
4. Mills, David L. (1976). "An overview of the distributed computer network". Proceedings of the June 7-10, 1976, national computer conference and exposition on - AFIPS '76. pp. 523–531. doi:10.1145/1499799.1499874. S2CID 13375745.
5. Mills, D.L.; Braun, H.-W. (August 1987). The NSFNET Backbone Network (PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 87 Symposium. Stoweflake, VT. pp. 191–196.
6. David L. Mills (29 November 2007). "The NSFnet Phase-I Backbone and The Fuzzball Router" (PDF). Presentation at the NSFNET Legacy event, 2007. pp. 38–48.
7. Mills, D.L. (December 1983). DCN Local-Network Protocols. IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0891. RFC 891. Retrieved 7 December 2022.
8. Kozierok, Charles M. (2005). The TCP/IP guide: a comprehensive, illustrated Internet protocols reference. No Starch Press. pp. 679–681. ISBN 1-59327-047-X.
9. Mills, David L. (2010). "Technical History of NTP". Computer Network Time Synchronization: the Network Time Protocol on Earth and in Space (2nd ed.). CRC Press. pp. 377–396. doi:10.1201/b10282-20 (inactive 2024-11-11). ISBN 978-1-4398-1463-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
10. Moy, John T. (1998). OSPF: anatomy of an Internet routing protocol. Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-201-63472-3.

External links

• The Fuzzball, with photographs
• Fuzzball source code, last update in 1992, 16 megabytes