Interview notes
There are often surprises. Today, interviewing Puzan, the father of the French Internet, is the biggest surprise this time. In the first half of the year, I met Puzan in Geneva and made an appointment to have plenty of time to tell his Internet history in the second half of the year. This time we came to Europe, we sent an email to make an appointment, but we never responded, thinking that we might miss this time. As a result, at the BRICS Forum in the morning, Puzan's wife came to talk to us before I spoke, and we realized that Puzan was also here. The joy is hard to express. We made an appointment to start Puzan's Internet oral narration at 4 pm in Room 3006, Building E, United Nations Headquarters. Puzan, who is 87, is soon to be the 87-year-old. Although his voice is gentle, his thinking is clear and he tells an online story for more than half a century. His work directly inspired the work of Winton Seff and Bob Kahn, the father of the Internet. Nowadays, people say that the Internet was invented by the United States, but don’t easily ignore Europe’s contributions. The earlier work of French Puzan and several British scientists directly influenced and promoted the birth of the American Internet. What's more, the World Wide Web was born in Geneva (we will interview CERN tomorrow morning, the birthplace of WWW). Puzan, who is almost unknown today, is worth exploring (we work hard for a day today. In addition to attending the conference, we also did three oral history, and we didn’t have time to eat lunch). I wish Puzan good health and will meet again in the future!
Organ History of the Internet (OHI) Interview with Louis Pouzin
Louis Pouzin: The Forgotten Internet Fifth
At a awards banquet held at Buckingham Palace in the UK in the summer of 2013, five pioneers of the computing engineering and Internet industries were personally commended by Queen Elizabeth II of the UK. Together, the five of them became the winners of the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and received a total of £1 million.
The five of them are the "father of the Internet", Turing Award winner Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, Bob Kahn, the father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, the first successful web browser inventor, co-founder of the famous venture capital firm Andreessen Hrowitz, and the pioneer of the Internet field, Louis Pouzin. I believe everyone is familiar with the names of the top four winners, but most people are probably not familiar with the name of Louis Puzan.
In the early 1970s, Puzan's creative established an innovative data network in France, Italy and the United Kingdom that could connect to the above locations. Although this network can only connect dozens of computers, its simplicity and efficiency pointed out the way for building a network that could connect to millions of computers in the future. But it is puzzling that Puzan's invention inspired Seph and Conn, who both incorporated many aspects of Puzan's design into their Internet protocol design, which is now driving the entire Internet operation. However, in the late 1970s, the French government withdrew its financial support for the Puzan project, and it was not finally cleared until the Internet began to become popular around the world.
" The affirmation of Louis' work came too late, too late, which is too unfair. " said Vinton Seff, who took the award together.
Birth and Deeds
According to the definition given by Puzan in 1974, category is a group of networks whose function is similar to a logical network. In other words, the network in "internetwork" is interconnected through "gateway", that is, the "router" in contemporary terms. Puzan's philosophy was later accepted by DARPA (U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and became the goal of a project they are working on, which is the Internet we are now familiar with.
Born in 1931 in a small village in central France, Puzan grew up in a sawmill run by his father.He was deeply attracted by the dangerous machines in the factory - in addition to chainsaws, there was also the steam engine that started the chainsaws, but his father did not allow him to touch them, and only gave him a building toolbox of Meccano (trade name, mainly a model toy of steel combination) for wood repair. Puzan's parents encouraged him to study at the École Polytechnique, the most well-known Polytechnical University in France. After graduation, he designed a set of mechanical tools for the French state-run postal, telegraph and telecommunications supplier (PTT).
By the 1950s, Puzan read a report from the annual exhibition of office supplies suppliers in Le Monde (the second largest national daily in France and the largest sales in France). In which American technology company IBM promised to launch computer products that can handle the chores of bureaucratic documents soon.
indulged in the potential of computerization, Puzan switched to IBM's French rival Bull Group (Bull). There he had more than a dozen engineers under him, working together to create application software for the Gamma 60, a computer that "can only be placed in a double-layer and two-room space" and sometimes frivolous (a supercomputer developed by Boole in 1960, with a technical level comparable to that of Europe and the United States). However, the rigor and demanding work—and Boer’s cooperation with the American Radio Corporation (RCA)—exposes the limitations of Puzan’s capabilities.
“I realized that if I couldn’t learn programming or English, I couldn’t gain a foothold in the computer industry,” he recalls.
Then Puzan used his two-year public leave to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and successfully completed the two major tasks set for himself. In the early 1960s, Puzan immigrated to the United States and joined a pioneering team dedicated to the development of time-sharing systems. The time-sharing system aims to enable expensive large-scale hosts to achieve higher utilization by allowing multiple users to run multiple programs on a computer at the same time. Puzan has designed a program called RUNCOM, which can help users automatically set some monotonous and repetitive instructions. He himself described the program as a "shell" wrapped around the computer's breathing internal organs, which contributed both to the creation of a whole class of software tool "command-line shells" and also to the source of its name. Today, the command line interface still plays a role in modern operating systems.
Online History (OHI) Interview with Louis Puzan
French objections
In fact, in the late 1960s, the French government had launched a plan to promote the development of the domestic computer industry . In 1971, the French government began to explore the possibility of establishing a national computer network despite opposition from the state-funded "The French Research Institute for Computer Science and Automatic Control" at that time, which was later famous CYCLADES, and also hired Puzan as the head of the project.
During his time in charge of this project, Puzan returned to the United States many times to learn about the computer network of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). ARPANET is also known as . It is the first packet switching network in the world operated by developed by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Program. It is the ancestor of the global Internet. Apa.com was originally mainly born for military research purposes. The construction concept of this network is to withstand the test of failures and continue to maintain normal operation. Rely on a promising new technology, "packet switching", to transfer data between computers.
"Package Exchange" divides all communications into fixed-sized data packets and allows computers to pass data packets to each other, which means there is no need to establish a direct connection between a pair of computers on the network. Even if two computers are very little related, they can be connected, which reduces costs and strengthens the flexibility of the network. Even if the connection of one network fails, the data packet can be transmitted over other networks.
But in Puzan's eyes, this network is far from perfect, and the design of Apa.com is still very conservative and inefficient. Each computer has to rely on complex hardware to connect to the network, because the design of Apa.com includes a connection establishment phase, during which a communication network connection path can be established between a pair of computers. After the connection is established, the packet will be transmitted in an orderly manner in this path.
Puzan then led his team to carry out ARPANET-based optimization work, and the team came up with a more efficient way. They proposed that each packet of should be marked and transmitted as a separate information "datagram", rather than presetting a transmission path for a string of packets. Puzan believes that the host should only be responsible for the transmission of data rather than the load network itself, so he then established the first network system called "CYCLADES" in France.
In Apa.com, strings of data packets are transmitted strictly in a certain order, just like the train car . In the CYCLADES network, each packet is like a separate car and can be transmitted independently by according to the destination. is like juggling and retrieving the data packet. The one that restores and sorts the data is the computer that receives the data rather than the network. If a data packet is lost during transmission, the computer that receives the data can also issue a retransmission command. The "connection-free" transmission mode of packet switching in
reduces the need for complex and expensive equipment in the network to preset the path for data packets. At the same time, this simple transmission system also makes connections between different networks easier. The first CYCLADES network connection was first released in in 1973. When Paris and the southeastern French city of Grenoble publicly established its first network connection, it received close attention from Seff and Conn, who were racking their brains to catch up with Apa.com. Based on the connectionless datagram transmission mode in the Puzan CYCLADES system, Seff and Kahn finally established the TCP/IP protocol commonly used on the Internet today, which is still running in the modern Internet.
However, although the CYCLADES network created by Puzan has impressed Seff and Kahn, the invention aroused hostility from French PTT and other state-owned telecommunications suppliers across Europe. Engineers at these companies believe that Puzan's design is not trustworthy at all, and are not satisfied with the way CYCLADES solves the problem of network intelligence. Puzan knew that his network design threatened the traditional business model of state-owned companies such as PTT, but he had no intention of calming the other party's anger.
Regarding this situation, American computer science expert John Day recalled a particularly passionate lecture by Puzan in 1976: " Louis shows a portrait of a castle, and this castle is actually a French state-owned enterprise such as PPT. People living in this castle (i.e. users) have been led by their owners, but people outside the castle have been trying to break this situation. "
takes a sharp turn and goes down
In France in the 1970s, many European state-owned telecom operators were building their own data networks, but these networks were based on circuit switching technology used on phones in the past. "The structure is complex and expensive," Puzan said, which is precisely the main reason why these state-owned enterprises are interested in these projects. At that time, French President Georges Pompidou had always supported the CYCLADES project under his charge, but after Pompidou died of leukemia in Paris in April 1974, the French government's attitude towards this project changed 180 degrees.
1978, the government's budget for the CYCLADES project was greatly simplified. "They said to me, 'You've had a great job before, now is the time to take a break'," Puzan said.
In the same year, PTT company connected the TRANSPAC network (French Remote Packet Switching Public Data Communication Network), which is the company's own connection-oriented data transmission network. "This is a very wrong," Puzan commented, "it's just a dead end."But it didn't seem like this at first - TRANSPAC system consolidated the application of Minitel, a French telephone company launched in 1982. Its application is very wide and successful. As early as 10 years before the launch of the World Wide Web, Minitel was able to provide French citizens with online banking, travel booking and pornographic chat room services. In the late 1990s, its users reached 25 million. However, facts proved that Minitel could not match the Internet and was eventually discontinued.
Even after the French government "abandoned" the CYCLADES project, Puzan's former superior and ally Maurice (Maurice) Allègre) still regrets it. " we could have been the pioneer of the Internet ," he wrote in 1999. " is now just one of the users, far from being as big as those who can determine the future of the Internet. ”
After experiencing this blow, Puzan gradually began to switch to other projects and finally started work in the field of academic research. " We have wasted too much of this great person's hard work. France's slow speed of embracing Internet technology is inseparable from this history. But now, the Internet has become a certain fact, and Puzan is their hero. ” John Dee commented.
On oral history of the Internet (OHI) interview with Louis Puzan
Future expectations
Lucky, the French government finally recognized Puzan's contribution in 2003, and the French government awarded Puzan the highest "France President awarded the Knight Medal " (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur), one of France's highest rewards. Currently, Puzan, 82, has officially retired in name, but like other pioneers in the Internet field, As the Internet is under increasing pressure from business and politics, Puzan is still using his reputation to promote the Internet to a more open and transparent level.
He bluntly criticized the arbitrary nature of Internet management, in which some key decisions are actually made by companies, charities and famous families. The group of idiots to finalize. Most of them are rooted in the United States and are largely not responsible for users in other countries around the world. Puzan is particularly worried that the popularity of five or six major Internet companies will gradually grow, which will cause users to stop in the closed experience of "fenced gardens" and use sites and applications related to these companies. In Puzan's view, this has violated the tradition of openness of the Internet. ", in some form, they are rebuilding Minitel. ” he commented.
Puzan mentioned that 80% of the new technology standards adopted in recent years were designed by American engineers or American companies. He tried lobbying lawmakers to make some changes to the Internet system to make it easier to understand by non-English users. The Internet reform movement won an important victory in 2009 , when ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers: Internet Name and Number Address Allocation Agency, a charity that manages the Internet address system, has made exceptions to approve a domain name (including URL) issued to scripts in Chinese, Arabic and other non-Western languages.
Despite this resolution, ICANN is one of Puzan’s biggest concerns. ICANN is based in California and is not very responsible for the U.S. Department of Commerce, and has been working to increase its influence in the international Internet field in recent years. However, some governments covet the rights of ICANN – and the rights of a loose alliance of network experts – the government wants to transfer these rights to a more traditional international organization such as ITU. Union: International Telecommunication Union), a dusty United Nations organization that has long been responsible for managing telephone affairs. Once is transferred to bureaucracies like ITU, it may hinder the development of new standards and the adoption of .Therefore, many countries will come to the conclusion that the current Internet status led by the United States is the best choice. Puzan is considering whether it would be a better choice to break down and reorganize existing international institutions in to form a new organization.
Although Puzan was originally an engineer rather than an activist, his focus was that the operational support system of the Internet should not be as prevalent, but should continue to evolve and improve. "The Internet was created just as an experimental network," he said. "It's actually the same now." He has given great support to researchers in the United States, Ireland, Spain and around the world who are working to make the Internet more efficient and secure.
" The Internet itself has not changed anyway in the past 30 years," he commented, " but I don't want to continue to maintain this status quo in the next 100 years. "Puzan said in an interview.
On the other hand, the well-known foreign magazine "Economist" also commented, "Although also made great contributions to the establishment of the Internet today, this does not mean that this is what he ideally looks like in his Internet ."
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