Conclusions

At this time (February 1970) the initial network of four sites is just beginning to be utilized. The communications system of four IMPs and wide band telephone lines have been operational for two months. Programmers at UCLA have signed in as users of the SRI 940. More significantly, one of the authors (S. Carr) living in Palo Alto uses the Salt Lake PDP-10 on a daily basis by first connecting to SRI. We thus have first hand experience that remote interaction is possible and is highly effective.

Work on the ARPA network has generated new areas of interest. NIL is one example, and interprocess communication is another. Interprocess communication over the network is a subcase of general interprocess communication in a multiprogrammed environment. The mechanism of connections seems to be new, and we wonder whether this mechanism is useful even when the processes are within the same computer.