International Computer Communication Conference

International Computer Communication Conference
Name	International Computer Communication Conference
Status	defunct
Genre	Academic conference
Frequency	Annual
First	1972
Last	1990s
Country	United States
Organized	Association for Computing Machinery

International Computer Communication Conference

The International Computer Communication Conference was a prominent annual forum for research on packet switching, networking, and distributed systems held in the United States during the 1970s–1990s. It convened researchers from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Bell Labs and attracted industry participants from companies including IBM, AT&T, Xerox PARC, DEC, and Intel. The conference influenced standards and projects associated with ARPANET, Internet Engineering Task Force, ISO/OSI model, TCP/IP, and IEEE 802.

History

The conference emerged in the early 1970s amid developments at ARPANET, RAND Corporation, National Science Foundation, DARPA, and Advanced Research Projects Agency Network laboratories. Early meetings featured contributors from RAND Corporation research groups, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and Bell Labs teams working on packet switching, queuing theory, and protocol design. Through the 1980s the conference paralleled milestones from Stanford Research Institute, MITRE Corporation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and international projects such as Cyclades and NPL Network. The venue rotated among cities like San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago as academic sponsors including University of California, Los Angeles and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided hosts.

Organization and Sponsorship

Organizing committees typically included representatives from Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Communications Society, American National Standards Institute, Internet Society, and corporate research labs like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM Research. Program committees drew reviewers from Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Cornell University, and University of Cambridge. Funding and sponsorship came from agencies and firms such as National Science Foundation, DARPA, AT&T, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard. Proceedings were often published in collaboration with ACM Digital Library or IEEE Xplore outlets and indexed alongside work from SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, USENIX, and SIGOPS venues.

Conferences and Proceedings

Proceedings from the conference documented early protocol specifications, simulation studies, and measurement reports comparable to contemporaneous outputs at SIGCOMM '84, IEEE INFOCOM, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, and ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Notable sessions included panels on OSI model adoption, interoperability between TCP/IP and proprietary systems, and benchmarking of network hardware from Cisco Systems and National Semiconductor. Special issues and edited volumes were compiled by editors affiliated with Prentice Hall, Wiley, and Springer Verlag, and papers were frequently cross-cited with monographs from Addison-Wesley and reports circulated by IETF working groups.

Technical Contributions and Impact

Technical contributions from the conference advanced concepts used in deployments by ARPANET, NSFNET, and commercial backbones operated by Sprint and MCI Communications. Research on congestion control, queuing algorithms, and flow control influenced later standards like RFC 793 and RFC 791 as well as work by researchers associated with Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and Carnegie Mellon University. Studies on routing protocols informed developments in Open Shortest Path First and influenced design choices in Border Gateway Protocol. Experimental platforms and testbeds referenced at the conference intersected with projects at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Notable Papers and Presentations

Presentations included seminal reports on packet switching experiments by contributors from Bolt Beranek and Newman, analyses of delay and throughput related to the Erlang models used by telephone companies such as AT&T, and early descriptions of internetworking efforts by teams at Stanford Research Institute and University College London. Influential authors who presented work include researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology such as figures associated with Project MAC, staff from Bell Labs linked to early Unix networking, and academics from Carnegie Mellon University who later contributed to RFC series. Cross-disciplinary sessions featured collaborations with scholars from Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University.

Awards and Recognition

While the conference itself offered program-level best paper recognitions and invited lecture honors often sponsored by ACM or IEEE, many presenters and their papers later received broader awards such as ACM SIGCOMM Award, IEEE Internet Award, and honors from National Academy of Engineering and Association for Computing Machinery fellowships. Contributors went on to win prizes tied to work in networking and distributed systems awarded by institutions including IEEE, ACM, and national research councils in the United States and United Kingdom.

Category:Computer networking conferences Category:History of the Internet