:
I think the mail gateways back when the various networks were being put
together into an internet had as their functional purpose unifying
disparate networks. On the contrary, a firewall has as its purpose
partitioning a network that otherwise would not have been. I don't
think one will hear from MIT, given that.But Steve and Ches and Dave Presotto at Bell, and Brian Reid and others
at DEC, were doing the partitioning thing in the late 1980's and 1990.
Right?
Right, but Seastrom is correct. If you read the old TCP/IP Transition
Handbook, you'll see that it talks about shutting off connectivity to
MILNET and running mailbridges instead. What's unclear to me is how
much of that was every built, but the intent was quite clear. I regard
that as the first TCP/IP application firewall, vintage around 1981.
--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb