Kirk Lougheed is known for solving a problem he initially wasn’t even sure he understood. He was having lunch with Yakov Rekhter of IBM during an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting (IETF) on how to improve the existing global routing protocol. It was 1989, when paper and pen were the most readily available items for writing down notes, and the paper on hand at lunch was napkins. Two of them are what it took to write down what came to be known officially as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), but, in Internet lore, goes by The Two Napkin Protocol.
Napkins aren’t the only nicknames applied to the BGP, which is sometimes referred to as the “postal service of the Internet” for how it revolutionized the early Internet’s early global routing, which then could handle only a few networks that had to be arranged in a strict hierarchy to avoid sending packets in infinite loops. The set of all BGP speaking routers is also sometimes referred to as “backbone,” for its foundational role in the network structure we all rely on every day to navigate the Internet.
By the time of that pivotal lunch, Lougheed was very familiar with routing issues and scaling network infrastructure from his work at Cisco Systems, the Internet router vendor. “Our customers were building large networks,” said Lougheed. “Mostly Ethernets and serial lines hooked together by routers. There was was no idea of a hierarchy. It just wasn’t needed. You plugged in your devices, you turned everything on, and the router software figured out where everything was.”
Lougheed credits this experience with his ability to help solve the problem of scalability. But it is also why he didn’t understand the problem itself at first. “I was confused by what the problems were that people were actually trying to solve there,” Lougheed recalled of the IETF working group’s meeting. “They seemed very concerned about network hierarchy. And I figured, you know, these are all really smart people. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand.” But when it finally clicked, it was precisely his Ethernet experience that helped him contribute to solving the problem by not constraining the structure of the global set of networks, allowing it to scale to ever more users and uses.
Lougheed’s contributions to the Internet are present in every online interaction that reaches across the globe. But it happens at a layer that normal every day users do not notice when it works as designed. But without it? We would find ourselves stuck staring at an error message instead of a loved one at the end of a video call.
