Great article by Craig Timberg at the Washington Post on the Border Gateway Protocol:
“By the time a pair of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the Internet’s growing pains had become dire. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was now exploding in size, lurching ever closer to a hard mathematical wall built into one of the Internet’s most basic protocols.
As the prospect of system meltdown loomed, the men began scribbling ideas for a solution onto the back of a ketchup-stained napkin. Then a second. Then a third. The “three-napkins protocol,” as its inventors jokingly dubbed it, would soon revolutionize the Internet. And though there were lingering issues, the engineers saw their creation as a “hack” or “kludge,” slang for a short-term fix to be replaced as soon as a better alternative arrived.
That was 1989.”
I was soon to encounter BGP in 1991, my third year of studying Computer Engineering. This turned out to be important in 1997 when my brother and I launched India's first private ISP - WMINet - and we worked with VSNL, the state-owned ISP, educating them about BGP.
Those were early wild west days of the Internet in India and built on personal relationships with admins at each ISP. So personal, that I had root access on giaspn01 - the first commercial public email server in India operated by VSNL. That story for another day.
But within a couple of years the Internet exploded in India and that, was the end of the innocence.