[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[David Mills]

Mike,

I expected a honk from you. What made the difference was that the 
fuzzies enjoyed up to a megabyte of buffere mapped in multiple segments 
in an LSI-11/73 processor. The operating system implemented a virtual 
RS-11 system that had very little overhead., so was much faster than the 
BBN implementation. In fact, the network code was later incorporated in 
the US Postal service fax network.

There are two SIGCOM papers in the 1986-1988 era, one describing the 
fuzzball, the other the NSFnet. There is a page about the fuzzies in the 
NSF archives. The technical history of the internet presentation at 
SIGCOM 99 is at www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/colloq.httml.

Dave

Mike Padlipsky wrote:

> At 08:04 PM 1/27/2009, Jack Haverty wrote:
>
>> Also, hardware was severely limited.  I remember one router, connecting
>> ArpaNet and Satnet, which at one point had only enough memory to buffer
>> exactly ONE packet.  So there wasn't much question of how to handle
>> priority in the "queue".
>
>
> this point deserves particular emphasis.
>
> while i didn't know your gateways were that minimal, i was keenly 
> aware of the hardware limitations of the 'fuzzball' [and it might be 
> nice if dave gave a rundown on just what the fuzzballs were for the 
> benefit of newcomers ... and oldtimers who've forgotten], and any 
> analogy between them and contemporary 'ISPs' must founder on precisely 
> that point: today's hardware is so much more capable than 
> 'yesterday's' that any attempt to reason by analogy to what used to be 
> licit is, i submit, a flagrantly false analogy.
>
> in a sense, if you've got enough processing power, to say nothing of 
> buffering, to be able to play nasty favoritism games with traffic in 
> the first place, as you do nowadays, you can't use what used to be 
> done in response to severe limitations on both processing power and 
> buffering as an excuse for playing said nasty favoritism games.  [in 
> my humble but dogmatic opinion, of course.]
>
> not that i think the original question was intended to imply a 
> connection between way back when and now, just that i'd like to try to 
> head off any of the apparently unscrupulous big-money bit-pushers who 
> want to play nasty favoritism games from inferring such a connection....
>
>
> cheers, map
>
> [whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and 
> create a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly 
> customary e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing 
> for a long time now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't 
> know ... and who's further broken down and done 
> http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html , rather grudgingly]
>