[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[Andrew G. Malis]

Frame Relay (and to a lesser extent, ATM) wasn't a competitor to TCP/IP. In
fact, they were both L2 technologies, and certainly the greatest amount of
FR revenue was in tail circuits carrying IP from an ISP or a corporate HQ
to a remote corporate office. At the time, FR was MUCH less expensive and
faster than leased lines.

Cheers,
Andy


On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 12:06 PM vinton cerf via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> and frame relay
> v
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 11:33 AM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> >  Let's not forget about ATM. I  think ATM was also a big area of focus
> for
> > many people in this time frame.
> > barbara
> >
> >     On Friday, February 10, 2023 at 06:48:47 AM PST, Craig Partridge via
> > Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> >  On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 7:16 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > At the time, in the 1990ish timeframe, there was a huge installed base
> > > of network technology.  Hundreds of thousands of computers utilizing
> > > networks based on SNA, SPX, XNS, Decnet, etc. etc.  TCP existed, but
> > > was a small player, confined largely to the academic and research
> > > communities.
> > >
> > > ...
> > >
> > > So how did TCP manage to blast through that momentum of the installed
> > > base, creating such a chaos in the collision?  And how did it do it so
> > > rapidly?
> > >
> > >
> > Hi Jack:
> >
> > I'll start with a shout out to Brian's point that the transition was
> > already well underway by 1990.  Absolutely
> > fits my experience.
> >
> >  I would argue that a critical issue was communicating outside one's
> > organization and/or over long distance.  The various technologies you
> list,
> > except for DECNET, did not focus on solving problems across
> organizational
> > boundaries.  Recall Netware was the
> > biggest networking technology of the time and, while it adapted somewhat,
> > was designed to connect an office or suite
> > of offices.
> >
> > Meanwhile, by 1987, we'd built a relatively homogeneous email environment
> > across the Internet, USENET, CSNET, and
> > (thanks to BITNET and EARN) the academic SNA networks.  I remember at a
> DC
> > Interop c. 1990, someone observing
> > that they had discovered couldn't hire new computing graduates if they
> > weren't connected to the RFC 822/domain name email
> > network.  So the tech mindset, among the younger generation, was that
> they
> > should be able to communicate with anyone via
> > email.  This pushed folks towards TCP/IP -- or, at least, email
> > compatibility with the Internet.
> >
> > At a bits-and-bytes level, long-distance reliable communications networks
> > are hard to do.  I remember Dave Clark talking about
> > this around 1985 and discussing how protocol suites designed around the
> > local network didn't scale.  He used the struggles by
> > the LOCUS distributed file system (which worked great on a LAN) to work
> > over the ARPANET as an example.  In the late 1980s,
> > only two networking architectures had engaged with and worked through
> those
> > issues: TCP/IP and DECNET.  Nicely, the most prominent and
> > complementary papers on congestion issues, one by Van Jacobson (TCP/IP)
> and
> > one by Raj Jain and KK Ramakrishnan (DECNET),
> > were presented back-to-back at the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 1988.  So if
> > you were looking to build (or soon after via NSFNET, connect
> > to) a sturdy wide-area network, unless you were a DEC VMS organization,
> > your best choice was TCP/IP.
> >
> > I'll note it was, in my view, a near thing sometimes.  NSFNET was a
> > tremendous gamble and for parts of 1987 and 1988 was not
> > a very good service (I'm told a scientist complained loudly at the
> National
> > Academy about this non-functional network they were
> > trying to use for important science).  We figured out congestion collapse
> > well enough for the time (pace buffer-bloat folks) just as
> > it was threatening to make the Internet unusable.  But I distinctly
> > remember that roughly around the end of 1988 or beginning of 1989,
> > Internet folks began to realize that when they were talking with
> engineers
> > building other networking technologies there was a whole
> > suite of community knowledge that the Internet folks had and nobody else
> > (except the wonderful DEC networking team) did.
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >
> > --
> > *****
> > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
> > mailing lists.
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