[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 41, Issue 17
odlyzko at umn.edu
odlyzko at umn.edu
Fri Feb 10 10:03:33 PST 2023
Kerry Coffman and I published some estimates of data traffic
and data network capacities as of year-end 1997 in October 1998
in "The size and growth rate of the Internet." (This was primarily
for the US. We were quite confident of the capacity estimates for
private line and Frame Relay networks, and also of FR traffic,
since AT&T had the lion's share of those markets, and we had
access to internal data, even when we could not publish that.)
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/620/541
At that time, on FR was the largest public data network, but it,
as well as ATM, were increasingly just carrying IP traffic.
We could not get very good stats, but it appeared that at the
time when the NSF backbone was being phased out, the internal
AT&T network that carried billing information carried at least
as much traffic. And it was IP! Although not just top AT&T,
but also Bell Labs management was talking of how ATM was the future
(I vividly recall an internal AT&T meeting around 1998 when a
high-level AT&T executive, in response to a question about IP
from one of our research group, said that the Internet was a
toy network, full of porn, and ATM was going to be the real
thing), the folks in charge of the company "crown jewels"
decided it made more sense to run IP. I do not know how that
decision was arrived at.
Andrew
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:34:24 -0500
From: Scott Bradner <sob at sobco.com>
To: "Andrew G. Malis" <agmalis at gmail.com>
Cc: vinton cerf <vgcerf at gmail.com>, "internet-history at elists.isoc.org"
<internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: Re: [ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in
SMTP)
of course its true that ATM & FR are L2 but that did not stop the ATM Forum and other
ATM fans from pushing ATM as a full replacement for IP and at least a partial replacement for TCP
after all, ATM had routing, subnets, flow control, guaranteed data delivery - and
ATM available bit rate (ABR) was quite a technical achievement (at least in the specification,
maybe not so much in the implementation)
this was my opinion in 1998
https://www.sobco.com/nww/1998/bradner-1998-09-14.html
Scott
> On Feb 10, 2023, at 12:25 PM, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> 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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