[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[Jack Haverty]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 21:14 +0000, David Mills wrote:
> but so far as I knew, nobody but the Fuzzballs 
> actuall responded to source quencn. 

Errr, ummm, well...depends on what you mean by "respond".

Since Source Quench was sent by a receiver when it had gotten so
overwhelmed that it threw away your packet, the obvious response from
the Sender was to re-send the packet immediately, since you had just
been told that it had been discarded.

I can't remember exactly what the various TCP implementations did that I
was involved in.  Or I could take the fifth amendment...

Of course, the spec might have said something a bit different about what
a well-behaved TCP should do when you received a Source Quench.  But I
don't recall there ever being any "certification" or the like that any
particular implementation was behaving correctly.  As I remember, the
spec wasn't very specific.  E.G., If you send one packet and get a
Source Quench back, what does it mean to "throttle back".

And of course I can't remember whether the core gateways put such
"control" traffic at the front of the queue (it's important stuff!), or
discarded it (gaaak, more whining and noise from that complainer
host...).  Or whether they looked at all.  Possibly all three schemes,
over time.

Of course, this whole Internet thing was a research project that was
supposed to go away and be replaced by the "real" system using ISO and
CCITT technology.

Good thing it's been 23+ years Dave!

/Jack