[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[Mike Padlipsky]

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]