[ih] principles of the internet

[Dave Crocker]

On 6/2/2010 1:56 AM, Matthias Bärwolff wrote:
> Pouzin's contribution notwithstanding, Metcalfe's thesis' chapter 6 to
> me is the first proper elaboration of best effort as a philosophy;
...
> To my knowledge, Pouzin has never put it that clearly in writing.


I think one of the other postings made a comment similar to what I'm going to 
say here, but just to underscore my own sense of that period:

It was quite common for things to be documented very much post hoc.  This gives 
a highly skewed view to diligent historians reading the literature, but it makes 
near-term efforts at oral history particularly valuable.

One of the issues emerging from some of the sub-threads in this exchange is the 
need to be clear and precise about the application of a term or concept.  Given 
all the layering that these systems have/had, one layer might have had a 
property that another did not.  (For example, Arpanet IMP was classic stateless 
packet/message model, while NCP was virtual, end-to-end circuits.)

This certainly means that debate, about whether a particular characteristic was 
present in a particular system, needs to be specific about the specific /part/ 
or layer of the system that did or did not have the characteristic.

As for best-effort, certainly Alohanet was the epitome of the construct and, of 
course, that predated Alohanet.  (Metcalfe's Ethernet design started from a 
paper he was given, describing Alohanet.)

The complexity of the Arpanet design and layering might permit a bit of debate 
about whether it qualified as being based on best effort.  Alohanet's simplicity 
does not (permit debate.)


d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net