[ih] Why did congestion happen at all? Re: why did CC happen at all?

[Bernie Cosell]

On 31 Aug 2014 at 20:54, Miles Fidelman wrote:

> Dave Crocker wrote:

> > My other understanding is that the extent of the direct benefit to
> users
> > wasn't quite anticipated, which made it increasingly difficult to
> make
> > changes to the net that could bring it down.  So it was a few years
> > before they had to start explicitly scheduling time slots for
> experiments.
> 
> I got to BBN a few years later, but my sense is that what was really 
> unanticipated was the amount of operational use, by military types, 
> which led pretty directly to the DDN.

Dave's right: there were many "untested" technologies that went into the 
ARPAnet and it was expected that there'd be an extended period in which 
it'd be flaky, tests would crash it regularly, etc.  It was a surprise 
that when it was turned on it just kind of worked, which quickly changed 
the focus of the work on it.  There were still experiments run, but the 
emphasis switched to "well, now we've got this damn thing, what are we 
going to *do* with it".

I think the "operational" use came less with military types than with 
"business" types -- clerks, secretaries, etc.  People were doing real, 
routine work over the ARPAnet and very quickly were expecting it just to 
"be up",  Same thing with experiments being run [distributed OS, 
encrypted speech, etc]: the fact of the ARPAnet _just_working_ was almost 
taken for granted.

I can't remember any more [maybe Dave does] but we had something like a 
two hour slot once a week in which we could tinker with the IMP code 
[something like 6-8AM on Tuesdays??]

   /Bernie\

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Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
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