[ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 84, Issue 4

[Guy Almes]

Detlef et al.,
   The subtlety and difficulty and importance of TCP congestion control 
algorithms are indeed worthy of discussion: more now with our 100-Gb/s 
wide-area networks than in the early days of TCP/IP.

   But I'd suggest that, for this list, attention be focused on a few 
issues.

<> Clarity on the degree to which the early TCP RFCs were pretty clear 
about the protocol, but only suggestive about an example congestion 
control algorithm.

<> Clarity on the degree to which the authors of the early TCP RFCs did 
not recognize the importance of developing very good congestion control 
algorithms.

<> Clarity on the degree to which the early TCP developers did or did 
not view as of any importance conformity by different TCP 
implementations of the best (or set of almost best) practices in 
congestion control algorithms.

<> Clarity on how/when it began to become evident that the naive 
algorithms documented in the TCP RFCs and used in early testing would 
themselves become the source of trouble.

   Even today, confusion between "TCP the protocol" vs "TCP the set of 
common congestion control algorithms used in practice" persists.  But, 
for this list, I'm interested in the state of clarity vs confusion in 
these matters early on.

   Regards,
	-- Guy

On 5/21/14, 7:37 AM, Detlef Bosau wrote:
> This does not really answer my original question, I consider asking Van
> directly, but I see that TCP resembles swabian "Kässpätzle". (cheesy
> noodles.) Everyone has his own recipe, there is not "that one standard"
> and the real clues in preparing them aren't written in any textbook.
>
>
>
> Am 19.05.2014 22:45, schrieb Jack Haverty:
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> That sounds about right.   IIRC, there were a lot of TCP
>> implementations in various stages of progress, as well as in various
>> stages of protocol genealogy - 2.5, 3, 4, and many could communicate
>> with themselves or selected others prior to January 1979.  Jon's
>> "bakeoff" on the Saturday preceding the January 1979 TCP Meeting at
>> ISI was the first time a methodical test was done to evaluate the NxN
>> interoperability of a diverse collection of implementations.
>>
>> I remember that you were one of the six implementations in that test
>> session.   We each had been given an office at ISI for the day and
>> kept at it until everyone could establish a connection with everyone
>> else and pass data.
>>
>> There were a lot of issues resolved that day, mostly having to do with
>> ambiguities in the then-current spec we had all been coding to meet.
>> As we all finally agreed (or our code agreed) on all the details, Jon
>> tweaked the spec to reflect what the collected software was now doing.
>>   So I've always thought that those six implementations were the first
>> TCP4 implementations to successfully interoperate.  Yours was one of them.
>>
>> There was a lot of pressure at the time to get the spec of TCP4 nailed
>> down and published, and that test session was part of the process.
>>  Subsequently that TCP4 spec became an RFC, and a DoD Standard, and
>> The Internet started to grow, and the rest is history....
>>
>> I wonder if Dave Clark ever forgave Bill Plummer for crashing the
>> Multics TCP by innocently asking Dave to temporarily disable his
>> checksumming code....and then sending a kamikaze packet from Tenex.
>>
>> /Jack
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Bob Braden <braden at meritmail.isi.edu
>> <mailto:braden at meritmail.isi.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     Jack,
>>
>>     You wrote:
>>
>>         I wrote a TCP back in the 1979 timeframe - the first one for a
>>     Unix
>>         system, running on a PDP-11/40.  It first implemented TCP version
>>         2.5, and later evolved to version 4.   It was a very basic
>>         implementation, no "slow start" or any other such niceties
>>     that were
>>         created as the Internet grew.
>>
>>     I have been trying to recall where my TCP/IP for UCLA's IBM 360/91
>>     ran in this horse race. The best I can tell from IEN 70 and IEN 77
>>     is that  my TCP-4 version made it between Dec 1978 and Jan 1979,
>>     although I think I had an initial TP-2.5 version talkng to itself
>>     in mid 1978.
>>
>>     Bob Braden
>>
>>
>
>
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