[ih] Significant milestones in the history of TCP/IP

["James P.G. Sterbenz 司徒傑莫 송재윤"]

On 16 Sep 2015, at 10:20, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> The line speed was very important.  Remember the ARPANET was built to be a production network to lower the cost of ARPA research on other things. It was to have major sites dedicated to compute and others to storage.  The Net would have worked, but in terms of Robert’s goal of a resource sharing network that would allow sharing of major computing resources, it would have been painfully slow, and probably deemed a failure.  The 56K lines kept the perceived response within expectations. All of the people not doing networking but using the ARPANET for other projects, of which there were a lot, would have found it more a barrier.  There were a lot of people submitting “big jobs” to CCN, Rutherford, Multics, etc. Tenex’ character-at-a-time echoing would have been even worse than it was. (It was easy to type a line and a half ahead in those days before starting to get echoed characters.)  Having the 56K lines at the beginning (which were hard to saturate for any sustained period) was a real boon that allowed us to treat it like a resource sharing facility, which is what generated the excitement.
> 
> Even those days, 9.6K was reasonable speed for one person (maybe two) at a terminal doing development.  Sharing that with a few hundred with more than a few doing essentially file transfers for RJE and you have one painfully slow network.  And even then the greater popularity for some sites was prevalent. 
> 
> Starting with high speed lines meant that a whole raft uglinesses were avoided.

I remember vividly the day that we cut over from 56Kb/s leased lines to the NSFNET T1 backbone through MidNet (or was it MIDNET?) at Wash. U in 1986 or 1987.  I initially thought something had to be wrong because it appeared that the files were transferring almost instantaneously, and I assumed truncated.  Of course, we compensated by FTPing bigger files more often…

Cheers,
James

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James P.G. Sterbenz  司徒傑莫  송재윤  +1 508 944 3067  www.ittc.ku.edu/~jpgs
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