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

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: John Day

    > The line speed was very important.  Remember the ARPANET was built to be
    > a production network ... 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. ... 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.

I am less certain of this than you are. I had the experience of working for
quite a while with Proteon, where the only link to the rest of the Internet
was, for some time, a 4800 (or maybe it was 9600, the memory dims, alas) baud
line. I don't remember it being really painful.

(Admittedly, the line did have some pretty fancy header-compression on it,
using an algorithm from Dave Reed. If there were more than one connection
using the line, one didn't get the maximal compression, but even then you'd
get some compression; e.g. the source address - for outgoing packets - was
mostly, or entirely [remember, this was the era of timesharing machines, we
only had one :-] the same, other fields were the same, etc.)

Your point about lots and lots of users (the Proteon user community was
admittedly fairly small, initially, at least - a half dozen or so) sharing a
line is taken, but at the same time, there would have been a lot more lines,
spreading the load.

I suspect the only way to say with any certainty how well a network built out
of lots of slow lines, as opposed to a few fast ones, would have worked is a
comprehensive simulation. Which is not likely to happen, of course! ;-)

	Noel