[ih] Origin of "best effort"

[John Day]

For most of my life, the term “to make a best effort” had more the latter meaning that the former. It was just a colloquial phrase. I wouldn’t call it slang but similar.  As I said, in networking the phrase originates with Pouzin and CYCLADES and the invention of the datagram. That would put it in the early 1970s.

John

> On Jan 19, 2017, at 14:09, Guy Almes <galmes at tamu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Brian,
>   This is actually an interesting question.
>   During the 1990s we had a discussion in which this phrase came up, 
> used in the now-typical networking sense.
>   One colleague in the conversation, a lawyer, who had done work in the 
> construction industry, found the usage very odd because, he said, in 
> contracts within that industry the phrase had a specific meaning and it 
> obliged a person/company to a very very high standard of "best effort". 
> In that context, for example, it might oblige a company to spend 
> money/effort to a degree that would keep a promise but ruin any hope for 
> making money in the deal.  He noted that we computer engineers were 
> using the term in an almost opposite (and, to him, an ironic) sense, 
> viz., "do whatever is normal, but *not* heroic, and if it works, good 
> and if it doesn't, don't worry about it".
> 
>   If the phrase is connected that older "contract language" usage, it 
> would indeed be interesting to see how it came to have almost a reversal 
> or sense.
> 
> 	-- Guy
> 
> On 1/18/17 2:34 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I learnt very early on that the Internet offered a "best effort" service
>> for the delivery of datagrams.
>> 
>> Where did that meme come from, and when?
>> 
>> The earliest trace I found in a quick trawl was 1986 (RFC992). But RFC791
>> doesn't mention it, and defined TOS, such that all packets were *not* assumed
>> to be created equal. The 1984 Saltzer et al paper doesn't mention it either.
>> 
>> (RFC768 does say that UDP delivery is "not guaranteed" but that is not
>> the same thing as "best effort".)
>> 
>> The question is of interest because some analyses of network neutrality,
>> including a student dissertation I was reviewing yesterday, conflate the
>> end-to-end principle with best-effort packet delivery.
>> 
>> Regards
>>     Brian
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