[ih] Hourglass model question
Jack Haverty
jack at 3kitty.org
Sat Jul 6 10:52:08 PDT 2019
IIRC, there were often many reasons expressed for doing some project.
In particular, the project had to be attractive enough to the people
with the $s for them to send $s your way. So a project was pitched to
each funding source with emphasis on the aspects of the project that
would appeal to them.
In my experience, it was common to get a project going by getting
multiple sources of funding. E.g., for ARPA, an emphasis on the
researchy aspects, and for DCA an emphasis on operational stability or
cost. It was even possible to get some $s from corporate clients, who
were willing to pay to get the results of all that government-funded
work into their own networks. A project team would have its members
funded by different sources, all working on the same thing (e.g., "the
Internet")
I was never involved in the government politics, but I suspect ARPA,
DCA, et al did similar things when they went to the Army/Navy/Congress,
etc for funding. One body might be interested in funding basic
research; another might be interested in cutting expenses, nailing down
a pork barrel project in his/her realm, etc.
/Jack Haverty
On 7/5/19 10:09 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> John, i had the same impression - that there was demand for new
> computing equipment and ARPA wanted the research groups to be able to
> share resources as well as sharing code and research results freely.
>
> vint
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 10:50 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net
> <mailto:jeanjour at comcast.net>> wrote:
>
> Okay, thanks for that clarification. Somewhere I had been told
> that the reason for resource sharing was so ARPA didn’t have to
> buy lots of computing equipment for multiple sites, but they could
> share it. And of course that included collaboration as well.
>
> If collaboration of people was one of the main goals, why was
> USING turned off? That seemed to be a hot bed of collaboration
> with great potential.
>
> Take care,
> John
>
>> On Jul 5, 2019, at 20:48, Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com
>> <mailto:steve at shinkuro.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Your characterization of the Arpanet as focused on lowering the
>> cost of research is off the mark. It was motivated by the desire
>> to increase the collaboration and sharing of resources.
>> “Resources” included people resources as well as computational
>> resources.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Jul 5, 2019, at 8:37 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net
>> <mailto:jeanjour at comcast.net>> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks Steve for that. Just to add.
>>>
>>> Keep in mind computing was still very small (there was only one
>>> or two computer conferences a year, when did NCC split into Fall
>>> and Spring Joint?) The networking field was even smaller.
>>> Publishing a paper was considerably more work and the criteria
>>> considerably higher than they are now. A lot of work and a lot
>>> of discussing went on that never appeared in publications or
>>> even in RFCs or other samizdat circulations. (I have all sorts
>>> of papers from this period that were not part of any even
>>> informal publication series.
>>>
>>> In 1968, Dykstra published his paper on THE and layered OSs. And
>>> it was all the buzz. Most, if not all, of the NWG were OS guys.
>>> You needed OS guys to figure out how to introduce the IMP-Host
>>> protocol and then the Host-Host on top of that in the OS. By
>>> 1970, layer diagrams of IMP-Host, Host-Host(NCP), (Telnet, DTP),
>>> FTP, RJE were common. (DTP was Data Transfer Protocol, the part
>>> of FTP that did the actual transfer.)
>>>
>>> By 72/3, the layers of Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport
>>> from CYCLADES were pretty common as well as a general
>>> characterization that wasn’t specific to a given network. INWG
>>> began in 72 after ICCC ’72 and these layers were common by then.
>>> There is also strong evidence that because CYCLADES was building
>>> a network to do research on networks (very different from what
>>> the ARPNET was)*, they had figured out a lot more about layers
>>> than most of us knew at the time.
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> *Remember the ARPANET was built to lower the cost of research
>>> but not really to do research on networks. That could be a side
>>> benefit and a lot of us thought there was a lot to do, but it
>>> wasn’t ARPAs main focus for the ARPANET. Once it was built, ARPA
>>> considered the network part done! (At least for awhile they
>>> did.) BBN couldn’t take the net whenever they wanted to do some
>>> experiment. The ARPANET was in a fairly real sense, a production
>>> network to support ARPA research.
>>>
>>>> On Jul 5, 2019, at 17:35, Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com
>>>> <mailto:steve at shinkuro.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Layering was part of the earliest discussions we had in 1968-69.
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 5:34 PM Craig Partridge
>>>> <craig at tereschau.net <mailto:craig at tereschau.net>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Related but not quite on target.
>>>>
>>>> The hourglass/margarita glass is a representation of
>>>> layering. And back in 1988 I tried to figure out the
>>>> origins of the layered model for a collection of networking
>>>> papers I edited. At the time, the best answer I found was
>>>> that layering, from a networking perspective, originated
>>>> with a paper by Davidson et al. on the ARPANET TELNET
>>>> protocol from the DATACOM conference in 1977. It portrays
>>>> layering as a fan, in which different protocols layer on
>>>> each other as needed. But it clearly articulates the
>>>> notion of layering and how layers interact. (And there's a
>>>> narrow window between the 1977 paper and the Cerf/Kahn 1974
>>>> paper on TCP/IP, which presumably would have mentioned
>>>> layering if the concept was in wide use).
>>>>
>>>> Craig
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 8:10 AM Andrew Russell
>>>> <arussell at arussell.org <mailto:arussell at arussell.org>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi everyone -
>>>>
>>>> You might have seen the CACM featured an article in the
>>>> most recent issue “On the Hourglass Model”
>>>> - https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237714-on-the-hourglass-model/fulltext.
>>>>
>>>> It’s not a history paper, but it raised a
>>>> history-related question for me. As far as I know the
>>>> visual representation in question started with a
>>>> drawing of a margarita glass in 1979, in the context of
>>>> an OSI committee meeting and the 7-layer model. I
>>>> reproduced the image on page 214 of my book “Open
>>>> Standards and the Digital Age” - it’s visible to me here:
>>>> https://books.google.com/books?id=jqroAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA214&lpg=PA214.
>>>>
>>>> My question for the list has 2 parts:
>>>> 1) when/where did the margarita glass turn into an
>>>> hourglass?
>>>> 2) when/where did the TCP/IP community borrow it from
>>>> the OSI community? (I’m assuming this is how it
>>>> happened, would be very interested in evidence or
>>>> recollections to the contrary)
>>>>
>>>> My hunch, without doing a fresh round of research, is
>>>> that I should look first to papers by David Clark and
>>>> co-authors in the 1980s to answer a third question,
>>>> which is how this illustrated concept morphed into a
>>>> “Theorem” (as the CACM essay puts it). But that’s just
>>>> a hunch, and I’d really appreciate pointers or
>>>> recollections.
>>>>
>>>> Thank you!
>>>>
>>>> Andy
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