[ih] sad news

[Steve Crocker]

[Including Bob Metcalfe just to be sure.]

Aww.  Sadness.  I was working in the ARPA office in the early 1970s.  I
hadn't paid close attention to the Alohanet but I was aware of it.  Norm
visited the office and explained it to me.  I thought it was extremely cool
to have all the terminals send whenever they wanted and to retransmit if
the central node didn't acknowledge.  His math showed if the total traffic
offered was less than 1/2e of the channel's capacity, the retransmissions
would subside instead of exploding.  I remember marveling on the boldness
of not having any explicit form of multiplexor and offered a
McCluhanesque, "the medium is the multiplexor."

I took home a copy of an AFIPS proceeding that had their paper in it.  Bob
Metcalfe stayed overnight sometime after that.  I showed him the paper and
commented he might find it interesting.  He took the concept back to PARC,
put it on coax cable, called it Ethernet, and the rest is history.

Steve


On Sat, Dec 5, 2020 at 1:10 PM vinton cerf <vgcerf at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had a call this morning from the NY Times asking for background on Norm
> Abramson who apparently passed away very recently.
>
> vint
>
>