[ih] inter IMP hackery [was Recently restored and a small ARPANET was run using simulated IMP hardware, ]

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

jack, there was a <Subsys> program on Tenex IIRC called HOSTAT that when
invoked established a connection to your SURVEY server at MIT-DM and then
downloaded and printed out your latest results in a friendly fashion.

yours truly recalls visiting the folks (Hal Murray <HGM> and Phil Petersen
<HPP>) from time to time at CCA when in Boston and seeing the two
Datacomputer storage incarnations:

the first being a line of disks drives pre-arrival of the TBM monster
noisy tape drive unit and it's compressor (IIRC).

the second being after the TBM was installed and operational... and the
washing machine sized line of "simulating" TBM Disk Drives were then
used/repurposed IIRC for caching data between the ARPANET users and the TBM
tape drive unit.

yours truly was curious about, well, is this the only TBM device and why
was it created... just for this?  who had the need to store that much data
like this and the budget to make such a product a viable business?

the answer, of course, was:

No Such Agency.

geoff

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 9:37 AM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> Geoff,
>
> Re: "were their processes on (all?) the ARPANET hosts at the time that
> collected data"
>
> While I was in Licklider's group at MIT, Marc Seriff implemented a
> "SURVEY" system that periodically (every 15 minutes) probed ARPANET hosts
> and recorded their up/down status.  Nothing about performance, just whether
> or not they were accessible.
>
> See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc308.txt
>
> SURVEY was included in the "Scenarios" booklet handed out to attendees at
> the ICCC conference/demo in 1972 (see page 3-4 of the brochure).   You
> could connect to the SURVEY system at MIT-DM and examine the availability
> of ARPANET hosts from the data that was being collected.
>
> At the time, Lick's vision included providing such data services as core
> network services.   The DataComputer was the obvious place to store Data.
> At the time, I was involved in building the MIT-DM mail server, and I had
> incorporated an interface to the DataComputer.  Users could mark a message
> for archival, and it would be transferred to the DataComputer for
> posterity.   At the time, we thought their Terabit (!!!) of online storage
> was plenty for everyone.   The intent was that "important" messages
> (technical reports, etc.) would be good to archive, while ephemeral
> messages ("Anybody want lunch?") would not.
>
> IIRC, the SURVEY data was also to be archived as another interesting
> dataset.   But I don't remember if Marc ever implemented that, or know if
> any of the DataComputer artifacts have survived.
>
> In the early days of the Internet, we replicated some of that ARPANET
> experience in the form of the CMCC (Catenet Monitoring and Control Center),
> with David Floodpage as the primary implementor.  There are historical
> discussions of that at least in the old BBN QTRs and maybe some
> IENs/RFCs.   The CMCC was a precursor to the incorporation of the gateways
> into the ARPANET NOC mechanisms so gateways were handled much as the IMPS
> were.
>
> /Jack
>
>
>
> On 9/7/20 11:54 AM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow wrote:
>
> would be curious to know WHAT did UCLA-NMC measure and HOW did it measure
> it?
>
> i.e. was there a "precursor" to some kind of SNMP capability that allowed
> UCLA-NMC to peer inside IMPs or hosts?
>
> or were their processes on (all?) the ARPANET hosts at the time that
> collected data from their respective OS's that the UCLA-NMC machine would
> then periodically poll to get the data, kind of like the Tenex RSSER job
> processes did with respect to sharing load avg. data among themselves?
>
> [btw, believe that unless Leonard Kleinrock <lk at cs.ucla.edu> is
> on/subscriber to the IH list, any reply sent to IH would be black holed, as
> the IH list is most likely configured (Joe can confirm) to only allow
> submissions to it from its "subscribers"... ERGO, if Len does reply, even
> if cc'ng the list, you'd need to then manually fwd it to the list for
> everyone else to see.]
>
> geoff
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 8:36 AM Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> I don't think the NMC measured anything at the host level, but I could be
>> wrong.  Vint and Len copied explicitly.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 2:30 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> > On 9/7/20 11:15 AM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> > > It would be interesting to know the
>> > > transfer rate between MTIPs.
>> > This is the kind of thing that I'd expect the ARPANET NMC (Network
>> > Measurement Center at UCLA, as opposed to NOC - Network Operations
>> > Center at BBN) might have been measuring.  I don't remember ever seeing
>> > any results or raw data from Measurements, and don't know much about
>> > that part of the History.   Were results published somewhere and did
>> > such reports survive?
>> > /Jack
>> >
>> > --
>> > Internet-history mailing list
>> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> >
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>>
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True