[ih] Better-than-Best Effort

[Jack Haverty]

Thanks, Steve.  I hadn't heard the details of why ISI was selected.   I 
can believe that economics was probably a factor but the people and 
organizational issues could have been the dominant factors.

IMHO, the "internet community" seems to often ignore non-technical 
influences on historical events, preferring to view everything in terms 
of RFCs, protocols, and such.  I think the other influences are an 
important part of the story - hence my "economic lens".   You just 
described a view through a manager's lens.

/Jack

PS - I always thought that the "ARPANET demo" aspect of that ARPANET 
timeframe was suspect, especially after I noticed that the ARPANET had 
been configured with a leased circuit directly between the nearby IMPs 
to ISI and ARPA.   So as a demo of "packet switching", there wasn't much 
actual switching involved.   The 2 IMPs were more like multiplexors.

I never heard whether that configuration was mandated by ARPA, or BBN 
decided to put a line in as a way to keep the customer happy, or if it 
just happened naturally as a result of the ongoing measurement of 
traffic flows and reconfiguration of the topology to adapt as needed.  
Or something else.   The interactivity of the service between a terminal 
at ARPA and a PDP-10 at ISI was noticeably better than other users 
(e.g., me) experienced.

On 8/28/21 11:51 AM, Steve Crocker wrote:
> Jack,
>
> You wrote:
>
>     I recall many visits to ARPA on Wilson Blvd in Arlington, VA.
>     There were
>     terminals all over the building, pretty much all connected through the
>     ARPANET to a PDP-10 3000 miles away at USC in Marine Del Rey, CA.  The
>     technology of Packet Switching made it possible to keep a PDP-10 busy
>     servicing all those Users and minimize the costs of everything,
>     including those expensive communications circuits.  This was circa
>     1980. Users could efficiently share expensive communications, and
>     expensive and distant computers -- although I always thought ARPA's
>     choice to use a computer 3000 miles away was probably more to
>     demonstrate the viability of the ARPANET than because it was cheaper
>     than using a computer somewhere near DC.
>
>
> The choice of USC-ISI in Marina del Rey was due to other factors.  In 
> 1972, with ARPA/IPTO (Larry Roberts) strong support, Keith Uncapher 
> moved his research group out of RAND.  Uncapher explored a couple of 
> possibilities and found a comfortable institutional home with the 
> University of Southern California (USC) with the proviso the institute 
> would be off campus.  Uncapher was solidly supportive of both 
> ARPA/IPTO and of the Arpanet project. As the Arpanet grew, Roberts 
> needed a place to have multiple PDP-10s providing service on the 
> Arpanet.  Not just for the staff at ARPA but for many others as well. 
> Uncapher was cooperative and the rest followed easily.
>
> The fact that it demonstrated the viability of packet-switching over 
> that distance was perhaps a bonus, but the same would have been true 
> almost anywhere in the continental U.S. at that time.  The more 
> important factor was the quality of the relationship.  One could 
> imagine setting up a small farm of machines at various other 
> universities, non-profits, or selected for profit companies or even 
> some military bases.  For each of these, cost, contracting rules, the 
> ambitions of the principal investigator, and staff skill sets would 
> have been the dominant concerns.
>
> Steve
>