[ih] Better-than-Best Effort

[Dan Lynch]

Jack, thanks for the very accurate description of what has happened in the past 60 years or so. In the early 70s I experienced something quite unique. I was the single user of a SDS Sigma 5 (IBM copycat) that was used to track missiles with a very advanced radar in New Mexico. So I wrote the software, keypunched it myself, loaded it into the card reader and ran the batch monitor to compile the program and then ran the radar with the program. I had the whole system to myself. Since this was a high priority program for the defense department it was deemed the best use of the money!  And I had the first taste of a big machine all to myself. What fun.  Oh, I also was given the source code to all the systems software and libraries because the activity was highly classified and if I ran into a bug in the software provided by the manufacturer I had to find the problem and solve it without bringing anyone else in to my location. Hence I learned a lot of stuff that way. When I found and fixed a bug I would tell them the fix I had found. Quite an education! 

Dan

Cell 650-776-7313

> On Aug 28, 2021, at 11:31 AM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Actually, I think of "The Cloud" as TimeSharing 2.0.
> 
> When I look at the last 60 years or so of history with an economics lens, there's a sort of cyclic pattern.
> 
> Computers in the 60s were very expensive and users were charged for use by the number of CPU seconds their programs used.  To keep those expensive computers busy, they were fed a continuous stream of jobs on punch cards, day and night.   You submitted your "job" and often got the results the next day.   People could wait, computers could not.   Their time was too valuable.
> 
> People could interact directly with computers, but that would mean that the expensive computer would be idle while waiting for the user to digest what it had just done and tell it what to do next.   So TimeSharing evolved as a useful technique to keep that expensive computer busy while allowing users to get their results faster, especially for very simple (to the CPU) tasks.
> 
> TimeSharing was popular for quite a while, but eventually users got frustrated by the experience of relying on "The Comp Center" to keep the machine running, and the tendency for those managers to put more and more users on a machine until it no longer felt like a User had a whole computer to work with.
> 
> But the Economics had changed.  Computers had gotten much much less expensive, so much so that it became economically feasible to purchase your own computer, and not worry about keeping it busy every minute of every day.  Plus you controlled that computer, rather than some bureaucracy inside the glassed-off computer installation.   Power was in the Users' hands.  Workstations and departmental minicomputers arrived.  As costs dropped even further, Personal Computers became the norm.
> 
> As LANs and PCs became dominant in offices and such commercial environments, the now-less-expensive "big computers" became servers, interacting with all those PCs in computer-to-computer communications, rather than the computer-to-terminal norm of TimeSharing.
> 
> With costs still dropping rapidly, and silo-ization of "networking" creating an unwieldy mix of incompatible networking technologies even inside a single organization, corporate managers noticed that the expensive part of IT had become the labor involved in keeping all that stuff running, updated to fix critical vulnerabilities, and continuously upgraded as software vendors dictated and Users demanded.   TCP/IP was a universal replacement for that hodgepodge, and Industry "embraced the Internet".   All of the other networking schemes withered away.
> 
> With costs of computing, and of communications, still dropping fast, the labor to operate an organization's "IT Department" became the dominant cost.   Especially in smaller organizations, it was difficult to have the right personnel skills around to handle problems and needs that arose.   A specialist in some aspect of technology might be needed urgently, but keeping such a person on the payroll would be an unnecessary expense when that particular problem or need had been addressed.
> 
> Cloud computing provided a solution.   By concentrating the technology all in one place, somewhere "out in the cloud", the expensive resources, whether computers or people, could be kept busy.   Cloud computing might be viewed as TimeSharing of not only computers and storage, but also of people.   TimeSharing 2.0 is here.  But instead of Users themselves interacting with a Computer in the Cloud, a User's personal computing device is interacting on that Users' behalf with often many Computers in several Clouds.
> 
> Of course, similar changes have been happening, and continue to happen, in the costs of communications.  Back in the late 60s, when TimeSharing was emerging, computers were still expensive and there was a desire to share such expensive resources to keep them busy. Computers were connected to Users by use of Terminals, sending and receiving characters.
> 
> At the time, communications was expensive.   Leased lines could be bought, but not economically justified unless they were kept busy. Dial-up access was available, also expensive and priced by distance involved, and, just like in the case of the big expensive computers, dial-up lines were "wasted" while the User was thinking about what to do next.
> 
> IIRC, a major motivation for Packet Switching was to address that economic problem, by allowing multiple Users to share communications circuits.   The circuits could be kept busy, and a mix of leased and dial-up circuits could be used to achieve the lowest-cost means to interconnect those Users and Computers.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Since 1980, costs of everything have continued to drop.  But of course, Users' expectations have also continued to rise.  In the 1980s, the only economic way to move things like video files was shipping magtapes on an airplane.   Streaming such material wasn't even a dream.
> 
> The economics now are also different, and it would seem that eventually the economic motivation for techniques such as Packet Switching might have disappeared.  In addition, the limitations of such technology are becoming more evident, and some silo-ization of specific solutions has been happening.   Bob Purvy's and Louis Mamakos' descriptions strike me as two examples of innovators tackling a specific problem with a point solution that mitigates that problem for a specific User community (aka their customers).
> 
> There's a lot more to the story of course, as other changes and innovations occurred.  E.g., we no longer interact much directly with remote computers, but rather with the one on our desks or in our hands.  Latency is possibly more important now than bandwidth, since while fiber can provide lots of bandwidth but no one has yet figured out how to move data faster than the speed of light.
> 
> So, that's a hopefully not too long explanation of why I mused that perhaps Packet Switching is no longer the best solution, at least when viewed through my economic lens.   The need to share expensive communications lines has apparently almost disappeared, and latency is a new hurdle.    If someone ever figures out how to make software that "just works" and doesn't need lots of care, perhaps "The Cloud" will wither away as well.  Maybe some AI like we see in the SciFi world.  Hopefully benevolent.....
> 
> Just my perspective - YMMV,
> /Jack Haverty
> 
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>> On 8/27/21 5:24 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>> On 8/27/2021 4:10 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>>> time-sharing is alive and well - spelled CLOUD
>> 
>> As PCs started to emerge Postel commented that that would eliminate the need for time-sharing.  I suggested that even for one person, it would be good for their computer to be running multiple, simultaneous activities.
>> 
>> So, nevermind the cloud.  Look at your phone.
>> 
>> d/
>> 
> 
> 
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