[ih] Better-than-Best Effort

[Dan Lynch]

And in 1980 I was hired by ISI to run that farm of PDP-10s and follow on machines. For a year or so the plan was to get even bigger, but then one day Bob Kahn told me my job was changed!  The era of personal computers was unfolding and my role was to buy 3 of each one and try to put them on the nascent Internet and see which ones worked and which ones didn’t. I bought the early Sun machines, from Cadlinc, not Sun yet, Perqs from CMU and BLTs from some part of Bell Labs I think, and early Vaxes from Dec and I tried to get the early Dolfins from Xerox and the first Stars. Oh, and this was to be the end of Timesharing!  And eventually it was, eh? After a few years of doing this I left ISI for Silicon Valley to get in on the revolution. Eventually I  realized that the Internet was taking off and I started Interop to teach the world how to make the Internet work for them. 

Thanks for the ride. 

Dan

Ps. Oh, Steve  Crocker was on the hiring committee that selected me😁❗️

Cell 650-776-7313

> On Aug 28, 2021, at 11:51 AM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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
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