[ih] Origins of Go-Back-N

[Bob Purvy]

Since we're going back to the pre-Morse era:

I'm currently (re)reading *The Count of Monte Cristo*, and you may dimly
recall that the Count pays a visit to a telegraph station, in about 1829.
He befriends and bribes the telegraph operator, whose job it is to see the
signals from his next neighbor and faithfully relay them. He has to stop
operating when it's foggy.

*Spoiler alert*: the Count bribes him enough to retire, and then has him
relay a false signal that causes his nemesis M. Danglars to lose a million
francs. This book has been made into a movie at least four times, so I'm
eager to see how they treat this episode (or if they do).

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure this is all in Wikipedia. I don't want to hear about
it 😎

On Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 9:15 AM touch--- via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hi, John,
>
> I don’t know the first instance of go-back-N, but selective repeat (in
> this case, selective NACK) was used by Edelcrantz in the Swiss countryside
> optical telegraph in roughly 1800 according to Wikipedia (I’ve seen similar
> descriptions in a little book the IEEE published on the history of
> telecom). The details of Chappe’s optical telegraph in France weren’t
> documented, so may have had similar functions and predate this.
>
> I wouldn’t be surprised if go-back-N had origins near that time or before.
>
> Joe
>
> —
> Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
> www.strayalpha.com
>
> > On Nov 14, 2021, at 6:22 AM, John Day via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > I think this came up before, but I am going to ask anyway:
> >
> > Can someone point me at the first proposal for Go-Back-N?  When and by
> whom?
> >
> > Is it before or after SDLC, which according to the wikipedia is 1975?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > John
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