[ih] ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

[Jack Haverty]

IMHO, many things also happen for non-technical and non-business 
reasons.  Since multicast was needed for some uses of the 'net, but it 
didn't actually get deployed widely in the Internet (whatever happened 
to the Mbone...?), people figured out another way to provide it by 
putting it in separate boxes (the CDNs) from the switches themselves.

I've always wondered if that same pattern drove the creation of TCP and 
use of datagram mode.   The ARPANET was the only WAN of the day, and its 
gurus were extremely reluctant to allow use of "uncontrolled packets" 
(aka datagrams) for fear of bringing down the whole network.   I 
recently found a 1975-era BBN report analyzing the TCP proposal and 
concluding for DCA that it couldn't work.

So TCP was implemented in the host computers, where mere mortals could 
get at the code.   Of course, TCP mechanisms duplicated the mechanisms 
already in the ARPANET.   That's what I meant by "moving mechanisms from 
switches to hosts:.  But that did enable us a few years later to simply 
interconnect routers with wires, cutting the ARPANET out of the picture.

Jack

On 3/2/22 20:03, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> It appears that Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> said:
>>     > On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 8:46 PM Jack Haverty wrote:
>>
>>     > One that I used in the talk was TOS, i.e., how should routers (and TCPs)
>>     > treat datagrams differently depending on their TOS values.
>>
>> I actually don't think that's that important any more (or multicast either).
>> TOS is only realy important in a network with resource limitations, or very
>> different service levels. We don't have those any more - those limitations
>> have just been engineered away.
> That's not it, they came up against the impenetrable barrier of a
> business model. We understand how to price peering and transit of
> traffic where all packets are the same, but nobody has any idea how
> you do it where some packets are more valuable.
>
> I never figured out why multicast failed.  It is bizarre that people are dumping
> cable service which has 100 channels multicast to all of the customers in favor
> of point-to-point service where you frequently have a zillion people streaming
> separate copies of the same thing, e.g., a football game.  We fake it with CDNs
> that position servers inside retail networks but really, it's multicast.
>
> R's,
> John