[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[Scott Bradner]

ps - a follow up opinion from 2001

https://www.sobco.com/nww/2001/bradner-2001-07-23.html

> On Feb 10, 2023, at 12:34 PM, Scott Bradner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> of course its true that ATM & FR are L2 but that did not stop the ATM Forum and other
> ATM fans from pushing ATM as a full replacement for IP and at least a partial replacement for TCP
> 
> after all, ATM had routing, subnets, flow control, guaranteed data delivery - and 
> ATM available bit rate (ABR) was quite a technical achievement (at least in the specification,
> maybe not so much in the implementation)
> 
> this was my opinion in 1998
> https://www.sobco.com/nww/1998/bradner-1998-09-14.html
> 
> Scott
> 
> 
>> On Feb 10, 2023, at 12:25 PM, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Frame Relay (and to a lesser extent, ATM) wasn't a competitor to TCP/IP. In
>> fact, they were both L2 technologies, and certainly the greatest amount of
>> FR revenue was in tail circuits carrying IP from an ISP or a corporate HQ
>> to a remote corporate office. At the time, FR was MUCH less expensive and
>> faster than leased lines.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 12:06 PM vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> and frame relay
>>> v
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 11:33 AM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Let's not forget about ATM. I  think ATM was also a big area of focus
>>> for
>>>> many people in this time frame.
>>>> barbara
>>>> 
>>>>   On Friday, February 10, 2023 at 06:48:47 AM PST, Craig Partridge via
>>>> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 7:16 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> At the time, in the 1990ish timeframe, there was a huge installed base
>>>>> of network technology.  Hundreds of thousands of computers utilizing
>>>>> networks based on SNA, SPX, XNS, Decnet, etc. etc.  TCP existed, but
>>>>> was a small player, confined largely to the academic and research
>>>>> communities.
>>>>> 
>>>>> ...
>>>>> 
>>>>> So how did TCP manage to blast through that momentum of the installed
>>>>> base, creating such a chaos in the collision?  And how did it do it so
>>>>> rapidly?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> Hi Jack:
>>>> 
>>>> I'll start with a shout out to Brian's point that the transition was
>>>> already well underway by 1990.  Absolutely
>>>> fits my experience.
>>>> 
>>>> I would argue that a critical issue was communicating outside one's
>>>> organization and/or over long distance.  The various technologies you
>>> list,
>>>> except for DECNET, did not focus on solving problems across
>>> organizational
>>>> boundaries.  Recall Netware was the
>>>> biggest networking technology of the time and, while it adapted somewhat,
>>>> was designed to connect an office or suite
>>>> of offices.
>>>> 
>>>> Meanwhile, by 1987, we'd built a relatively homogeneous email environment
>>>> across the Internet, USENET, CSNET, and
>>>> (thanks to BITNET and EARN) the academic SNA networks.  I remember at a
>>> DC
>>>> Interop c. 1990, someone observing
>>>> that they had discovered couldn't hire new computing graduates if they
>>>> weren't connected to the RFC 822/domain name email
>>>> network.  So the tech mindset, among the younger generation, was that
>>> they
>>>> should be able to communicate with anyone via
>>>> email.  This pushed folks towards TCP/IP -- or, at least, email
>>>> compatibility with the Internet.
>>>> 
>>>> At a bits-and-bytes level, long-distance reliable communications networks
>>>> are hard to do.  I remember Dave Clark talking about
>>>> this around 1985 and discussing how protocol suites designed around the
>>>> local network didn't scale.  He used the struggles by
>>>> the LOCUS distributed file system (which worked great on a LAN) to work
>>>> over the ARPANET as an example.  In the late 1980s,
>>>> only two networking architectures had engaged with and worked through
>>> those
>>>> issues: TCP/IP and DECNET.  Nicely, the most prominent and
>>>> complementary papers on congestion issues, one by Van Jacobson (TCP/IP)
>>> and
>>>> one by Raj Jain and KK Ramakrishnan (DECNET),
>>>> were presented back-to-back at the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 1988.  So if
>>>> you were looking to build (or soon after via NSFNET, connect
>>>> to) a sturdy wide-area network, unless you were a DEC VMS organization,
>>>> your best choice was TCP/IP.
>>>> 
>>>> I'll note it was, in my view, a near thing sometimes.  NSFNET was a
>>>> tremendous gamble and for parts of 1987 and 1988 was not
>>>> a very good service (I'm told a scientist complained loudly at the
>>> National
>>>> Academy about this non-functional network they were
>>>> trying to use for important science).  We figured out congestion collapse
>>>> well enough for the time (pace buffer-bloat folks) just as
>>>> it was threatening to make the Internet unusable.  But I distinctly
>>>> remember that roughly around the end of 1988 or beginning of 1989,
>>>> Internet folks began to realize that when they were talking with
>>> engineers
>>>> building other networking technologies there was a whole
>>>> suite of community knowledge that the Internet folks had and nobody else
>>>> (except the wonderful DEC networking team) did.
>>>> 
>>>> Craig
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> *****
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>>>> mailing lists.
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