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

[John Day]

ATM was a bad idea the day it was proposed.  It was unbelievable how many people were taken in by it.  But then in that time period, I also had people telling me that the amount of data traffic would never exceed the amount of voice traffic! All you could do was shake your head and wonder what they were smoking.

I had a shaggy dog story I use to tell, about how I had worked for a stat mux company and they did this neat thing multiplexing a few characters from terminals onto larger packets and reshuffling them at every hop and it worked really well. Who was talking to was usually a good bellhead and was agreeing eagerly and remembering how great it was and nodding their heads a lot. And then I said, we should do that now and do ATM over IP. Then they stopped nodding with a confused look.  ;-)

> On Feb 10, 2023, at 12:25, 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> *****
>>> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
>>> mailing lists.
>>> --
>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> 
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> 
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history