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

[Brian E Carpenter]

I have to say that in those years, I evaluated ATM (and frame relay, and
ISDN for that matter) only by asking how well TCP/IP would run over it.
(For ATM, the answer was "badly".)

It was already the case that "it's the applications, stupid!", and
all the useful apps ran over TCP/IP (apart from those that ran over
DECnet).

I remember Ellen Hancock from IBM's Network Hardware Division showing
up on a Grand Tour of Europe, explaining how ATM was going to replace
Token Ring as the solution to all networking problems. It wasn't until
she left IBM that I was head hunted by them.

The new IBM HQ building in Armonk NY was equipped with ATM to the
desktop in about 1996. Bizarre.

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 11-Feb-23 06:25, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history 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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