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

Fri Feb 10 11:51:37 PST 2023

ellen was viscerally opposed to TCP/IP - visited IBM HQ at one point and
got an earful.

v

On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 2:50 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> *****
> >>> 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
> >>>
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> >>>
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> >>
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