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

[Miles Fidelman]

I seem to recall ATM working just fine, as a backbone technology.  Heck, 
BBN even went off and started Lightstream to build ATM switches.  It's 
just another form of low-level multiplexing.  Even Frame Relay, when it 
was used at the link layer, worked just fine.

Now ISDN, on the other hand... I spent a lot of time helping MILDEP 
communications commands sell Ethernet deployments in the face of ISDN 
pressure.  And then, working with municipalities around both enterprise 
services & municipal broadband. ("What, you want to sell us Centrex ISDN 
service, with metered packet service on the D channel?")

It was rather odd how the telco types didn't get how useless ISDN data 
service was, particularly when they were charging by the packet.  "Who 
needs more than 64kpbs?"  And the D-channel packet service ... It really 
blew some minds when you did the simple calculation of how long it would 
take to send a 10meg file, and how much it would cost.

The folks who knew what they were doing were out selling metro-area 
services - starting at 64kbps frame relay, and then T1 & T3 speed ATM - 
stuff that was actually useful.

Miles Fidelman

Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history 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.
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