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

Bob Hinden bob.hinden at gmail.com
Sat Feb 11 09:42:41 PST 2023 

Miles,

> On Feb 11, 2023, at 9:25 AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

When ATM first came out, its 155Mbps speed was fast compared to what else existed at the time, like 10M Ethernet.   I admit to having gotten sucked in for a while (BBN and Ipsilon).

Now in hindsight, ATM’s small cell size (53 bytes) would become a problem at much higher speeds like 100Gbps, both from the cell/second rate needed and the percentage of overhead (5 bytes header and 48 bytes payload) in each cell.   It didn’t scale up very well.

I used to like saying that ATM was like ATM machines except that you only were allowed to put money in :-)

Bob




> 
> 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.
>>>>> --
>>>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> Internet-history mailing list
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>>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Internet-history mailing list
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>>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>> 
> 
> 
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> 
> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
> 
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