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

[Vint Cerf]

Confirming Bob Kahn and Dave Walden came to UCLA in early 1970 to force
various lockups. I helped to program artificial loads and to capture the
data showing various lockups.

V

On Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 11:19 Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 7:48 AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >     > From: Craig Partridge
> >
> >     > We figured out congestion collapse well enough for the time
> >
> > It should be remembered that the ARPANET people (hi!) had perhaps solved
> > this
> > problem a long time before. I'm trying to remember how explicitly they
> saw
> > this as a separate problem from the issue of running out of buffer space
> > for
> > message re-assembly at the destination IMP, but I seem to recall that
> RFNMs
> > were seen as a needed throttle to prevent the network as a whole from
> being
> > overrun (i.e. what we now think of as 'congestion', although IIRC that
> term
> > wasn't used then), as well as flow control to the source host (as we
> would
> > now call it).
> >
> > I don't recall exactly where I saw that, but I'd try the BBN proposal to
> > DARPA's RFP, and the first JFIPS paper ("The interface message processor
> > for
> > the ARPA computer network").
> >
>
> I don't recall the details either, though I remember stories of Bob Kahn
> going to LA to beat up on the first few ARPANET nodes
> because he anticipated various issues, I think including congestion.  And
> he found them and fixes were made.
>
> But remember ARPANET was homogeneous -- same speed for each link and a
> single control mechanism.  I think John Nagle was
> the first to point out ("On packet switches with infinite storage") that
> connecting very different networks had its own challenges.
> And to my point, not something that a person working with X.25 would have
> understood terribly well (yes X.75 gateways existed but
> they typically throttled the window size to 2 packets, which hid a lot of
> issues).
>
> 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
>