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

[John Day]

Was the Christmas Eve lock up the first one? Or was that just an accident?



> On Feb 13, 2023, at 13:35, Vint Cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
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