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

[Vint Cerf]

I think we forced Mexican standoff and reassembly lockup pretty early on.

V

On Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 13:39 John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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
> >> --
> >> *****
> >> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
> >> mailing lists.
> >> --
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> >>
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>