[ih] early competition and networking

[John Day]

To some degree, ‘back in the day’ was pretty recently. ;-) Long after the fundamental problem was solved. As I just noted to Dave, the original problem was the existence and expectation of many heterogenous networks of different technologies, some multi-access, some switched or relayed, some circuit-switched, virtual circuit switched, datagram, etc. 

The problem was how to interconnect them.  A solution was arrived at. From what I can tell, somewhere before 1976 or so.

The question is precisely what was it? Or perhaps more to the point, what did people think it was?

Take care,
John

> On Apr 14, 2024, at 23:11, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>> My understanding is that the design model then and now is a homogeneous 
>> service, on top a variety of heterogeneous services. Hiding the 
>> differences by providing a common service on top of them.  That the 
>> common service was originally specified as one layer and evolved into 
>> two does not change the meta-design approach.
> 
> Back in the day we moved a fair amount of mail via UUCP, a store and
> forward dialup scheme quite different from SMTP. The format of the
> mail messages was the same, and once we had the uucp mapping project
> to figure out the routing, the addresses looked pretty much the same,
> too, e.g. my address was johnl at ima.uucp. The sendmail mail program,
> which is still widely used today, has a complex internal language to
> describe how to route various addresses while keeping everything above
> the same.
> 
> The ability to use the same higher level software and just futz with the
> lower levels was and is quite powerful.
> 
> R's,
> John
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