[ih] early competition and networking

[Jack Haverty]

I agree with JohnL.  There are multiple solutions, many of which have 
been known for millennia, that humans have used to move "stuff" from 
place to place.   There's even a whole field of academic study and 
business practice dedicated to the problem - "Operations Research" (aka 
OR).  OR is used to make decisions about questions like where to put 
manufacturing plants, warehouses, distributors, and other elements of 
the "supply chain" to optimize the flow of goods.

In the electronic world of networking, we might call such warehouses 
"buffers", "gateways", or "servers" in a "cloud", and they use various 
techniques such as encapsulation, or repackaging as needed for the next 
stage of a journey.

I only learned a tiny bit about OR by taking an undergraduate course 
long ago.  The science has evolved quite a lot since then - e.g., 
https://catalog.mit.edu/interdisciplinary/graduate-programs/operations-research/

OR is used to make analytical decisions for goals such as optimizing 
transportation "networks".   AFAIK, such analysis was never applied to 
our computer networks back in the 70s/80s or even now.   Maybe that was 
a mistake.

There's not a single solution.  There's many possible solutions. It's an 
engineering task (likely using OR) to design an appropriate solution for 
each situation.

Jack Haverty


On 4/15/24 09:27, John R. Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, John Day wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> i don''t think there was or is a single answer.
>
> One answer was layering, so you can have consistent behavior at upper 
> levels while having different lower levels.  We take this for granted 
> now, e.g., IP packets in my office are flowing over twisted pair, 
> wifi, 5G, and fiber, but I think it's only obvious in retrospect.
>
> The other was gateways, translate traffic from one form to another.  
> Some of the translations are conceptually simple, like turning phone 
> numbers from North American en-bloc signalling to CCITT compelled 
> signalling. Some is very baroque like the mail gateways Dave worked on.
>
> There may be others but at the moment I can't think of any.
>
> R's,
> 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
>>> -- 
>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>>
>
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
> Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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