[ih] booting linux on a 4004

[Greg Skinner]

On Oct 5, 2024, at 5:42 PM, Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:
> 
> As someone who was in touch with Raj/KK and Van/Mike during the development of congestion control.  They were unaware of each other's work until spring of 1988, when they realized they were doing very similar stuff.  I think, someone (Dave Clark) in the End2End Research Group became aware of Raj & KK's work and invited them to come present to an E2E meeting in early 1988 and E2E (more than IETF) was where Van was working out the kinks in his congestion control work with Mike.
> 
> Craig
> 

I looked into this a bit, and discovered that Raj/KK and Van/Mike were all at the 6th IETF, which took place in April 1987. [1] (It was a joint meeting of the IETF and ANSI X3S3.3 Network and Transport Layer standards groups.)  Both teams presented their work at the meeting.

> On Sat, Oct 5, 2024 at 5:34 PM John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>> The work of Jain’s DEC team existed at the same time and I believe Jacobson’s original paper references it.
>> 
>> As I said, at least it does congestion avoidance without causing congestion (unless under extreme conditions).
>> 
>> I suspect that the main reason Jacobson didn’t adopt it was that they were trying to maximize the data rate by running as close to congestion collapse as they could. While Jain’s work attempted to balance the trade-off between throughput and response time.  But that is just policy they still could have used ECN to keep from being predatory and used ECN while waiting until the queue is full to mark the packets. That is what TCP use of ECN does now. Of course, I think that is bad choice because it generates lots of retransmissions.
>> 

Some of the reasons why Van/Mike took the approach they did were discussed in a email message Van sent to the tcp-ip list.  It included some discussions that had taken place on the ietf and end2end-interest lists. [2] IMO, it’s unfortunate that the existing archives of those lists, because we would be able to read the points of view expressed by the list participants.

>> When I asked Jain why his wasn’t adopted, he said he isn’t an implementor, but an experimenter.
>> 
>> But it is not uncommon to be so focused on the immediate problem to fail to notice the system implications.

John, what could they have done that would have met your criteria and yielded a deployable solution to the congestion problems existing at that time in the timeframe that it was needed?  IMO, their paper should be assessed in that context.

--gregbo

[1] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/06.pdf
[2] https://ee.lbl.gov/tcp.html