[ih] CORRECTION: Not IEN's, but Packet Radio Notes

[Greg Skinner]

The key players you mentioned are the ones I meant by ''initial group of TCP implementors from the late 1970s and early 1980s.’’  But what about other TCP implementors who had access to RFC 793, but didn’t have access to Packet Radio Notes?  How aware were they of the application of the robustness principle for retransmission timeouts, etc?  From what I’ve seen of TCP implementations in the Unix Tree, TCP implementations varied in terms of their interpretation of the retransmission timeouts.  For example, some hardcoded the alpha/beta parameters, and some used floating point calculations to determine the smoothed round-trip time.

--gregbo

> On Apr 16, 2025, at 5:07 PM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:
> 
> some key TCP players were part of the packet radio program (jim mathis, vint cerf, ....)
> v
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 7:49 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>> On Apr 16, 2025, at 9:33 AM, Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Friends,
>> > 
>> > I must apologize for a serious misstatement.  I now realize it was not
>> > IEN's which were strictly controlled, it was Packet Radio Notes.  I myself
>> > was on the public distribution list for IENs and I should have remembered
>> > this.
>> > 
>> > My sincere apologies,
>> > Alex McKenzie
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>> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> 
>> OK, I understand (although some of those Packet Radio Notes are also IENs).  But IMO some of the Packet Radio Notes (such as those that are in https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA157696.pdf) that are not IENs could have been valuable to TCP implementors who were not part of the initial group of TCP implementors from the late 1970s and early 1980s.  At the very least, they give an idea of how one might go about designing or tuning a TCP implementation, or testing for interoperability (including performance).
>> 
>> --gregbo
>> 
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> 
> 
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