[ih] Question re rate of growth of the Arpanet

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

steve, can you elucidate any history with respect to how/why the speed of
50 kb/s was chosen for the ARPANET lines?  were there great speeds
available then?

yours truly kinda (perhaps mistakenly) recalls these 50 kb/s "wideband
circuits of the day" were primarily used for linking tv broadcast affiliate
stations to/with their motherships (cbs, nbc, abc, ...)?

geoff

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 7:26 AM Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Thanks for the pointer to RFC 597.
>
> As I looked at it, an aspect I hadn't considered before came to mind.
>
> Installation of an IMP required provisioning 50 kb/s lines to two or three
> other points.  In the early days, we installed roughly a new IMP once a
> month.  (The lead time for ordering 50 kb/s lines from AT&T was NINE
> months.)
>
> Once an IMP was installed, new hosts could be added to the IMP as quickly
> as the site could build or obtain the host-IMP interface and write or
> obtain the software for their operating system.
>
> If anyone has the dates for each of the hosts, it would be interesting to
> compare the growth of IMPs vs growth of hosts.
>
> Steve
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Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True