[ih] Question re rate of growth of the Arpanet

[Vint Cerf]

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On Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 14:09 the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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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> >
>
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> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
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