[ih] Question re rate of growth of the Arpanet

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

On 22/04/2025 17:24, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> Speeds were 300 or 1200 baud, where I think 300 was the most common 
> initially.

300 baud mostly in US. In Europe we had the joy 1200/75 as well which 
meant if you originated the call you'd scarcely be able to send anything 
out.
I remember dreaming of a Telebit which was the Rolls Royce of modems at 
the time, when all we could afford locally were Hayes 300 or a lovely 
Racal-Milgo MPS1222 modem. A bit more money would purchase you a USR 
Courier. No money: some cheap no-name add-on hacked cards with dodgy 
Eproms...

>
> It was quite noteworthy that having email transfer take place entirely 
> in the background made even 300 baud useful for email traffic of those 
> days.  Users simply did not have to know or care what the connection 
> speed was, since the transfer happened 'away' from them.
>
> There was, however one problem this model had: Users were not aware 
> what the connection speed was, or when there were problems.
>
> One day, I got a call from a site's admin claiming that no mail was 
> getting through.  There would be a connection for about an hour and 
> then it would break off, repeating at the next wake-up cycle.
>
> Looking at the logs showed that the queue was stuck on trying to send 
> a 1MB file... sigh.
>
> The user environment that I shipped with MMDF contained some 
> alternatives, but the popular choice was code that emulated BBN 
> Tenex`s SNDMSG(*) and ISI's MSG(**).  This was in the days long before 
> there was official support for attachments, but people would include 
> files anyhow..  In SNDMSG, do a Ctl-B and you stuffed the file into 
> the message.  You did not have to know or care how big it was.  sigh.
>
> The dial-up link simply could not sustain a data call long enough. 

Not when you used UUCP!!! UUCP worked really well because when the line 
got dropped, it would restart the file transfer reasonably close to 
where it had been dropped. So it might take time, but the information 
eventually got to the other end. It was only an amount of time. Some of 
the UUCP hosts I was working with regularly had 600 or 700Mb in the 
queue, just dripping them along to the other end...
Kindest regards,

Olivier