[ih] NBS seminar on TCP/IP (was TCP RTT Estimator)

Barbara Denny b_a_denny at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 25 17:43:38 PDT 2025


 Anyone out there know what happened to a project I think was called SAPE ( Strategic Adaptive Planning Experiments(?)).  The RFP was in the early to mid 80s and could have had some interesting networking stuff to look at. I worked on the proposal more than once: SRI kept having to rewrite the proposal because things  kept getting contested by bidders?  if I remember right. I think the RFP changed enough over time that SRI dropped out in the bidding process so I never heard what happened.
barbara
    On Friday, April 25, 2025 at 04:03:12 PM PDT, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
On 4/25/25 3:17 PM, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:

> So far, based on what I’ve read, I don’t see any evidence that the concerns of the military, or users of lossy networks, were given insufficient consideration.

For a while (circa 1972/73), while at SDC, I worked on projects for the 
US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

We were working on packet switched networking issues, mostly for 
tactical communications.  And we were highly concerned with lossy 
networks - not only in terms of packet loss (or corruption) but also 
with the loss of physical assets, such as routers/gateways disappearing 
(usually accompanied by a loud "boom" from conventional explosives or 
intense X-rays from a nuclear blast - the "cold war" was running rather 
hot at the time.)

(We were also concerned with the physical capture of operating packet 
switching devices or the links between them.  I remember one project 
where we were concerned about loss of devices due to them being dropped 
into the mud by tired Marines slogging across a battlefield.)

This was well before the advent of TCP but the idea of highly dynamic 
routing of store-and-forward packets was well accepted as the right road 
forward.

Much of what I saw during those years was hidden behind cone-of-silence 
upon cone-of-silence - Our world was "we don't talk about it" or 
"everything is classified".  (I even got dinged for publishing a piece 
based only on open source/unclassified materials.)

So it would not be surprising that the academic and tech communities 
that were not inside our security walls did not hear us loudly 
expressing our concerns.

    --karl--
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