[ih] Correct name for early TCP/IP working group?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jack Haverty jack at 3kitty.org

    > At the time, the "ARPANET crowd" was skeptical that the "datagram"
    > nature of TCP could be made to work. Traditional networks, including
    > the ARPANET, had elaborate internal mechanisms to provide a "virtual
    > circuit" service to its users.

I was thinkking about this, and wondering if internetworking was a more
fundamental advance than the ARPANET (relegating the latter to a
'ground-breaking experiment'), and I had another thought.


Internetworking (following in the track of CYCLADES) made much of the
fate-sharing aspect - that the data needed to ensure reliable transmission
was co-located was the application. One good reason for that (that we knew at
the time) was that it made the network itself simpler.

But there's another side to that, one that was even more important, and which
I'm not sure was obvious to us at the time (1977-79), which is that because
it means the intermediate packet switches in the overall internet carry no
state about the connections travelling through them, there's no scaling
limit. This, to me, has been the single biggest reason why the Internet has
been able to grow to the stupendous size it has.

I don't think we could have been thinking 'this aspect of lack of state in
the internet packet switches neans it will scale indefinitely', because I
don't think we had any idea, at that point, about how to do path selection in
a global-scale internet - so global-scale internets could not have been in
our thinking.

Did that infinite scalability turn out to be just a happy accident, a
side-effect of good fundamental design (but one whose true complete value
wasn't obvious to us at the time), one that moved state out of the internet
packet switches?

	Noel