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

[Vint Cerf]

statelessness was an important design choice and was made consciously so
that paths were not critical to successful transport. For example we did
not want to have to reassemble along a particular path. Even though we
deprecated fragmentation, at the time we thought it was important, we did
not want gateway (router) state to be necessary to accomplish reassembly
regardless of path. I don't know that we recognized the scalability aspect
but we definitely cared a lot about statelessness of the gateways.

v

On Sun, Jan 26, 2025 at 4:25 PM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>     > 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
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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