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

[Brian E Carpenter]

Vint, and Noel,

I just glanced through Baran's 1964 paper, and it clearly recognized
statelessnesss (and a standard packet header) as important for network
survivability and adaptive routing. But although he mentions networks
of intercontinental size, I didn't spot any discussion of scalability
as such.

Interestingly, exactly the same applies to Dave Clark's 1988 "Design
Philosophy" paper.

In RFC 1958, we did note as principle 3.3 that "All designs must scale
readily to very many nodes per site and to many millions of sites".
I guess that by then (1996) this was too obvious to ignore, and it was
written when IPv4 address exhaustion was considered inevitable.

Maybe somebody who knows the early literature better than me can find
something. But it's almost as if the intrinsic scalability of stateless
packet switching was an unnoticed and accidental property.

Regards
    Brian

On 27-Jan-25 11:16, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
>> --
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>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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>>
> 
>