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

[Scott Bradner]

fwiw - the 1976  Kleinrock & Kamoun paper "Hierarchical Routing for Large Networks, Performance evaluation and optimization" is all about scaling of packet switched networks

Scott



> On Jan 27, 2025, at 8:47 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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>>> 
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