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

[Scott Bradner]

ps - you can find the paper on Kleinrock's website

https://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/data/files/Kamoun/Data%20Communications%20through%20Large%20Packet-Switching%20Networks.pdf

> On Jan 28, 2025, at 6:55 AM, Scott Bradner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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