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

[Steve Crocker]

And they were office mates.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 8:50 AM Vint Cerf via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> roberts would also have been aware of Len Kleinrock's queueing theory
> analysis of message switching which, mathematically, was not very different
> from packet switching. They were both at MIT if memory serves and got their
> Ph.D's the same year, 1963.
>
> v
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 7:50 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Brian,
> > I agree with you. In the Baran reports, he describes something that
> sounds
> > like a datagram. However, he never explores it much other than to define
> > hot-potato routing. His focus is very centered on survivability and
> > resilience, which makes sense it was research for the DoD. There is also
> > the consideration that so far as I have been able to determine, all of
> the
> > projects Baran was involved in afterwards were virtual-circuit, as were
> > Roberts.
> >
> > OTOH, NPL didn’t do military research, so I guessed that their impetus
> for
> > exploring packet switching had to be different and indeed it was. We have
> > found a memo Davies wrote (and a similar one by Derek Barber) that Davies
> > had attended the IFIP Congress in the US in 1965 and heard lots of papers
> > on timesharing and the time slicing scheduling that timesharing used. The
> > advantage being that while batch systems did FCFS and short jobs got
> stuck
> > behind long ones, timesharut ing interleaved jobs and while short jobs
> were
> > still delayed but their *completion* times were shorter. Davies told
> Derek
> > that that was what they should do with communications and they did. Their
> > impetus for packet switching was very different. (But there were two
> > problems. ;-) 1) Donald got promoted and less time for research, ;-) and
> 2)
> > the GPO got involved and the government directed NPL to concentrate on
> > “practical” projects, so they had to move to virtual-circuits.
> >
> > Scantlebury told Roberts about packet switching at the Gatlinburg
> > conference and convinced him to use it. When Roberts returned to DC, he
> > found he had Baran’s reports in a stack of documents but hadn’t read it
> > yet. Based on the NPL experience Roger also convinced Roberts not to use
> > 2.4Kbps lines but 50Kbps, which was a large part of the ARPANET success.
> > (Slower speed would have worked but been so slow people would have said
> it
> > wasn’t practical, etc.)
> >
> > There is much more to be said about all of this. But that seems to be the
> > core of it. I find it very interesting how minor events have major
> effects.
> >
> > Take care,
> > John Day
> >
> > > On Jan 27, 2025, at 20:47, 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
> > >>> --
> > >>> Internet-history mailing list
> > >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > >>>
> > > --
> > > Internet-history mailing list
> > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
> >
>
> --
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> Vint Cerf
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>
>
> until further notice
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