[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 64, Issue 30

[John Day]

It is a great quip!

There are several things that people did early on that were pushing the hardware to the limits and sometimes beyond and we had to wait for the hardware to catch up.  ;-)

I have had young profs ask if I wasn’t blown away by some event in the 90s and having to say, that I was just glad to see us getting back to where we were in the 70s.  ;-) It doesn’t make them happy.

> On Mar 27, 2025, at 05:52, Vint Cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> love the quip!!!!
> 
> v
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 12:24 AM John Shoch via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>>>>> On Mar 26, 2025, at 16:57, Vint Cerf via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>>> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>>>> I think we had a fair number of nodes - at least a half dozen,
>> possibly
>>>>> more? Don would know, if you don't Barbara.
>>>>> Yes to multiple mountain sites. Eichler - sounds like somebody's
>> house! I
>>>>> used to live in an Eichler in Palo Alto but never had a packet radio
>>>>> installed. Xerox PARC had one (fixed location) though.
>> 
>> Vint is understating his generosity and support:
>> 
>> --Vint (at Arpa) and Don Nielson and team (at SRI) supported us with TWO
>> Packet Radio Units in Palo Alto.
>> --They were stationary installations, at the main PARC building and another
>> about a mile away.
>> --The PRUs had an 1822 interface, and we had built an 1822 interface for
>> the Alto (to connect to an Imp).
>> --So we built 2 more interfaces, and had an Alto at each PRU -- which ran
>> our standard internet gateway, and could also connect to an Ethernet, and
>> then on to the rest of our internet.
>> --We did not modify the PRU code.  A network driver was written to
>> encapsulate internet packets for transmission through the PRNet, so it
>> became a transit network between two Ethernets (and packets coming off the
>> PRNet could be routed on through other gateways to machines elsewhere in
>> the country).
>> --The PRNet and an Ethernet differed in throughput by maybe 2 decimal
>> orders of magnitude -- so it taught us all a lot about flow and congestion
>> control, retransmission algorithms, lossy sub-neworks, delayed duplicates,
>> intra-network fragmentation, and more..
>> --It was a great experiment.
>> 
>> Could not have done it without Vint, Don, et al.
>> (I helped organize the project, but real kudos go to Larry Stewart, who
>> made it all happen!)
>> 
>> John
>> 
>> PS:  I sometimes give a talk that includes a picture of a rack of equipment
>> holding the PRU and the Alto gateway -- and then quip, "If you squint real
>> hard, and apply pressure from 20-30 years of Moore's law, out pops a WiFi
>> access point!"
>> --
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>> 
> 
> 
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