[ih] AOL in perspective

[Vint Cerf]

something on the order of 80-85% of the bits flowing on the Internet today
are video  streaming, video conferencing.

v


On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 9:34 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> This "network status" usage was, IMHO, the beginning of a fundamental
> shift in how networks were used, and influenced how they were
> subsequently designed.
>
> In the early ARPANET era (1970s), network traffic was dominated by
> Telnet, FTP, and a bit later email.  Human users connected to their
> computers using Telnet and worked for the duration of a "session", which
> lasted for minutes or perhaps hours.  During that session, they might
> also do file transfers between two computers.  The ARPANET was pretty
> slow, so file transfers could easily take minutes or more.  Sessions
> between two ARPANET hosts were relatively long and infrequently opened
> or closed.
>
> So network traffic was largely short packets containing typing and
> responses, as well as larger packets associated with file transfers,
> mostly part of sessions lasting minutes or more.
>
> Email added to this traffic with the addition of non-human users, i.e.,
> mail servers, who transported mail around the net, including short
> messages as well as long documents.  But email servers were pretty
> patient compared to humans, and certainly didn't expect to see the
> characters they sent echoed immediately.
>
> The internal mechanisms of the ARPANET (i.e., the mechanisms inside the
> IMP code) were designed to carry that mix of traffic - interactive and
> bulk transfers, carried out over "sessions".   In particular, there were
> IMP mechanisms to set up end-to-end connections between the source and
> destination IMPs (not the attached hosts).  Those mechanisms created the
> reliable "virtual circuit" behavior, on top of the underlying unreliable
> packet switching machinery.  The IMPs delivered a "virtual circuit"
> reliable byte-stream service to their hosts - much like TCP does now
> between two devices on the Internet.   For anyone curious, the 1970s
> ARPANET IMP code has been resurrected and is available online.
>
> Marc Seriff's SURVEY program broke the ARPANET traffic pattern. Sessions
> in SURVEY were extremely short, unlike sessions in human-based traffic.
> I wasn't at BBN at the time (actually I was in Lick's group at MIT, same
> as Marc), but I suspect part of the backlash Marc received about SURVEY
> was because it was seriously "thrashing" the ARPANET with so many short
> connections continuously happening.  The ARPANET wasn't designed for
> that kind of continuous very short session traffic load.
>
> Several years later, circa 1980, we had a similar experience with the
> ARPANET and the emerging Internet which was being built around it.  Lots
> of now inexpensive minicomputer gear had appeared on the Internet,
> connected by LANs to the ARPANET.  I was the "Internet guy" at BBN, and
> one day a NOC operator stuck his head in my office and said something
> like "What's your Internet doing!!?"  It was probably a bit more
> colorful than that.  The ARPANET was thrashing again, and the NOC had
> traced the problem to traffic to/from gateways.   That made it my problem.
>
> Debug, XNET, SNMP, ... IIRC, it turned out that Berkeley had just
> released a new version of BSD, and announced it to the user community.
> There were a lot of BSD systems out there.   The new BSD included a new
> feature, that probed all the gateways out on the ARPANET and generated a
> status report of "State of the Internet". Updated automatically of course.
>
> The server that performed all that probing was part of the new OS
> release.  And... it was "enabled" by default.   So as the new release
> propagated out into all those systems, they all started probing every
> gateway continuously.   Like Marc's SURVEY program, this caused the
> ARPANET to internally hemorrhage.   A quick call to ARPA, and a quick
> order to Berkeley, and the cyberattack stopped. Took a while IIRC.
>
> Looking back over the history, I see this as the progression of
> networking from the "human user" model of Telnet and FTP towards the
> model Licklider had envisioned in his "intergalactic network". Instead
> of humans interacting with remote computers, we were beginning the
> transition to computers interacting with each other over the Internet,
> in support of whatever humans wanted done.   That was Lick's vision -
> everyone would have their own computer, all able to communicate with
> each other, and active all the time.  Pretty much seems like what we
> have today.
>
> I don't have the data, but I suspect the mix today of interactive/bulk
> traffic is quite different from what it was 50 years ago.  There's
> probably not a lot of Telnet-style activity any more.  But perhaps the
> growing population of "IOT" microcomputers will replace it.
>
> Jack Haverty
>
> On 9/4/25 17:27, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
> > There were complaints when it disappeared, but it also gotten too
> popular.
> >
> >> On Sep 4, 2025, at 20:25, Vint Cerf<vint at google.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I had forgotten about that!
> >>
> >> Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
> >> Vint Cerf
> >> Google, LLC
> >> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
> >> Reston, VA 20190
> >> +1 (571) 213 1346 <(571)%20213-1346>
> >>
> >>
> >> until further notice
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Thu, Sep 4, 2025, 19:57 John Day via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>>
> wrote:
> >>> In the very early days, the NMC at UCLA did something similar. If you
> connected to a particular well-known socket, it would print a ASCII map of
> the current ARPANET and which hosts were up or down. It was discontinued
> when it would no longer fit on one page.
> >>>
> >>> Take care,
> >>> John
> >>>
> >>>> On Sep 4, 2025, at 10:42, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Speaking of.  Marc Seriff was one of the co-founders of AOL.  He had
> >>>> previously been part of the MIT Dynamic Modeling group.  He (along
> with
> >>>> Bob Metcalfe and others) had a hand in making the ARPANET "SURVEY"
> >>>> program, which would probe network hosts to see if they were up.  Marc
> >>>> told me this:
> >>>>
> >>>>   "I tell the story of SURVEY all the time.  For a few days, the whole
> >>>>   ARPANET was pissed at me since, in those days, all the systems
> logged
> >>>>   every connection attempt - typically to a model 33 teletype machine
> >>>>   sitting in front of the PDP/10 or whatever.  A decent system since
> the
> >>>>   few computers on the network at the time weren't likely to get more
> >>>>   than a few connections a day.  All of sudden, I'm poking them once a
> >>>>   minute or so.  System managers would come in in the morning to find
> >>>>   paper piled behind the teletype and, frequently, ink ribbons that
> had
> >>>>   been torn to shreds!"
> >>>>
> >>>> They program has been recovered and seems to be working, lacking only
> an
> >>>> ARPANET to survey.  Watch your teletypes!
> >>>>
> >>>> Survey results were stored on the Datacomputer (also located in MIT's
> >>>> Tech Sq building.)
> >>>> --
> >>>> Internet-history mailing list
> >>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> >>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>>> -
> >>>> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
> >>> --
> >>> Internet-history mailing list
> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>> -
> >>> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


-- 
Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
Vint Cerf
Google, LLC
1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
+1 (571) 213 1346


until further notice