[ih] AOL in perspective

Sun Sep 7 15:22:30 PDT 2025

BBN Planet (the ISP BBN created) did a big build out for AOL in the 1990s.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB854067026226959000?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAgAzzNoP6-xfZWwGGyv3L4itmrH87Vfevd9eT_aDOa3ZAS5Y0JpCf_zXKFWhnQ%3D&gaa_ts=68be08ef&gaa_sig=I3h0R0z7sd7L7GOwTyw4hGk1p2Dq4qKojWQJyqrm1ABTuPQpQGGz4X9H5ZnMwloHFLoqrlHRMPA5nJ0NXd-oCg%3D%3D

Craig

On Sat, Sep 6, 2025 at 10:09 AM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Jack,
>
> Do I recall correctly that BBN (or maybe Telenet) provided the dial-up
> network for AOL, modeled on the ARPANET TACs?
>
> Miles
>
> Jack Haverty via Internet-history 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> 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
> >>>>
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>
> Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
> Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
> In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
> nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown
>
> --
> 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
>

-- 
*****
Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
mailing lists.