[ih] History from 1960s to 2025 (ARPANET to TCP)

[William Westfield]

> … pooled buffers require 3 or more orders of magnitude less buffer space than static allocation of buffers. …  The practice at the time was that VC nailed everything down and tried to make it deterministic, i.e., static allocation. This demanded either more memory (expensive then) or fewer virtual-circuits of less capacity.

Ah, yes, the good old days when Windows were supposed to be some indication of memory resources on the endpoints, instead of a mechanism for network-side congestion avoidance…  (although, I remember getting dramatic LAN throughput increases by implementing an “optimistic window strategy” in Tops20.)

Hmm.  Should the question be re-examined now that “memory is cheap”, or has the increase in required buffering kept up with the advances in memory?

BillW