Slashdot Mirror
Van Jacobson Denies Averting Internet Meltdown In 1980s
New submitter strangebush sends this quote from Wired about Van Jacobson's work on the TCP/IP protocol in the '80s, which helped stabilize early computer networks enough for them to eventually grow into the internet:
"'I was getting a bit per second between two network gateways that were literally in the same room,' Jacobson remembers. ... In 1985, Berkeley ran one of the IMPs, or interface message processors, that served as the main nodes on the ARPAnet, a network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that connected various research institutions and government organizations across the country. The network was designed so that any node could send data at any time, but for some reason, Berkeley's IMP was only sending data every twelve seconds. As it turns out, the IMP was waiting for other nodes to complete their transmissions before sending its data. The ARPAnet was meant to be a mesh network, where all nodes can operate on their own, but it was behaving like a token ring network, where each node can only send when they receive a master token. 'Our IMP would just keep accumulating data and accumulating data for about twelve seconds and then it would dump it,' says Jacobson. 'It was like the old token ring networks when you couldn't say anything until you got the token. But the ARPAnet wasn't built to do that. There was no global protocol like that.'"
You have no clue. The internet was a thriving ecosystem that expanded to general consumer use when the first html browser came on the scene.
Although my ideas usually involved souping up the engines of the station wagons carrying the tapes.
Not sure if you're being serious or not, but if you are, my first thought on reading your response was "I'll bet this is a 2.6million UID". And sure enough, it is. What's with all the recent 2.6million UIDs that seem to contain the same cookie-cutter response??
/. really needs to stop new UIDs (or AC) from having first post on their first comment. Perhaps New UIDs could only post replies to comments until they have a few positive mods.
The most fun thing about this lame post is ... "restructuring the BIOS " wow .....
I think Microsoft has found that this is cheaper than developing good products.
I can't tell if this is a talented troll or a clueless shill.
Microsoft? The same Microsoft that famously said '"The Internet? We are not interested in it."? You're high.
If anything, BSD should get the credit for saving the internet with their network stack, which everyone copied, and in Microsoft's case, badly.
So, through this Herculean event behind the scenes, the Internet and future as we now know it was saved.
Sounds like he became a systems administrator for a day.
What are you smoking?
I also did not avert an internet meltdown in the 1980s.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The internet was created 6000 years ago
rewriting history since 2109
I quickly glanced this as "Van Jacobson Dies Averting Internet Meltdown In 1980s". Now that would be interesting to read, unlike the crap submitted.
And why is every word capitalised? Was this submitted by some spambot of sorts?
and it was saved, ironically enough, by a big packet-flood and by keeping copies, two at a time, of every message type. the messages were saved for a series of consecutive days and then finally released when it was safe again.
you can read about this historic event. I believe its written down in a few places.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You "Young Internet" creationists are ignoring the evidence for Netvolution, which clearly shows that the Internet has been developing from simpler structures for nearly 4.2 Billion years (Note that I am using the US 'Billion', that is One Thousand Millions - British style Billions would be silly in this context. I'd use scientific notation, but that would obviously confuse any persons who still listen to the absurd claims that "No one can show an intermendiate transition networking schema", and such.).
Who is John Cabal?
Al Gore also did not avert an internet meltdown in the 1980's.
Here's Van Jacobson's Tech Talk at Google in 2006: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840 I didn't know much about Van Jacobson's work on networking before that, I found it quite informative, thought I'd post it here.
Ahh, Free Speech only means something when you agree with its usage, eh?
It used to be that reporters first learned basic grammar before creating an article. English is not my first language, but that article has been written so badly that it is hurting my eyes. Even the quotes don't make sense (if they are actually quotes, who can tell?)
Ahh, Free Speech only means something when you agree with its usage, eh?
Free Speech protections mean the government can't surpress what you say. Slashdot, being a private company, is not bound by the First Amendment in that way. And you'd be surprised how many forums/boards require you to prove you're not a shill or spambot before turning you loose on the site's population as a whole.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Free speech is a concept, the first amendment is what involves your government. In this case, it's the concept that is under threat.
Sorry to all those who tried to be clever.
Microsoft did not poo-poo the Internet. They just didn't "get it". That's par for their course.
BSD did not create the TCP/IP software stack. They just had more runs at it and by the tie Reno and Tahoe came along got it almost right.
Van Jacobson is a fairly smart guy. Pretty much if he says X then you can bet X is true.
IMPs were around long before the Internet, the NSFnet, and only applied to ARPAnet.
With all due respect to all of us who were working on networking during the 1980s... this "quote" leaves much to be desired to be truthful.
Still... Van is an honest guy (great speaker too btw if you ever get a chance to hear him... you should).
Now as to those who would criticize grammar... this isn't your threat. Move along now.
Slashdot mods: step off.
E
Maybe it's time to fork /.? Isn't the code that runs this place freely available? I don't think it can be set up on a standard hosting account so not just *anyone* could do it but surely the talent and resources are available to someone around here.
There are a couple of suggestions in this very thread that have merit but will never see the light of day here.
Fork it or stick a fork in it.
Yep, posted AC. Why? I could go on ... Suffice it to say, my UID isn't much higher than the parent.
And that *concept* is exactly what the GP post said it is. Free speech as a concept originated to protect your right to express your opinion about the government without prosecution, and it has NOTHING to do with allowing trolls to harass people on a PRIVATELY RUN service.
Go stand up in a movie theater some time and try to exercise your free speech, and see how fast you get kicked out of their privately owned building. And good luck trying to sue them for impinging your right to "free speech".
Van Jacobson Denies Averting Internet Meltdown In 1980s
And then we have the summary, which appears to recount a not particularly exciting anecdote about how a guy noticed things were going a bit slower than they should for an indeterminate amount of time and with indeterminate consequences. It doesn't even tell us what Van Jacobson did do when he wasn't averting a mythical meltdown.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The internet was created 6000 years ago
In September of 1993?
and it was saved, ironically enough, by a big packet-flood and by keeping copies, two at a time, of every message type. the messages were saved for a series of consecutive days and then finally released when it was safe again.
"Every repost is a repost of a repost!"
Well, at least that explains 4chan.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
And that *concept* is exactly what the GP post said it is. Free speech as a concept originated to protect your right to express your opinion about the government without prosecution, and it has NOTHING to do with allowing trolls to harass people on a PRIVATELY RUN service.
Go stand up in a movie theater some time and try to exercise your free speech, and see how fast you get kicked out of their privately owned building. And good luck trying to sue them for impinging your right to "free speech".
The fact that free speech is not legally protected via private services or on private property does not mean that the concept cannot exist. The US Constitution is the basic legal framework for the United States of America - it is not an indisputable and infallible guide to moral philosophy. Now you may be able to give good reasons why private property rights should outweigh free speech rights, but that does not mean that the conflict does not exist.
So, basically, you directly pushed a man over the edge to commit suicide all because you were too dumb not to install rogue antivirus?
You, sir, are so full of shit that your eyes must be brown.
I think Microsoft has found that this is cheaper than developing good products.
How did they figure that out? It's not like they could have any first hand data on the cost of developing good products.
May we live long and die out
I take offense to your brown eyed slur.
I'm assuming you are of blue-eyed Germanic roots.
Almost a Godwin.
It's called UEFI / tianocode and it's on sourceforge.
Even though I worked on this project, I wish we would go to open-firmware based on FORTH.
The embedded drivers would then be machine agnostic.
It also proves that the Cylons were right. "All of this has been posted before, and will be posted again."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
And we used RFC 1149, and we liked it.
Faster then dialup when the wind was favorable.
And we used RFC 1149, and we liked it. Faster then dialup when the wind was favorable.
The big problem with RFC 1149 transports is cleaning up all the bird shit. Back in the day when I was using leg-length broadband, my ISP started charging by the turd, which quickly made this mechanism uneconomical.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
but it does mean the practice cannot exist.
private property rights DO outweigh free speech rights.
If you don't believe me, watch as I mod you down.
Adding a 60-second delay when posting as A/c or from new or lower-than-new-karma accounts would pretty much cut them out of the race for "frost p1st" or "first reply in a hot sub-thread" without preventing the words from showing up in a VERY reasonable time frame.
Sure, it won't stop trolls from sometimes getting 1st post on a story that doesn't attract a lot of first-minute posts, but it will make the odds of "success" go way down and be a dis-incentive for trolls to try for that "goal."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not having Free Speech is called Censorship. When people say that they want Free Speech, what they say is that they do not want Censorship.
Censorship is not limited to Governments.
Even then, if Free Speech is a good idea for the government to put it into law, it is probably a good idea to do the same a public forum.
The fact that others do it does not mean it is a good idea. The majority of people had VHS and not Betamax. The majority of people do not have free speech (China). And no, I am not surprised.
So please no censorship. Perhaps what would be possible is that there is a way that you yourself can select to have new posters modded -1. That way you can decide for yourself if you want to filter new posters out or if you want to welcome new members to the community.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As one of the people who was active in TCP design back then (see my RFCs), this article sounds weird.
First, the ARPAnet was not "the Internet". The ARPAnet was a closed backbone network, with flow control and guaranteed delivery of packets. When hosts talked directly to ARPAnet nodes (IMPs), the backbone provided reliable transport. When Ethernet to ARPAnet gateways were created, the possibility of packet loss in gateways appeared, and congestion packet loss became a problem.
The TCP/IP implementation from Berkeley in BSD wasn't the first; it was about the fourth. We at Ford Aerospace used 3COM's UNET, which was a very early TCP/IP. I had to overhaul it, adding ICMP. UDP, congestion control (that's why I have those RFCs on network congestion), and checking for invalid packets. After that it could talk reliably over fast or slow links and to other valid implementations. We had a real "bit bucket"; all packets that didn't meet the spec were logged, and I used to check that every day and send out notes to other TCP implementers. Mark Crispin at Stanford was responsible for the PDP-10/DEC-20 implementation, and we talked a lot as we made two very different implementations play well together. I was impressed with Mark; unlike many developers today, he never blamed someone else when his end was at fault. I once sent a packet to Stanford which caused the implementation there to crash the mainframe, and I apologized to him. He wrote back that it was his fault if his mainframe crashed, not mine.
The Berkeley people had originally assumed that TCP/IP would use Ethernet as a backbone and didn't worry too much about interoperability with other TCP implementations. Berkeley UNIX up to 4.3BSD could barely operate over a slow or congested link, and interoperated badly with other TCP implementations. The initial release of 4.3BSD would only talk to DEC-20 implementations for 4 hours out of every 8, because the sequence number arithmetic in BSD had been botched. (I had to fix that, which was a painful 3 days.)
Van Jacobson was responsible for bringing the BSD TCP up to an acceptable level of behavior under heavy traffic. That was a few years later, around 1988.
3COM discontinued UNET in the early 1980s, since UC Berkeley, funded by the Government, was giving away a comparable product. Ford Aerospace got out of networking because they only did DoD work, and networking was going commercial. I left Ford Aerospace, and networking, in 1986 because a friend of mine had started up a little company to do CAD software, and it was becoming successful.
John Nagle