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.'"

Comments

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[sa666_666]

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??

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Anonymous Coward]

/. 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.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Nerdfest]

I think Microsoft has found that this is cheaper than developing good products.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I would like to announce

[AuMatar]

I also did not avert an internet meltdown in the 1980s.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[JustOK]

The internet was created 6000 years ago

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Artifakt]

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.).

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk

[file_reaper]

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.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Richard_at_work]

Ahh, Free Speech only means something when you agree with its usage, eh?

Grammar in artlcle

[owlstead]

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?)

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[FSWKU]

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.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[Kidbro]

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.

Re:Interesting note about the history of internet

[jimmydevice]

And we used RFC 1149, and we liked it.
Faster then dialup when the wind was favorable.

No, not "the Internet", just a broken BSD TCP

[Animats]

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