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.

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

[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.