bemused
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8 months ago
in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » TCP/IP “More or Less by Fiat?” on The Technology Liberation Front
As someone who was a young network engineer in the days when TCP/IP was born, I can tell you that central planning had both more and less impact than you admit. TCP/IP ran on the ARPANET which was paid for by DOD. In that period long haul circuits were hugely expensive, as was high speed connection equipemt. Private/commercial networking, barred from using the arpanet, had to cost justify network choices, and the X.25 and proprietary protocols were optimized to work well on lower speed connections. The ARPANET designers were academics studying network design and performance, but the underlying traffic on the ARPANET was mostly email and ftp file transfer between universities.
When the ARPANET was opened to commercial traffic around 1990, the underlying hardware environment had changed. Computers were faster, the personal computer had become a platform able to run more resource intensive and capable operating systems, and many private companies had installed Ethernet infrastrucure for their private networks. The optimizations made by the telcos in X.25 were now the wrong ones to support high speed peer networking. The proprietary protocols were closed and also not designed to support networks without central administration.
Thus it came to pass that the design decisions made by the researchers and paid for by the DOD came to the fore. Without the funding that enabled the ARPANET protocols to be designed, developed, tested and improved, they wouldn't have been ready when the hardware caught up to them.
An interesting contrast: the ISO protocols developed as an alternative to the ARPANET protocols. Arguably, they had some aspects that were theoretically superior to the ARPANET protocols, and they were an international standard adopted by the telecom community. But because they didn't have battle tested implementations, they didn't catch on, and only some of the upper layer protocols still are used.
When the ARPANET was opened to commercial traffic around 1990, the underlying hardware environment had changed. Computers were faster, the personal computer had become a platform able to run more resource intensive and capable operating systems, and many private companies had installed Ethernet infrastrucure for their private networks. The optimizations made by the telcos in X.25 were now the wrong ones to support high speed peer networking. The proprietary protocols were closed and also not designed to support networks without central administration.
Thus it came to pass that the design decisions made by the researchers and paid for by the DOD came to the fore. Without the funding that enabled the ARPANET protocols to be designed, developed, tested and improved, they wouldn't have been ready when the hardware caught up to them.
An interesting contrast: the ISO protocols developed as an alternative to the ARPANET protocols. Arguably, they had some aspects that were theoretically superior to the ARPANET protocols, and they were an international standard adopted by the telecom community. But because they didn't have battle tested implementations, they didn't catch on, and only some of the upper layer protocols still are used.