In the beginning days of the Arpanet, circa early 1970s, ARPA made a policy
decision about use of the Arpanet. First, Arpa Program Managers, located on
the East Coast of the US, were assigned computer accounts on USC-ISIA, located
on the West Coast in LA. Thus to do their work, exchanging email, editting
documents, and such, they had to *use* the Arpanet to connect their terminals
in Washington to the PDP-10 in California - 3000 miles away.
Second, ARPA began requiring all of their contractors (researchers at Universities etc.)
to interact with Arpa using email and FTP. If your site was "on the Arpanet",
you had to use the Arpanet. If you wanted your proposal for next year's research to be
funded, you had to submit your proposal using the net.
This policy caused a profound attention, by everyone involved, to making the
Arpanet work and be useful as a collaboration tool.
JCR Licklider (aka Lick) was my advisor at MIT, and then my boss when I joined the
Research Staff. Lick had been at ARPA for a while, promoting his vision of a
"Galactic Network" that resulted in the Arpanet as a first step. At MIT, Lick
still had need for lots of interactions with others. My assignment was to build and
operate the email system for Lick's group at MIT on our own PDP-10. Lick had a terminal
in his office and was online a lot. If email didn't work, I heard about it. If the
Arpanet didn't work, BBN heard about it.
This pressure was part of Arpa policy. Sometimes it's referred to as "eating your own dog
food" -- i.e., making sure your "dog" will get the same kind of nutrition you enjoy.
IMHO, that pressure policy was important, perhaps crucial, to the success of the Arpanet.
In the 70s, meetings still occurred, but a lot of progress was made through the use of
the Arpanet. You can only do so much with email and file interactions. Today, the
possibilities for far richer interactions are much more prevalent. But IMHO they are
held back, possibly because no one is feeling the pressure to "make it work".
Gigabit throughputs are common, but why does my video and audio still break up...?
It's important to have face-to-face meetings, but perhaps if the IETF scheduled
a future meeting to be online only, whatever needs to happen to make it work
would happen? Perhaps...
Even a "game" might drive progress. At Interop '92, we resurrected the old
"MazeWars" game using computers scattered across the show exhibit halls. The engineers
in the control room above the floor felt the pressure to make sure the Game continued to run. At
the time, the Internet itself was too slow for enjoyable gameplay at any distance. Will the
Internet 30 years later work?
Or perhaps the IETF, or ISOC, or someone could take on a highly visible demo
involving non-techie end users. An online meeting of the UN General Assembly?
Or some government bodies - US Congress, British Parliament, etc.
Such an event would surface the issues, both technical and policy, to the engineers,
corporations, policy-makers, and others who might have the ability and interest to
"make it work".
Jack
On 11/14/23 10:10, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
Hi Jack,
On Nov 14, 2023, at 13:02, Jack Haverty via
Nnagain<[email protected]> wrote:
If video conferencing worked well enough, they would not have to all get
together in one place and would instead hold IETF meetings online ...?
[SM] Turns out that humans are social creatures, and some things work
better face-to-face and in the hallway (and if that is only building trust and
sympathy) than over any remote technology.
Did anyone measure latency? Does anyone measure throughput of "useful"
traffic - e.g., excluding video/audio data that didn't arrive in time to be actually used
on the screen or speaker?
[SM] Utility is in the eye of the beholder, no?
Jack Haverty
On 11/14/23 09:25, Vint Cerf via Nnagain wrote:
if they had not been all together they would have been consuming tons of video
capacity doing video conference calls....
:-))
v
On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 10:46 AM Livingood, Jason via
Nnagain<[email protected]> wrote:
On the subject of how much bandwidth does one household need, here's a fun stat
for you.
At the IETF’s 118th meeting last week (Nov 4 – 10, 2023), there were over
1,000 engineers in attendance. At peak there were 870 devices connected to the
WiFi network. Peak bandwidth usage:
• Downstream peak ~750 Mbps
• Upstream ~250 Mbps
From my pre-meeting Twitter poll
(https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1720060429311901873):
<image001.png>
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