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Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP

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Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> writes:
> Chessin came to visit us in the Systems Technology Group at Apple ATG
> and we had a nice discussion.
>
> I had wondered whatever happened to XTP.

TCP had minimum 7 packet exchange and XTP defined a reliable transaction
with minimum of 3 packet exchange. Issue was that TCP/IP was part of
kernel distribution requiring physical media (and typically some
expertise for complete system change/upgrade; browsers and webservers
were self contained load&go).

XTP also defined things like trailer protocol where interface hardware
could do CRC as packet flowing through and do the append/check
... helping minimize packet fiddling (as well as other pieces of
protocol offloading, Chessin also liked to draw analogies with SGI
graphic card process pipelining). Problem was that there were lots of
push back (part of claim at the time HTTPS prevailing over IPSEC) for
any kernel change prereq.

topic drift ... 1988, HA/6000 was approved, initially for NYTimes to
migrate their newspaper system off DEC VAXCluster to RS/6000. I rename
it HA/CMP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing
when I start doing technical/scientific cluster scale-up with national
labs (LANL, LLNL, NCAR, etc, also porting LLNL LINCS and NCAR
filesystems to HA/CMP) and commercial cluster scale-up with RDBMS
vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix) that had VAXCluster support
in same source base with unix (also do DLM supporting VAXCluster
semantics).

Early Jan92, have a meeting with Oracle CEO where IBM AWD executive
Hester tells Ellison that we would have 16-system clusters by mid92 and
128-system clusters by ye92. Mid Jan92, convince IBM FSD to bid HA/CMP
for gov. supercomputers. Late Jan92, cluster scale-up is transferred for
announce as IBM Supercomputer (for technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we
are told we can't do clusters with anything that involve more than four
systems (we leave IBM a few months later).

Partially blamed FSD going up to the IBM Kingston supercomputer group to
tell them they were adopting HA/CMP for gov. bids (of course somebody
was going to have to do it eventually). A couple weeks later, 17feb1992,
Computerworld news ... IBM establishes laboratory to develop parallel
systems (pg8)
https://archive.org/details/sim_computerworld_1992-02-17_26_7

Not long after leaving IBM, was brought in as consulatnt to small
client/server startup, two former Oracle people (that had worked on
HA/CMP and were in the Ellison/Hester meeting) are there responsible for
something call "commerce server" and they want to do payment
transactions. The startup had also invented this stuff they called "SSL"
they want to use, it is now frequently calle "e-commerce". I had
responsibility between web servers and payment networks, including the
payment gateways.

One of the problems with HTTP&HTTPS were transactions built on top of
TCP ... implementation that sort of assumed long lived sessions (made it
easier to install on top kernel TCP/IP protocol stack). As webserver
workload ramped up, web servers were starting to spend 95+% of CPU
running FINWAIT list. NETSCAPE was increasing number of servers and
trying to spread the workload. Eventually NETSCAPE installs a large
multiprocessor server from SEQUENT (that had also redone DYNIX FINWAIT
processing to eliminate that non-linear increase in CPU overhead).

XTP had provided for piggy-back transaction processing to keep packet
exchange overhead to minimum ... and I showed HTTPS over XTP in the
minimum 3-packet exchange (existing HTTPS had to 1st establish TCP
session, then establish HTTPS, then the transaction, then shutdown
session).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpress_Transport_Protocol

other trivia: I then did a talk on "Why Internet Isn't Business Critical
Dataprocessing" based on documentation, processes and software I had to
do for e-commerce, which (IETF RFC editor) Postel sponsored at ISI/USC.

more trivia: when 1st started doing TCP/IP over high-speed satellite
links, established dynamic adaptive rate-based pacing implementation
... which I also got written into the XTP spec.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-01 20:25 +0000
  Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> - 2026-01-01 13:34 -0700
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-01 22:10 +0000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2026-01-01 15:36 -1000
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2026-01-01 15:27 -1000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> - 2026-01-01 17:45 -0800
        Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2026-01-02 13:27 -1000
          Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-03 03:11 +0000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-02 03:22 +0000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-02 14:08 +0000
        Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-02 20:29 +0000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2026-01-02 08:27 -1000
        Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-02 20:34 +0000
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2026-01-02 04:41 +0000
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-01-02 05:45 +0000
  Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2026-01-01 22:11 +0000
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> - 2026-01-01 15:03 -0800
  Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> - 2026-01-04 16:46 +0100
    Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP - What was the competition Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-04 15:53 +0000
      Re: 43 Years Of TCP/IP - What was the competition Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> - 2026-01-10 17:38 +0100

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