Computing History · Cluster
Networking History
From ARPANET to the public Internet.
- 01 Statistical Multiplexing and the Case Against Reserved Circuits Why bursty traffic made end-to-end circuit reservation wasteful, how store-and-forward queueing turns silence into capacity, and where the packet argument stops being a win.
- 02 ARPANET IMPs and the 1822 Host Interface How the Interface Message Processor kept switching separate from host software, what the 32-bit leader and the RFNM handshake enforced, and why one message in flight per link was enough.
- 03 NCP and the Limits That Forced TCP/IP How the ARPANET host-to-host protocol split messages into connections, why its addressing and flow control could not span multiple networks, and what TCP added to replace it.
- 04 The TCP/IP Split and the End-to-End Argument Why reliability moved out of the network and into the endpoints, what that costs in duplicated work, and how the argument constrains where a function may legally live.
- 05 Classful Addressing, Subnets, and the Move to CIDR Why the fixed class A, B, and C boundaries wasted most of the IPv4 space, how subnetting borrowed host bits, and what prefix aggregation changed about routing.
- 06 DNS Delegation, Glue Records, and the Referral Loop How authority for a name is handed down a zone tree, why a child in the same zone as its parent forces address records into the parent, and what breaks when glue is wrong.
- 07 Store-and-Forward Delivery and the MX Indirection How mail separated the address a sender writes from the host that receives it, why transfer is hop-by-hop rather than end-to-end, and what the retry rules actually require.
- 08 AIMD Congestion Control and the Collapse It Prevented Why additive increase with multiplicative decrease converges to a fair operating point, how the window is discovered without measuring the network, and where the control loop breaks.
- 09 Path Vectors, Policy, and Why BGP Does Not Minimize Anything How an exterior gateway protocol carries a whole path to detect loops, why the decision process ranks policy above distance, and what that costs at convergence time.
- 10 NAT, Port Overloading, and the Address Exhaustion Boundary How one public address serves many private hosts through port translation, what the binding table must store, and which protocol assumptions a translator cannot preserve.