[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Craig Partridge]

In message <1168442297.4840.321.camel at localhost>, Jim Gettys writes:

>Those patches preceded the paper, if I'm not mistaken of the history.
>The proof was in the implementation of the algorithms in widely used
>system of that era. Had it been done in the Twenex implementation, while
>it might have been noticed, its impact would have taken far longer and
>could even conceivably been ignored.

Just building on Jim's recollection.

The patches preceeded the paper.  But the patches were vigorously tested.
Van actually did his work incrementally.  First he worked on trying to
improve congestion response and then round-trip time estimation.
There is a small set of emails from him reporting progress and asking
questions on the E2E and TCP-IP lists.  He also gave talks, with various
graphs showing the behavior of existing TCP implementations and his
implementation with various changes and got feedback.  (You can see many
of these talks if you go look at the old IETF proceedings at www.ietf.org --
a small tragedy -- the Moffett Field talk, which caused everyone
to sit up and notice isn't on-line).  He distributed his patches to
a small number of beta-testers before releasing them widely.

There was a lot of testing and carefully staged progress.  One fond
memory I have of that time is the Winter USENIX (I think in 1988 in
San Diego) and finding Van during a break.  He was sitting with a thick
stack of graphs showing the performance of round-trip time estimation
algorithms on real data over problematic Internet paths and sorting
out which algorithms worked well.

Craig