[e2e] Jon Crowcroft's thought questions...

[Craig Partridge]

In message <E19gIpL-0000AU-00 at wisbech.cl.cam.ac.uk>, Jon Crowcroft writes:

>i) who was involved in the ISO
>OSI Teransport Protocol (e.g. class 4 was quite nice -we did an implementation
 > which
>outperformed tcp:)

I'd page Ross Callon for this one (he did CLNP and as I recall did a lot on
TP4 as well).  Also John Burruss and Lyman Chapin comes to mind (perhaps
incorrectly).

>ii) where did XTP end up

Around a surprisingly long time -- my colleague, Tim Strayer, who produced
that well-written XTP book while a grad student (!), was still fielding
questions from implementors into the late 1990s -- probably still is.

>iv) what other nameservices apart from dns and grapevine were built ? is there
 > equivelent
>documentation to the grapevine experiences papres out of PARC for them?

There was the CSNET nameserver (and there was a paper on it around 1984).

There was also a wonderful private debate c. 1986 about whether the DNS
approach was right, or whether a replicated central database into which you
registered would scale better.  As I recall, a lot of the debate centered
on estimates of the relative cost of bandwidth -- those who argued for
centralization said, hey the revolution has to come (and it did c. 1989),
while those who argued for DNS said, don't count on it.  [I should hasten
to add that my recollection is that the debate was not so much should we toss
the DNS, but a way to ask if the DNS design correctly reflected the future
and if not, were there things we could do to adjust the trajectory to make
it perform better].

Craig