The man who made the Internet possible

Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast".  You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast.  Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.

And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed.  We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP".  And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.

Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson.  He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved.  WAY improved.  TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application.  The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.

Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS.  He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.

IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.

Enter Jacobson again.  He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion.  What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.

So why do I say that he made the Internet possible?  Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth.  There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.

And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers.  As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster.  That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode.  The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.

All because of Van Jacobson.

Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you. 

WW2 Submarine stuff

OldNFO posts a hilarious story about scrounging to keep the subs on patrol:

On June 11, 1942, disease, and perhaps an increasing desire not to use one’s own hand to wipe one’s nether regions, drove Lt. Cmdr. James Coe of the submarine Skipjack to send an “urgent” message to the powers that be.

Since July 1, 1941, a requisition had been submitted for 150 rolls of toilet paper to replenish the dwindling supply aboard the Skipjack. However, as the boat patrolled the Pacific, no sign of the all-important bathroom item appeared — even as other war materiel came in.

The TP was needed because crews ate very well when out at sea.  I've posted Tasting History episodes before, and this one does not disappoint.  I'd eat that in a New York minute.

The Pharaoh Rameses the Great had a passport

Who knew?

This goes back to the 1970s, when a French museum wanted to run a CAT scan on the mummy.  Egypt, recalling decades of looting by European powers seemed to think that issuing a passport to the mummy might make it easier to get him back:

It was his poor condition that prompted Egyptian authorities to seek help preserving him in the mid-1970s. They found their experts in France and reluctantly decided to transport the 3,000-year-old mummy to Paris.

In order to leave the country, however, even a three-millennia-old king has to follow the rules. Egypt required anyone leaving the country, living or dead, to have the proper papers. Ramses II was issued a passport. Seemingly the first mummy to receive one, Ramses had his occupation listed as “King (deceased).” The government didn’t want him to get a passport for publicity, but believed it would afford them legal protections to ensure his safe return. Countless artifacts and mummies have been plundered and stolen from Egypt, and museums in Europe didn’t always respect Egyptian claims.

Like I said, who knew?

The Pan Am Clipper that flew around the world after Pearl Harbor

This is one heck of a flying story:

LAGUARDIA TOWER LAGUARDIA TOWER. THIS IS PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER NC18602 INBOUND FROM AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND. DUE TO ARRIVE PAN AMERICAN MARINE TERMINAL LAGUARDIA IN SEVEN MINUTES. OVER.

It left San Francisco on 1 December 1941 bound for Auckland, NZ.  They were two days out from Hawaii when they heard of the Japanese attack, and the Pacific route back from New Zealand was closed.  Instead, they flew across Australia, Java,  Ceylon, Africa, Brazil and up to New York the "long way around".

Along the way they pushed the airframe far beyond what it was designed for.  The crew adapted to the problems, they avoided being shot down over Java or crashing on takeoff from the Nile.  Giants strode the Earth in those days.