on 60 years of networking, which focused almost entirely on the internet and ARPANET, I received quite a few comments about various networking technologies that were competing for ascendancy at the same time.
These included the OSI stack , the Coloured Book protocols , and of course ATM which was actually the first networking protocol on which I worked in depth. It’s hard to fathom now, but in the 1980s I was one of many people who thought that ATM might be the packet switching technology to take over the world.
I rate congestion control as one of the key factors that enabled the internet to progress from moderate to global scale ATM proponents used to refer to existing technologies such as Ethernet and TCP/IP as “legacy” protocols that could, if necessary, be carried over the global ATM network once it was established. One of my fond memories from those days is of Steve Deering boldly stating that ATM would never be successful enough to even be a legacy protocol.
One reason I skipped over these other protocols when earlier retelling the history of networking was simply to save space – it’s a little-known fact that my Systems Approach colleague Larry Peterson and I aim for brevity, especially since receiving a