

Happy Anniversary to the Early Internet's First Network-Wide Crash - motherboard
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/happy-anniversary-to-the-early-internets-first-network-wide-crash

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Animats
No, there were earlier ARPANET-wide failures. The reassembly lockup on
December 21, 1973, for example. See
"[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc626"](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc626")

The ARPANET protocols and IMPs provided a guaranteed delivery system. They did
not drop packets in congested situations. They had flow control back to the
host, so they could prevent hosts from flooding the network. This left the
possibility of network-wide deadlocks where all buffers were in use and
nothing could be forwarded. That happened several times in the ARPANET's
history.

That's why the Internet does not guarantee delivery of IP datagrams.

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chiph
I got to see an IMP get installed at McClellan AFB in 1986. I had no idea what
it was at the time, but these days .. wow, pretty cool bit of history.

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drcross
Was this the precursor to the reason why TCP/IP included the TTL field?

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ojbyrne
I found "...was dropping bits (slivers of binary information)" hilarious.
Would there be anybody reading this article who doesn't know what a bit is?
Especially since a couple of sentences later they use "timestamp" without any
exposition on what that means.

