Re: A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:41:48 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 4/30/26 20:06, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 4/30/2026 4:55 PM, vinton cerf wrote:
>> To add to Dave's story
>
>
> Since MCI Mail wound up being relevant to Internet history, when Vint 
> used MMDF to interconnect with Internet mail, I'll add to his addition.
>
> MCI Mail was built using a collection of vendors for different parts 
> of the system. (HP had the remote laster printers.)
>
> Six months before the scheduled public demo was the first meeting, 
> with all the vendors in the same room.
>
> Vint got up to greet everyone and set the stage.  He said we did not 
> have much time but we were going to meet the September deadline.  Then 
> he said that if anything stopped us -- not that it would, but if it 
> did -- it would be a connector.
>
> As I recall, that middle-of-the-night-before-the-demo problem that 
> Vint described turned out to be a connector.
>
> d/
>

Do Computer Science curricula today teach anything about connectors?  /Jack

 From my archives, a message I sent about a year ago:

"In the late 1960s as an undergraduate I had a student job programming a 
PDP-8 doing data collection at the MIT Instrumentation Lab (also known 
as "The ILab").  The group I worked for was designing and deploying 
inertial navigation systems.  At the time their focus was on the Apollo 
moon missions and "PIGA" devices (Pendulous Integrating Gyroscopic 
Accelerometers), but their technology had been in use for years in older 
systems such as the Minuteman ICBMs.   (Google "minuteman piga" if 
you're curious).

In EE classes, we had been learning about all sorts of Engineering 
techniques for optimizing circuit designs - things like Karnaugh maps.  
One day while sitting at my desk in the ILab, I realized that the 
engineer sitting at the next desk was an actual "rocket scientist" 
working on rocket stuff.  So I asked him what Engineering principles and 
techniques he found most useful in his design work.

His answer surprised me -- "Connectors are all that matters!".  All 
designs were focussed on minimizing the number of connectors. Nothing 
else was considered important, as long as it fit in the size, weight, 
and power budget.

Over years of accumulated field data, they had determined that failures 
were mainly associated with connectors.  A few extra logic gates didn't 
matter.  An extra connector made the system noticeably less reliable.

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