Notes on the Network Working Group meeting, Urbana, Illinois, February 17, 1971
RFC 101

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Network Working Group                                  Richard W. Watson
Request for Comments: 101                                        SRI-ARC
NIC: 5762                                              February 23, 1971

              NOTES ON THE NETWORK WORKING GROUP MEETING

Wednesday Evening, February 17

   Mike Sher opened by welcoming the group to Urbana and briefly
   indicated that ILLIAC IV was expected to be running this summer.  The
   ILLIAC IV Project has been split into two projects; one on basic
   system hardware and software, and the other on applications.  Their
   IMP is not yet connected to their PDP-11.

   Steve Crocker asked for topics to be discussed at this meeting; these
   are indicated below.

   Peggy Karp of Mitre has been summarizing the old RFC's.  She has a
   list of about 30 topics and is summarizing their present status.  She
   expects to finish around the end of February.  See RFC #100,
   NIC(5761).  It was suggested that someone write an RFC indicating
   which ones are obsolete.  It was also suggested that the Network
   Information Center (NIC) help sites in organizing their hardcopy
   material.

   There then followed brief discussions of experiences in using the
   Network.  John Melvin (SRI-ARC) summarized SRI's experience in using
   the Utah PDP-10 to help in SRI's transfer from an XDS 940 to a PDP-
   10.  In April-May 1970 it was clear that SRI was headed toward a
   PDP-10 in order to have the capacity and reliability to fulfill their
   role as the Network Information Center.  They had had some previous
   experience in connecting with Utah, and so it seemed logical to try
   to use the Utah 10 to aid the transfer.

      In June use of the Network began.  SRI uses higher level languages
      extensively, so the first task was to transfer the compiler-
      compiler Tree Meta.  Source code was generated on the 940 to run
      on the PDP-10.  Binaries were then transmitted to Utah and run and
      debugged.  Patches were performed where possible, and source
      changes accumulated.  A new source and binaries would then be made
      periodically.

Watson                                                          [Page 1]
RFC 101        NOTES ON THE NETWORK WORKING GROUP MEETING  February 1971

      Once Tree Meta was running, a new high level language (called L-
      10) for programming the On-Line System (NLS) was implemented in
      the same way.  When L-10 was running the core device independent
      parts of NLS were rewritten and debugged.  NLS was completely
      reorganized during the transfer.

      At the SRI and Utah ends a control program allowing three users to
      connect to Utah was written, which ran as a user process and
      allowed character interaction and files to be transmitted.  The
      scheme worked well and much useful work was accomplished in the
      July--December period with some people on 4-5 hours per day.  The
      voice link was used when something would go wrong in trying to
      determine where the problem existed and to reset.  At times they
      would go 2 weeks with no problems.  SRI has an IMP interface
      diagnostic which ran as a T/S process.

      Generally, echoing was handled at the SRI end.  DDT was used at
      Utah end.  Round trip character delays of 4 seconds were not
      uncommon, and at certain points delays of 8 or 10 minutes were
      experienced.  These delays were the result of the implementation
      used which involved multiple processes at each end, each to be
      scheduled.  Utah was heavily loaded at 2:00 PM and the SRI people
      took to running at night and on weekends.

      When the SRI PDP-10 came in in December, use of the Network
      slowed.

      Users would have liked a more constant response time instead of
      the widely varying one so that their work habits could adapt to it
      even if it was slow.

   Gerry Cole reported on some results of measurements made during the
   SRI-Utah work.  Measurements were also made at SRI to help in
   interpreting the data obtained by UCLA.  Gerry wrote a paper
   summarizing these statistics which is available from him care of SDC.

      Gerry requested that when people are set up to use the Network,
      they inform him so that he can gather statistics.  UCLA will
      eventually have a program to scan the Network for utilization, but
      if people could tell him when they were going to use the Network,
      it would be easier to measure meaningful things and interpret the
      data from a knowledge of type of usage.

   Bob Kahn indicated that BBN is interested in the Statistics on
   overall flow to see if the Network is configured properly.  Gerry
   said that UCLA is interested in the statistics for Network modeling
   studies.  Measurements are taken by remote control by use of a
   feature designed into the IMP's by BBN for such a function.

Watson                                                          [Page 2]