Re: [LibreQoS] [ih] The linux router project and wifi routers

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

forwarding an IT measurement tale from the beginning...

... certainly IT folk dig measurement tools of all sorts. I can't help
but wonder what his at rutgers looked like (in the 1980s) compared to
what we're doing in libreqos.io - dave, you got any screenshots of the
old UB - tool?

On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 7:35 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history
<internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> On 11/3/2022 6:13 PM, Guy Almes via Internet-history wrote:
> >   Bosack deserves credit for understanding how big a business the
> > router business would soon be and the urgency to get it going.
>
> A counterpoint.  This time, direct experience, rather than rumor:
>
> While at Ungermann-Bass, around the years being discussed, I managed the
> effort to put TCP/IP onto the U-B intelligent PC card and include
> applications on the PC to use it.  Our second customer was Rutgers.
> Some months later, our salesperson called me and said that Rutgers was
> interested in buying a router from us.  I noted that we didn't have one,
> didn't have one in the pipeline, and that the salesperson already knew this.
>
> She acknowledged all that, and further said that the Rutgers IT guy also
> knew all this.  But, she said, he liked us.  I noted that, really, he
> liked /her/.
>
> But an opportunity is an opportunity, so I asked how long he would
> wait.  (For the router, not for her.)  She called back later and said 6
> months.
>
> We had a guy just coming off a project who had said to me, on my second
> day at U-B, that he really wanted to built a router.  So I corralled
> Stan and asked him how long he would need to build one. We did a
> whiteboard analysis -- well, really, he did it and I just grunted
> occasionally and sometimes asked a question, mostly to keep him going.
> He estimated 5 months and I noted that was perfect, leaving us a month
> for testing.
>
> I went to our marketing guy and he blew me off, saying that there was no
> market and only a few were needed for the backbone.  I then went to my
> boss, John Davidson (*), who said that we never like saying no.  So he
> authorized the project.
>
> Stan Maniply was the best coder I'd seen and hit the mark.  And we
> delivered.
>
> But U-B marketing never knew how to do anything but market to a small
> number of large customers.  (The company had a dumb Ethernet card that
> was faster and cheaper than 3-Com's, but again, had no idea how to
> market it.)
>
> The same limitation applied to an Internet symbolic packet trace product
> I built, based on an existing U-B XNS trace tool.  At the Rutgers PC
> product delivery, I brought it with us so the IT guy could see the
> packet traffic.  He was casually satisfied with our basic delivered
> product but was got /very/ excited about the trace tool.  Lightbulb...
> This made clear that IT people doing networks would be interested in
> something that gave them insight into what the heck was going on... down
> there.  But, again, U-B marketing didn't know what to do with it.  And
> by the way, neither did Wollongong marketing, when we built a fresh tool
> there. Also, I thought it was a product opportunity, not a full business
> opportunity.  This changed when Harry Saal's company reached a million a
> month.
>
> So, yeah, rather anti-climatically and obviously, this underscores that
> understanding an opportunity matters.  Possibly more than building a
> competent product.
>
> d/
>
> (*) Quite a number of people were guilty for having pointed, goaded
> and/or facilitated me down the professional path I've wandered.  John
> Davidson was an unwitting accomplice.  From his Aloha network graduate
> student venue in Hawaii, he wrote a note about delayed echoing over
> satellites, suggesting adoption of a scheme that Tenex used, allowing
> apps to offload to the operating system; this got documented as RFC 357.
> I was doing user support and had noticed echoing delays were frequent,
> more generally.  So I suggested to my office mate, Jon Postel, that this
> would make an interesting Telnet option and I'd like to write it, but
> only if Jon helped.  RFC 560, RCTE.  Option 5, as I recall.  My first
> networking technical effort.
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history@elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history



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Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC