Rivet’s Blog

One fine day, I had a wonderful meeting with a great academician and researcher. Douglas Comer – known to Anna University Computer Science students as author of TCP/IP books. We computer science students used to cram those books during our under-grad days. He is a distinguished faculty member at Purdue University and VP of research at Cisco. Most importantly he is known for his work in development of internet for the past 30 years.

He came to the University to give a guest lecture on “Lessons learned from developing Internet”. His lecture lasted for 50 minutes. It was darn funny and witty. For example, he used to don the academician hat and talk about how ISPs take consumers for a ride by claiming to give blazing fast internet connection. Did you know that ISPs do not use the shortest path to route packets? Routing is dictated by economics. The consumer who pays a lot gets top priority. Then, he wears an imaginary employee hat, “Use XYZ routers, the best routers in the world”.

Some excerpts from his talk -
Comer: There was a student who proposed an aggressive way of tackling congestion in the internet. “Just mow your way through the congestion. Keep resending out packet until it comes out of the congestion”. I told him that if everyone starts doing it, the entire internet is going to collapse. I was curious to know from where the student got the idea. Incidentally, the student happened to be from a place called India. Once I was in Delhi. If you are driving on a heavily congested road and you see an opening, all the vehicles gun for that spot. Chaos ensues, however one of the vehicle makes it past the congestion.

When Comer told how the student got the idea I was laughing the loudest in the room.

Comer: Did you know TCP was sidelined by the government’s policy? It mandated that every government organization shouldn’t use TCP. There was a jolly good fellow at NASA who wanted to use TCP. He found a catch in the policy document (It’s known as GOSIP) – “USE TCP IN CASE OF EMERGENCIES”. So, NASA declared that there was an ‘emergency’ and began to use TCP in their networks. Soon enough, as history failed to record it, all organizations began to claim it was having an emergency and started using TCP. The government had to overrule its policy of not using TCP because it’s not healthy to have emergencies every day. It’s astounding that this incident was not much noted in history.

For the folks from non-CS background who are reading this- TCP is an important mechanism used in internet. Just imagine the internet as a road. TCP is kind of similar to the traffic lights. Without TCP, you will probably get your emails garbled. When the lecture ended, I wished my professors would teach like him. Nonetheless, my professors have their own style. But, there was something about Comer’s way of teaching.

Note: I circulated this anecdote through email an year ago. Technically, its not a retro-post.  ^_^