CS99I Meeting 1 Notes

Entered by Gio Wiederhold, 5 Jan 2000.

Topics Covered briefly

Course Goals

Discussion; understanding what's going on; not telling what the future will bring.

Student participation: reading, arguing, writing. Freshies only

Technology Origin:

Resource sharing for ARPA (the Defense Department/s Advanced Research Projects Agency) Contractors.
Objectives:
  1. Remote use of computers: TELNET protocol
  2. File transfer for remote execution: FTP protocol
  3. Robustness: redundant linking
  4. Limited loss on failure, load balancing: packeting of messages

Technologies

Transmission Control Protocol: TCP, specifies
    Packets with headers: from, to, number
    Nodes with forwarding information tables
    Later: four level adresses: 171.64.64.64. (what is yours?)
    Three level addresses: cs.stanford.edu, translated by domain name servers (DSN)
Later a simplified protocol for email: SMTP
Internet protocol (IP), provided for interconnection of networks with
    Internetwork nodes: routers
    Local Internet service providers
    Regional Internet services (BART, Los Nettos, (what was yours in your home town?)
    Backbone linkages -- wide, trancontinental links (leased from the phone companies, as MCI etc.)
Ethernet for satelite networks (Hawaii) and local wire networks with
    Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) and
    Collision detection (CD) and exponential backoff
Cable transmission versus Plain-old-telephone-service (POTS)
    Bandwidth usage for messages, images, TV

Distributed, autonomous development

Requests for comments (RFCs) to proposals, collected at SRI International. Implemented and adopted by the community, after discussion, when effective.
Alternate means of developing standards
    Implement, show, convince others of usefullness and leverage
    Committee of wise men, government mandates
    Commercial value of getting one's standard accepted
    Surfeit of standards, confision, cost, dirty tricks.

Remote document access

    Simplified FTP, with embedded site address (http://cs.stanford.edu/account/...) avoiding having to login [BernersLee@CERN]
    Browser to interpret http, and integarate text images via hyperlinks [Andersen?,Bina@Mosaic-UIUC]
    Browser competition [Clark-Netscape] [Gates-Microsoft]

Some preliminary hints for future meetings

Role of HTML
Selling over the Internet
  1. fungible versus unique goods
  2. return policies and problems
More?

Notes

See class chapter about the Internet and the glossary.