Data communications over telegraph circuits 1913

a trivial example was one of the first major sites for original payment gateway

was a sports oriented operation ... which did some national advertisements on sunday afternoon football.

they had a major isp that frequently did down-time on sunday afternoon for various maintenance activities (aka no teleco provisioning). if you were a commercial high-speed customer of theirs, you would get email bulletins about which cities were having sunday afternoon outages for maintenance activities (30min-3hr periods).

so for the payment gateway ... we could mandate that the server code attempted the connection using multiple a-record support.

the payment gateway had HA-configuration ... some of it was background having done the ha-cmp product

and multi-homed support with multiple connections into different ISPs at different major points into the internet (... one of the isps had (48-volt) router co-located at telco facility). this was also in the period that the internet routing policy transitioned to hierarchical.

we attempted to get the browser group to also support multiple a-record for connections ... but for whatever reason ... that took another year.

in any case, this being one of the first major e-commerce sites, it turned had out their ISP had a couple sunday afternoon (sheduled) outages ... when they were expecting major activity (because of their national sunday afternoon football advertisements).

giving talks during the period about the internet not oriented towards industrial strength data processing ... i was somewhat surprised at the number of the audience who would break in and parrot something (from some univ. course?) about tcp being a reliable protocol.

past mentions of multiple a-record support

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