The complete story draft
Before a device can send a message, it has to answer a deceptively political question:
Who gets to speak when everyone shares the same channel?
Interactive computer traffic was also bursty.
The system became known as ALOHAnet. In 1971, it operated an ultra-high-frequency packet-radio network in Hawaiʻi. Its importance was not simply that data moved without wires.
A remote terminal did not reserve the channel or wait for permission. When it had a packet, it transmitted. If the central station received the packet correctly, it sent an acknowledgment. If the terminal did not receive that acknowledgment, it treated the packet as unsuccessful, waited a randomly selected interval, and tried again.
Random delay reduced the chance of repeated lockstep collision without assigning every user a fixed turn.
Franklin Kuo’s 1981 National Bureau of Standards survey describes the network as an experimental radio computer-communication system developed from 1970 through 1976.
Under the idealized traffic model used to analyze Pure ALOHA, its theoretical maximum throughput is about 18.4 percent of channel capacity.
When it extended packet networking through satellite facilities, the technical path ran into a pricing system still organized around voice service.
