19 Sep
2023
19 Sep
'23
5:42 p.m.
From: Paul Ruizendaal
Any suggestions as to why the on-the-fly algorithm did
not catch on
more in the 1980's? Maybe it was simply less well known than I think?
I can't answer that directly, but I will point you at IEN-56, "CRC Checksum
Calculation", by Dave Reed (11-Sep-78):
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien56.pdf
Dave wanted the INWG to use a more powerful (in terms of detecting errors)
CRC, instead of the simple summation eventually adopted, in TCP and IP. So he
produced code to implement a particular CRC, to show people that it would not
be particularly expensive (whether in time, or space, I don't alas recall
definitively; speed would have been an important consideration, when
competing with the summation, though).
This would have been close to the leading edge of our knowledge at the time;
Dave liked playing around with math, and at about that time he did a very
fast DES implementation.
Noel