A brief history of TCP and its variance

Two main congestion control variations are those offered by TCP Tahoe and Reno. (since not long before, 2005)


The two algorithms were retrospectively named after the 4.3BSD operating system in which each first appeared (which were themselves named after Lake Tahoe and the city of Reno, Nevada). The “Tahoe” algorithm first appeared in 4.3BSD-Tahoe (which was made to support the CCI Power 6/32 “Tahoe” minicomputer), and was made available to non-AT&T licensees as part of the “4.3BSD Networking Release 1”; this ensured its wide distribution and implementation. Improvements, described below, were made in 4.3BSD-Reno and subsequently released to the public as “Networking Release 2” and later 4.4BSD-Lite. The “TCP Foo” names for the algorithms appear to have originated in a 1996 paper by Kevin Fall and Sally Floyd.