Roberts would have been content with an inner loop of 1,500 instructions; Crowther and Walden used 150. From that, the two programmers calculated just how quickly the IMP could process each packet. With that information, they were able to predict how many packets could be moved per second. “We actually sat down and wrote the hundred and fifty lines of code, counted them, and then we knew,” Crowther said. They had figured out the kernel.
