Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years

https://dmitryelj.medium.com/tired-of-the-modern-web-discover-some-retro-protocols-you-still-can-use-today-30bbca48d3f2

by DmitryElj • 5 years ago

165 165 5 years ago

dmitryelj.medium.com

Happy to see Gopher listed! We even have a HN portal on Gopher which is pretty well suited for the folder listing format.

https://github.com/michael-lazar/hn-gopher

nunez3• 5 years ago

so happy to see that michael lazar wrote this. he also wrote rtv, a terminal reddit viewer, whose fork (tuir) i still use today.

superkuh2• 5 years ago

You don't have to use old clunky protocols to escape the commercial web. Just don't visit commercial websites designed by collectives using JS libraries. Disable JS by default and leave a site when nothing displays. There is plenty of good web buried under all the commercial crap. We don't have to abandon HTTP.

That said, eternal-september.org is a great way to get back into usenet.

EamonnMR• 5 years ago

What groups (besides the obvious specific tech focused ones) are worth going on? I'm able to get on via sdf.org but I never actually found any engaging discussion.

superkuh2• 5 years ago

I've been posting intermittently to alt.cyberpunk, alt.startrek, and alt.irc for a handful of years. It's slow, maybe a post a week, but when things happen it's a place to talk. Gotta be the change you want to see.

madengr• 5 years ago

My first modem was 300 baud, through I believe 150 baud preceded that. I miss BBS and the old internet.

timbit42• 5 years ago

110 baud preceded 300 baud, then 1200 baud.

Here is a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_spe...

mmaunder• 5 years ago

Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts.

Telnet text based muds are one of my favorite things we used to have. You’d telnet to a host and play a text based game where you’re trying to make progress walking through a world solving puzzles.

hrunt• 5 years ago

Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts.

I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years.

The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway.

That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

It's been years and I still angry about yEnc, lol.

It suffers from all the same problems that UUEncode did, and that MIME had already solved. Using magic words in the body text as delineators, splitting parts using the subject line, it's terrible.

nsonha• 5 years ago

The other day someone mentioned FTP and I asked them "what is that" because I have completely forgotten about FTP

romwell2• 5 years ago

It also happens to be a political slogan, so if it's mentioned out in the open, they probably don't mean the File Transfer Protocol.

300bps2• 5 years ago

The connection speed varied from 1200 bits/s in the 80s to 56600 bits/s in the 90s

As my username will attest to, 300 bps modems were very common in the 80s. I got my first one in 1985.

wglb3• 5 years ago

Yes.

My first modem was 110. 300 was exciting, and 1200 was outrageous.

icedchai3• 5 years ago

My first modem was 1200, back in 1987. I got a 2400 in 1989. I remember upgrading to a 9600 baud modem in 1991. It was insane.

kerneloftruth• 5 years ago

I took a LISP class in graduate school in the late 1980s, and dialed up to their VAX on a 300 baud modem from my commodore 64. Ah 40 character lines crawling across the TV/monitor. It felt powerful!

softwarebeware• 5 years ago

This article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive. The best use of the web, retro or modern, is when ordinary people share with each other in the open and on the same level.

It's the commercialism and hierarchicalism that ruins everything.

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

This article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive.

None of the protocols discussed in TFA have anything to do with the web. In my opinion, www was created with a strong server client model, and was not as "democratic" as some of the other protocols prevalent at that time.

lostfocus• 5 years ago

The fact that this is on medium dot com is rather funny.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

Its HTTP?

yessirwhatever• 5 years ago

I'm more tired of people writing on Medium than I am of modern web.

To authors everywhere: Stop writing on medium.

robertlagrant4• 5 years ago

Where should they write that pays?

yurishimo• 5 years ago

How much does medium pay? I didn’t even know that was an option!?

Good ole Google Ads on a WordPress blog seems fine historically.

At least substack loads fast…

door103• 5 years ago

Not everything needs to be about money. Software engineers get pretty absurd salaries already. Most of the high quality blogs I’ve seen are pro bono.

matkoniecz• 5 years ago

Substack seems to be an option, is less user-hostile.

Though I would not expect some piles of money unless you have an army of invested readers.

dang2• 5 years ago

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

forty2• 5 years ago

Speaking of being tired of the modern web: I think HTTP/HTML are fine. However medium really sucks, can't everyone start hosting their webpages somewhere else? This is slow on my mobile (even with adblocker) and this "open in app" bar doesn't want to disappear even if it's bringing no value

sammorrowdrums• 5 years ago

I moved to write.as and it’s much more tailored to people who want to just share their blogs etc. like Medium was originally!

almog• 5 years ago

Their free tier is invite-only for now though.

xigoi• 5 years ago

https://scribe.rip/

savolai• 5 years ago

The ux with full size images or enlarging them onclick does not quite seem up to par.

https://medium.com/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression...

https://scribe.rip/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression...

rubyfan• 5 years ago

I wondered if they posted it to medium as irony.

echelon• 5 years ago

HTTP and HTML are fine. It's what people (eg. Medium) do with them that we complain about.

   - Monopolistic platforms
   - Annoying advertising
   - Creepy tracking
   - Walled gardens of content
   - Needless SPA-ification 
   - Engagement optimization
   - Gamification 
   - Dark patterns

You can still very much develop websites like it's the 90's. You can even use tables for layout.

The only things we've really lost are MIDIs, <blink> / <marquee>, and Flash. And for some reason people don't like bedazzled mouse pointers anymore.

montroser• 5 years ago

Fun fact -- yes <blink> is indeed lost, however <marquee> still enjoys first-class support across all major browsers!

https://caniuse.com/?search=marquee

goodpoint• 5 years ago

HTTP and HTML were a hot mess since day one.

qwertox• 5 years ago

My experience seems to be a bit different, apparently. I see a lot of interesting content hosted there. HN is my only entry point to Medium, so for me that site ist just a blog hoster, like blogspot.com is. But I do dislike the latter somehow, as well as Wordpress.

For me Medium seems to be the only acceptable blogging platform, but neither do I use it myself as I don't blog, nor do I visit any non-tech/-science content on that site.

But I do use a very strict setting in uBlock Origin, so maybe that's causing the site "to behave". And I only visit it on the desktop.

dang2• 5 years ago

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

forty2• 5 years ago

I'm sorry, but I think for this article that seemed relevant since the real article title starts with "tired of the modern web", then discuss the merits of the "old" web. I thought the article media was itself a good illustration of what was wrong with the "new" web.

anthony_romeo2• 5 years ago

I would make an important note on FTP: it’s not a secure protocol. The last time I cared about FTP, the recommendation was to move toward SFTP or FTPS for production/public environments for this reason.

robertlagrant4• 5 years ago

It's 100% not secure. I don't know much about FTPs, but I think I only trust sftp.

anthony_romeo2• 5 years ago

My understanding is that FTP/FTPS is analogous to HTTP/HTTPS but I left FTP for ssh long ago and never looked back.

chasil2• 5 years ago

It is not only insecure, but not specific enough on several aspects of the protocol, leading to implementation problems. It also doesn't do any error correction beyond TCP.

It is quite fast, however, compared to SFTP/SSH.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie

netfortius• 5 years ago

When someone starts an article with a protocol which has been among the first to be forbidden/blocked/tracked-and-shutdown-at-source, when possible/firewalled on any organization network, for the last 10 years, then I don't know what'd be the incentive to read any further :-(

samhw• 5 years ago

That's fine: it doesn't suit their needs. No protocol is meant to be all things to all people, and every organisation has its own security posture and its own environment.

I don't think any of that entails that FTP is somehow failing to fulfil its contract. Implementing transport encryption is not within its scope. It has to be run over a secure channel, which can easily be done with FTPS.

300bps2• 5 years ago

One protocol I didn’t see mentioned but I still use every day is IRC.

It’s one of the best ways to get new files today and been around since 1988.

diegocg• 5 years ago

So, basically: (mostly) dead protocols. That is precisely why they don't need to change. Protocols that are used widely are those who have no option but to change in order to adapt to real world problems

Apreche• 5 years ago

Anyone interested in using old protocols should check out Project Gemini.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It's still obviously very small, but Gemini space is growing.

CharlesW• 5 years ago

Anyone interested in using old protocols should check out Project Gemini.

The Gemini protocol is 13 months old.

sedivy94• 5 years ago

They’re appealing to the nature of the protocol, not the age.

nu11ptr2• 5 years ago

Misleading title I think. I assumed these were protocols in wide use that did not require changing because they were so well designed. Instead, this is about old protocols that didn't change...because nobody uses them anymore.

That said, it is an interesting retro blast from the past. As someone who cut their teeth during the BBS and early days of the web, it always brings back nostalgia. Computers were just more fun back then IMO.

SV_BubbleTime• 5 years ago

No one uses newsgroups anymore? Hmm, well, I guess I don’t use them for their chatting purposes, but they are very much alive for file transfer.

smokey_circles• 5 years ago

I maintain a usenet subscription because the file transfer and search mechanisms are incredibly relevant today. There is a yuge amount of data still pushed around on the usenet. Which is not-so-coincedentally related to media formats and sizes (yarr)

anthk4• 5 years ago

Check Usenet and comp.misc plus the comp.lang* hier.

nu11ptr2• 5 years ago

Interesting - I honestly didn't know Usenet was still in use.

SkipperCat• 5 years ago

They left out BGP, one of my favorite routing protocols! There's still a bunch of ancient routing protocols out there. They work pretty well, so I guess you can't argue with success.

kazen444• 5 years ago

bgp has changed a ton however. with new additions to the protocol happening nearly yearly.

rayhaanj• 5 years ago

Yup, even the BGP-4 RFC 4271 is from 2006 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4271

stevekemp• 5 years ago

Very true! Also another omission was "finger" - although I guess that isn't used so often these days..

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Would be nice to see a new version of irc but it's going so slowly...

rvba• 5 years ago

Firefox depreciated FTP and in fact completely stopped supporting it. Sad.

chasil2• 5 years ago

It would be nice if that could be reimplemented as an extension.

Jonovono• 5 years ago

My long (long) term plan of my browser (https://wapps.app) is to bring us back to something similar to Gopher.

First I want to make browsing web apps feel as good as browsing an app. Then I want to make it better. To do that I want to 'translate' the HTML into a common structure and create UI that can be similar across websites and rendered in a clean, easy to navigate way. Not sure if that makes sense. Join our Discord if you want to chat more about it (https://join.wapps.app)

erwincoumans2• 5 years ago

Does anyone remember internet relay chat, IRC, with its channels? It is still here today as well.

herodoturtle3• 5 years ago

/me slaps erwincoumans around with a large trout

erwincoumans2• 5 years ago

/whois herodoturtle :)

theonemind2• 5 years ago

mIRC users. Pfft.

btdmaster• 5 years ago

Most of those are supported by curl, just prepend e.g. telnet:// gopher:// and ftp:// to the URL!

hliyan2• 5 years ago

Is it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)? After 25 years on the web, I'm starting to feel format fatigue so much that I actually cherish reading man pages and internet RFCs on the terminal (and even occasionally reading web pages on lynx).

q-big• 5 years ago

Is it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)?

Just do it and post a reference implementation of a server and a client (assuming this is the architecture that you want to use), and the protocol specifications somewhere.

skybrian• 5 years ago

Do you know about the Gemini protocol?

anthk4• 5 years ago

And Gopher.

hliyan2• 5 years ago

Quite coincidentally, I found an example of just the type of experience I prefer in a neighboring HN post (SPADE): https://asciinema.org/a/bG7PPKj0AaJq087ZNPxSZwcCl

fimdomeio• 5 years ago

I did this just as a way to put an idea to code. It's very rough. Web for cli only. Web 0.5 https://tilde.pt/~fimdomeio/index2.html

peter303• 5 years ago

This was done long ago. I forget the name, but there was a browser that only rendered the text parts. It was useful on slow modems or text-only screens.

romwell2• 5 years ago

An even more noteworthy protocol is MIDI[1], which has been virtually unchanged since its introduction in 1981, and is still the way that electronic musical instruments and software talk to each other.

MIDI-over-USB has been popular for a while, but we're seeing a resurgence of "classical" MIDI over serial with the current synthesizer renaissance.

And of course it's all the same on the software side.

Note on:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

ReleaseCandidat2• 5 years ago

Bad timing, MIDI 2.0 has been officially published (almost exactly) 2 years ago.

https://www.midi.org/specifications/midi-2-0-specifications

SeanLuke4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure this counts. Their similarity in name notwithstanding, MIDI 2.0 is explicitly a different protocol from MIDI 1.0. It's not meant to replace it, but to exist in parallel with it. Which is good because I suspect it's doomed. Anyway, MIDI 1.0 is still a standard protocol.

SeanLuke4• 5 years ago

Actually, this kind of a collective lie perpetrated in the synth community. MIDI's version number never changed from 1.0, but it has had numerous revisions, including LSB+MSB CC values, NRPN and RPN, General MIDI definitions, MIDI Show control, MIDI Machine control, MTC, MIDI file formats, etc. etc. And of course recently MPE. The original version was quite primitive.

I'm looking at the so-called "1.0 Specification" circa 1995, and it's document version 4.2.

rcarmo2• 5 years ago

"noteworthy", ha. I see what you did there :)

wglb3• 5 years ago

Bbs is not a protocol;ftp certainly is, as is gopher, NNTP is.

Disappointed that NTP is not listed as it may well be the oldest continuously running protocol.

Tomte• 5 years ago

NNTP had a relatively recent update.

wglb3• 4 years ago

Did it invalidate the long-running ones?

mickael-kerjean• 5 years ago

Another article which mention both FTP and Dropbox. The infamous top comment on the Dropbox HN launch back is what led me down the rabbit hole of building a Dropbox like UI for FTP: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

FTP is amazing on so many perspective. About a month ago, I crawled the entire IPv4 range looking for anonymous FTP and found about 200k of them. As I wanted to publish the results and provide a way to get through those servers, I ended up building crawlers but quickly stopped as the sheer amount of movies, series, music I found would have been more problems than it's worth.

whoibrar• 5 years ago

really interesting, thanks for commenting

nobody9999• 5 years ago

As I wanted to publish the results and provide a way to get through those servers,

Lists of the contents of Anonymous FTP servers have been produced since at least the 1980s.

And in fact, they still exist:

http://fy.chalmers.se/OLDUSERS/ivi/ftpsites2.html

http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do...

Back in the day, you'd download updated lists to find the stuff you were looking for. Because that was how you found stuff. Although there wasn't a lot of video or music out there on the public anon FTP servers.

That was before Archie[0] and Veronica[1] and, of course, websites.

Apparently, there was a discussion[2] about this here back in 2016, as well.

I have fond memories of wuarchive.wustl.edu, simtel20.army.mil[3] and a bunch of other FTP sites I can't remember 30+ years later.

A good topic. Thanks for posting it. Perhaps you should publish your list, or stand up an Archie server for it. I'd use it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel

pkulak• 5 years ago

I really expected to see email on that list.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/eGqxU

badrabbit• 5 years ago

Balance is key in my opinion both for protocol and programming language standards. Decades is too long and months is too fast irrespective of use-case.

I can see javascript,python updating every few years and once or twice a decade for HTTP,SMTP,SSH,Rust,C++. But that's just my opinion, what I stand firmly on is avoidance of extremes in either end.

fckthisguy• 5 years ago

I completely agree. The one-year release cadence for JS has been amazing and it's a much-needed improvement over the one every few years model they used to follow.

More importantly though, I think JS has really benefitted from small improvement scopes: there's only a few new features that really matter ever year. That, along with clear roadmaps leading up to a release have made adopting new features easy.

hyperman1• 5 years ago

For years I wondered about the insanity of the FTP protocol. Why take random ports at both sides? Did they hate firewalls?

Some day, someone explained this allows for a client(with low bandwith) to setup a transfer between 2 servers(high bandwith) with the data not moving through the client. I've never seen this usage and don't know any ftp package supporting this, but it's pretty neat nevertheless.

com2kid• 5 years ago

For years I wondered about the insanity of the FTP protocol. Why take random ports at both sides? Did they hate firewalls?

Simpler answer: because Firewalls didn't exist at the time!

InvaderFizz• 5 years ago

Not sure if that is why the multiport setup, but the process you are describing is called FXP[0]. I used it quite a bit back in the late 90s.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

Lammy• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashFXP supports it.

pavlov• 5 years ago

Another one of those weird Wikipedia trip articles that starts out rambling in a way that would never pass the “no original research” test today, then hits you out of the blue in the last paragraph with a matter-of-fact statement.

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

LFTP supports this on the CLI:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp

* http://lftp.yar.ru/features.html

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

Control channel and data channel makes a lot of sense. And is arguably a simpler and more efficient way to transfer data. You set up transfer via one channel and then you don't need overhead of extra headers and other stuff on the data itself. Compare to HTTP 1.1 for example where you often carry bunch of headers around.

chungy• 5 years ago

FTP predates full-duplex. You simply could not receive and transfer on the same port, so two were opened for each task. FTP is a protocol from the 1970s before TCP/IP existed. It has a lot of warts and really shouldn't be used on the internet anymore. :)

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

"Before TCP/IP" = NCP.

The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan and published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. Until 1980, FTP ran on NCP, the predecessor of TCP/IP.[2] The protocol was later replaced by a TCP/IP version, RFC 765 (June 1980) and RFC 959 (October 1985), the current specification.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol

Unlike TCP or UDP, NCP was not duplex:

NCP preceded the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) as a transport layer protocol used during the early ARPANET. NCP was a simplex protocol that utilized two port addresses, establishing two connections, for two-way communications. An odd and an even port were reserved for each application layer application or protocol. The standardization of TCP and UDP reduced the need for the use of two simplex ports for each application down to one duplex port.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program

So the original transport layer that FTP relied on necessitated two ports, and when the move to a newer transport layer occurred the use of two ports was carried over for simplicity's sake. And several decades later that design still exists.

FTP needs two ports (one for sending and one for receiving) because it was originally designed to operate on Network Control Program (NCP), which was a simplex protocol that utilized two port addresses, establishing two connections, for two-way communications. An odd and an even port were reserved for each application layer application or protocol.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol

Per RFC 114, responses from the server are considered a data type: when a user sends a command to the server, sometimes the response is a status update ('MKDIR successful'†) and sometimes the response is the requested file.

The data structure of the response has fields to say what's coming back on the data channel for the requested transaction.

† MKDIR was not a command, just using it as an modern example.

theshrike79• 5 years ago

FXP was the thing that made (and to some extent still makes) the warez scene possible.

There were specific people whose main role was that they had access to one source server and one or more target servers. Without spending more than a few kB of their own bandwidth they could transfer files between big servers easily.

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

I'm sure it played an important role, but a[n optionally restricted] telnet account could do the same, right?

rndgermandude• 5 years ago

I remember doing this, transferred a few large (at the time) files from one server to another. There were definitely some clients which had this feature, but I cannot remember which one I was using specifically. If I remember correctly, I did this because the servers in question were some "free" webhosting things where you'd only get ftp access (along with http, of course), but no shell.

I also remember talking to some people back in the day who regularly did that supposedly. Members of some minor warez group who uploaded new releases to one server and then used FTP to directly transfer files from one server to another to create mirrors. Then retransfer from the two servers that now had it to even more servers for some exponential growth.

jcrawfordor5• 5 years ago

Many early protocols were designed under the basic assumption that any two hosts on a network could initiate connections to each other. This was, after all, the fundamental concept around which early computer networks were designed... as networks of equal peers.

Unfortunately, this assumption has failed the test of time, as the "peer to peer" nature of computer networks has been fundamentally degraded due to widespread adoption of a more strict client-server model. Today, it is mostly not true that any two internet hosts can intiate connections with each other, and while seldom phrased this way the reality is so deeply embedded in our understanding of the internet that protocols designed under this assumption, while common, seem absurd. There are numerous reasons for this that range from security concerns to IPv4 exhaustion to the simple practicalities of the way that computer networks entered widespread usage.

We should all wonder: is it a good thing that we have abandoned the peer to peer nature of networks?

rasengan• 5 years ago

It is not good. Hopefully IPv6 is adopted globally soon.

ThalesX• 5 years ago

I think there are efforts underway to build a more p2p internet. I've been trying to find the time to build some small experiment using https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (no affiliation).

jjav4• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, this assumption has failed the test of time

I can't agree that it has failed the test of time. Peer to peer is still the superior solution to nearly every problem.

What happened is that the Internet became commercialized and now profit runs everything. Centralized solutions are better at: injecting advertising, tracking users, requiring subcriptions, ensuring lock-in and preventing interoperability. None of these are good qualities for anyone involved, except the company making the profit. But these companies now rule the internet, so they hate peer to peer.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo• 5 years ago

FlashFXP was the most used client in the late 90s Warez scene because of the easy implementation of fxp. Private internet was still 56k or up to 128k with ISDN. Most of the scene ftp sites were hosted in universities. You transfered files from the US to a local university went into the library and downloaded it on a drive. What a trip down memory lane.

icedchai3• 5 years ago

The simpler explanation is nobody was using firewalls when it was invented. Throughout most of the 90's, many people had unfiltered IPv4 at their desktops. I had dedicated internet at home: no firewall... at work, same thing.

nunez3• 5 years ago

100%.

When Microsoft made Windows Firewall opt-out with Windows XP SP2, it caused SOOOOOOO many headaches. On one hand, no more rogue porn pop-ups during work! On the other hand, nobody knew what a firewall was and why trying to use Skype or whatever was such a PITA.

It’s a bit of a shame that one simply cannot use the Internet without a firewall of some kind (unless you really like getting cryptoransomed in, like, 30 seconds)

jjav4• 5 years ago

Indeed. Through the 90s at $JOBS, my desktop workstation has a public IP address and was directly on the Internet without any kind of firewalling.

Sendmail ran locally and I'd send/receive email to/from the world directly on my workstation. Same for FTP, HTTP, etc. That's how the Internet was originally intended to operate.

kazen444• 5 years ago

i doubt firewalls even existed in any capacity at this time. routing packets in and of itself was already quite an CPU intensive task, analysing and blocking packets would be a whole other ballgame during the early days.

jjav4• 5 years ago

Did they hate firewalls?

What's a firewall? By that I mean, firewall wasn't a thing when FTP was designed.

rcarmo2• 5 years ago

...most of telco. Seriously, mainstream stuff is interesting and all, but there are hundreds of protocols needing a retrofit (or actually being re-encapsulated in TCP) in that industry.

elb2020• 5 years ago

Another ancient but still supported protocol is the finger protocol. For the current weather on the South Pole, try this from the command line:

finger south_pole@graph.no

Or, if you want the weather in Boston, Massachusetts, try:

finger boston@graph.no

DHPersonal• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

I think it was Carmack who introduced me to that protocol through a dev talk, if my memory is correct.

mnd9992• 5 years ago

Still not massively convinced HTTP needed to progress beyond 1.1. I’m sure someone at Google got a promotion out of it though.

tialaramex3• 5 years ago

Pretty early on it becomes apparent that you'd quite like to fetch more than one resource. In 1992 you're fetching one page of HTML markup or maybe a file somebody linked, but by 1995 you're definitely fetching a picture of the author's cat and the logo of the organisation they work for. Maybe there is a little animated GIF explaining that the page is under construction. Today obviously most documents on the web have lots of resources ("Under construction" GIFs are gone, but pictures of the author's cat are still very much a thing, now joined by audio and video, style and of course scripts).

Obviously one thing you can do is, for every resources spin up a new HTTP connection to the remote server. These connections have no relationship to each other, so that's a bunch of extra overhead but nevertheless your browser today will probably try to do this several times per server. Still that's pretty inadequate, surely we can do better?

So, OK, HTTP/1.1 also has keep-alive. We can re-use connections, ask for a resource, wait until that's delivered, then fetch another one.

But notice this is strictly sequential. If you're a Unix person it's natural to try the next idea for HTTP, pipelining. Don't wait until things are delivered, just ask for everything you want, surely the remote server will provide one at a time, reading your next request, serving that, then the next one and so on, right?

But for 1990s server programmers excited by threads this doesn't work. Their server has one thread gathering requests, and for each request it spawns a thread to provide the answer. If I try to pileline my HTTP requests I get muddled nonsense back from their server. Sometimes. Is that forbidden by the HTTP specification. Sure. Did it happen anyway? Yes. So your browser does not use pipelining in HTTP/1.1

Also, this suffers head-of-line blocking. If I request CreditCardStatement19960402.pdf and you must send a tape robot to retrieve that, too bad, even though I also wanted bankname.jpeg and hideousfont.css I can't retrieve those because I'm waiting for CreditCardStatement19960402.pdf. The network is idle while we wait for the robot.

Google's servers and Google's browser spoke SPDY back in the day, which fixes a bunch of this. That doesn't exist any more because HTTP/2 was standardised and has the same fixes plus other stuff, some of which proved very useful, other things not so much. Only one way to find out.

mnd9992• 5 years ago

Sure, HTTP 1.1 was a clear improvement over 1.0.

omegalulw• 5 years ago

Why not have the server packetize and label?

... <file1, bytes 2048-4096> <file2, bytes 0-125> ...

The server has to order critical stuff first on a pipelined connection to reduce latency but this approach can easily send stuff the client requested and will request, while collecting data serverside by any number of threads.

kevin_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

HTTP/2 should have been implemented over SCTP. It's silly that we're restricted to two bulk transport protocols and have to hack things on top of them. Google could have used it's influence to break the logjam.

alangibson• 5 years ago

I got half a page of text then "To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in."

Gopher is starting to look pretty good.

kevincox• 5 years ago

I doubt gopher would be any different. It is just better now because the users aren't trying to monetize it.

IronWolve• 5 years ago

I was also sad that RLE graphics never took off, it was great way to get black and white photos over a slow modem. Wonder what a unicode based rle gfx format would look like.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

SMTP anyone? I mean is still very much used, though it got extended, but you can definitely use the old one and BigCo will accept your email.

bullen• 5 years ago

SMTP(1971), ETHERNET(1973), IP(1974), UDP(1980), TCP&DNS(1983), HTTP&BGP(1989), DHCP(1993)

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't honestly put HTTP on that list. Latest RFC is from 2014 and even the 1.1 was from 1997.

tommica• 5 years ago

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but 1997 was 25 years ago... Of course it is not the same as 30, but it is quite close

cryptonector• 5 years ago

Those are old, but they've been modified a lot over the years, including recently. TFA is about protocols that haven't changed in decades.

Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years

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