HN user
That made me remember part of an interview done to Dennis Ritchie back in 2000:
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go,
I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed
under the advice of a worldwide crowd. C is peculiar in a lot
of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a
certain unity of approach that stems from development in a
small group. LinuxWorld.com: What is your advice to designers of new programming languages?
Dennis Ritchie: At least for the people who send me mail about a new language
that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to
write a compiler. Don't have any expectations that anyone will use it, unless
you hook up with some sort of organization in a position to push it hard.
It's a lottery, and some can buy a lot of the tickets. There are plenty of
beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on. But someone
does win the lottery, and doing a language at least teaches you something.
Oh, by the way, if your new language does begin to grow in usage, it can
become really hard to fix early mistakes.[0]
That truly is a pressing challenge due to all these DNS related issues.
It makes me remember a short paper from 1977 by Carl A. Sunshine [0] where he proposed a network architecture with no global unique addressing, no global routing, and no global naming. These three major axis of modern Internet censorship would fall apart.
David P. Reed, the designer of UDP, tried to push for larger role of source routing in the then nascent Internet architecture. But, somehow, it didn't reach what he had envisioned.
The 70's were a very interesting era on the research of networking fundamentals and I find it sad that such important topics like source routing weren't investigated much further in the following decades.
Shouldn't we somehow return to the fundamentals of networking to try to find ways of dealing with the censorship by the status quo against the natural need of sharing our digital culture in a free and anonymous way?
An example of a BITNET Relay session [0]:
/SIGNUP robert harper
* Thank you for signing up, robert harper.
* Now use the /SIGNON <nickname> command to
* establish a nickname and to logon Relay.
/SIGN ON rob
Welcome to the Inter Chat Relay Network, Rob.
Your host is RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland).
Your last logon was at 08:39:23 on 03/17/89.
There are 67 users on 27 relays.
/HELP
**************** Relay Commands ***************
/Bye . . . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
/Channel <num> . . . . .Change to channel <num>
/Contact <host-nick> . .Show Relay contact info
/Getop . . . . . Try to summon a Relay operator
/Help. . . . . . . . . . . . . Prints this list
/Info. . . . . . . . . . . Send RELAY INFO file
/Invite <nick> . . .Invite user to your channel
/Links . . . . . . . . . . .Shows active relays
/List. . . . . . . . . . . List active channels
/Msg <nick> <text> . . . .Sends private message
/Nick <newnick>. . . . . . Change your nickname
/Names <channel> . . . . .Show users with names
/Rates . . . . . . . . . .Display message rates
/Servers <node>. . . . Show relays serving node
/Signon <nick> <channel> . . . .Signon to Relay
/Signon <nick>,SHIFT . . Forces uppercase shift
/Signon <nick>,UNSHIFT . Forces lowercase shift
/Signoff . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay
/Signup <full name>. Signup or change full name
/Stats . . . . . . . . Display Relay statistics
/Summon <userid>@<node>. . Invite user to Relay
/Topic <subject> . . . . Topic for your channel
/Who <channel> . . . . Show users and nicknames
/WhoIs <nick>. . . . . . . .Identify a nickname
/LINKS
RELAY Version 01.24x0 Host RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland)
Relay RELAY @ CEARN ( Geneva ) -> Finland
Relay RELAY @ DEARN ( Germany ) -> Switzerland
Relay RELAY @ AEARN ( Austria ) -> Germany
Relay RELAY @CZHRZU1A ( Zurich ) -> Geneva
Relay RELAY @ HEARN ( Holland ) -> Geneva
Relay RELAY @TAUNIVM ( TAUrelay ) -> Geneva
Relay RELAY @EB0UB011 (Barcelona ) -> Geneva
Relay RELAY @ ORION (New_Jersey) -> Geneva
Relay RELAY @ BITNIC ( NewYork ) -> New_Jersey
Relay RELAY @JPNSUT10 ( Tokyo ) -> NewYork
Relay RELAY @ VILLVM (Philadelph) -> New_Jersey
Relay RELAY @NDSUVM1 (No_Dakota ) -> New_Jersey
Relay RLY @CORNELLC (Ithaca_NY ) -> New_Jersey
Relay RELAY @ UTCVM (Tennessee ) -> Pittsburgh
Relay RELAY @UIUCVMD (Urbana_IL ) -> Pittsburgh
Relay RELAY @CANADA01 ( Canada01 ) -> Ithaca_NY
Relay RELAY @ AUVM ( Wash_DC ) -> Va_Tech
Relay RELAY @ VTVM2 ( Va_Tech ) -> Ithaca_NY
Relay RELAY @UALTAVM ( Edmonton ) -> Canada01
Relay RELAY @NYUCCVM ( Nyu ) -> New_Jersey
Relay RELAY @ UWF (Pensacola ) -> Va_Tech
Relay MASRELAY@ UBVM ( Buffalo ) -> Ithaca_NY
Relay RELAY @CMUCCVMA (Pittsburgh) -> Ithaca_NY
Relay RELAY @PURCCVM ( Purdue ) -> Pittsburgh
Relay RELAY @UREGINA1 (Regina_Sk ) -> Canada01
Relay RELAY @ GITVM1 ( Atlanta ) -> Tennessee
What I see is that no amount of monitoring of the more radicalized elements of society will alter the deep and profound civilizational changes that are taking place in Europe.
This seems to be about the end of an era and the beginning of a whole new one. And nothing seems able to alter that course of History.
One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of (state) violence will
ever solve a (hard) math problem.
-- Jacob AppelbaumI always ask this to myself:
If we haven't been able to make our human civilizations sustainable here on
planet Earth (where we have the perfect conditions to do so), how will we
ever create sustainable environments in much harsher conditions such as on
the Moon or Mars ?I wonder if they will ever be able to ban steganography on ham radio. [1]
Another good example is Lynn Conway [1][2], that together with Carver Mead wrote "Introduction to VLSI System Design" bestseller that would catalyze the Mead & Conway revolution [3] in VLSI design in late 70's, early 80's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
[2] http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution
There is an interesting graph on how the block chain size has progressed over the years since Jan 2009 [1].
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...
Great point.
The original Usenet comp.mail.pine newsgroup post [1] by Mark Crispin (father of the IMAP protocol):
This statement is based upon a terrible misunderstand of Postel's
robustness principle. I knew Jon Postel. He was quite unhappy with
how his robustness principle was abused to cover up non-compliant
behavior, and to criticize compliant software.
Jon's principle could perhaps be more accurately stated as "in general,
only a subset of a protocol is actually used in real life. So, you should
be conservative and only generate that subset. However, you should also
be liberal and accept everything that the protocol permits, even if it
appears that nobody will ever use it."
It's pretty impressive how LEGO has changed its destiny in the last 10 years, given this: [1]
In 2003, The LEGO Group faced a budget deficit of 1.4 billion DKK (220 million
USD at then current exchange rates; equal to EUR 175 million),[40] causing
Poul Plougmann to be replaced by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen as president. In the
following year, almost one thousand employees were laid off, due to budget
cuts. However, in October, 2004, on reporting an even larger deficit,
Kristiansen also stepped down as president, while placing 800 million DKK of
his private funds into the company.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Group#Financial_resul...
[2] http://time.com/money/3268065/lego-largest-toy-company-matte...
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely
helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language
efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and
fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie (in "The Development of the C Language" [1])
Great point !
You raise a really interesting point about the relevance of Source Routing.
Recently I read a small but significant paper by Carl A. Sunshine [1] (from the beginning of 1977) about Source Routing and some of its implications. This was written at a time when there was still a very active community researching the fundamentals of Computer Networking.
He shows how one could build an even simpler and dumber (while still functional) core computer network with no routing infrastructure (pretty amazing concept when you think of it), no global addresses and no global node naming. All that complexity would be transferred to the endpoints, making the whole network even more configurable and adaptable to topology changes. Endpoints would have a more powerful and free participation in that network. The End-to-End Principle taken to its limits.
Is there still some deep fundamental research on the feasibility of such a large scale network based on Source Routing ?
[1] Source Routing in Computer Networks http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf
For those wishing to try and submit the problems, there is an online judge containing the ACM-ICPC World Finals since 2012 till 2015 [1].
A bit of UDP history by its creator [1]:
Actually, UDP was "un-designed" by me and others.By this I mean that
UDP was the final expression of a process that today we would call
"factoring" an overcomplex design. Originally, the ARPANET end-to-end
protocol NCP was a "kitchen sink" oriented toward providing remote
teletype-centric access using the "telnet" protocol and the "FTP"
protocol to remote machines over a packet network.
A group of us, interested in a mix of real-time telephony, local area
networks, distributed operating systems, and communications security,
argued for several years for a datagram based network, rather than a
virtual circuit based network. The group involved me, John Schoch and
Yogen Dalal of Xerox PARC, Danny Cohen of ISI (now at Caltech, I think),
and Steve Crocker, with Jon Postel as a supporter, and Vint Cerf and Bob
Kahn as neutral referees.
UDP was actually "designed" in 30 minutes on a blackboard when we decided
pull the original TCP protocol apart into TCP and IP, and created UDP on
top of IP as an alternative for multiplexing and demultiplexing IP
datagrams inside a host among the various host processes or tasks. But it
was a placeholder that enabled all the non-virtual-circuit protocols since
then to be invented, including encapsulation, RTP, DNS, ..., without having
to negotiate for permission either to define a new protocol or to extend
TCP by adding "features".
Thanks for that snapshot. Unfortunately it's missing a lot of the content that was available there. It's only around 1/3 of the full content.
That makes me remember the now famous quote:
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural
resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
-- Alan KaySome years before his death, Konrad Zuse wrote a book about his long and interesting life called "Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk", which was later translated to an English version titled as "The Computer - My Life".
Some trivia from Wikipedia [0]:
The movie Tron: Legacy, which revolves around a world inside a computer system,
features a character named Zuse [1], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse.
Giving expressive, meaningful, coherent and readable names to the entities used all the time in programming languages (variables, functions, procedures, classes, methods, etc) is an incredibly challenging task that in general doesn't seem to be acknowledged as such.
You can also read the original USENET post on comp.os.research here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI...
"You want it (the browser) to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101." -- Alan Kay
Back in 1994, this LEGO Technic set [1] impressed me beyond anything else related to toys until and after that time.
[1] http://www.leg-technic.hu/images/sets/6/lego-8880-super-car....
There is a quite interesting book where the author (John Day) shares an inside view about the OSI committees back in the 70's and 80's, and its endless discussions: "Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals" [1]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Network-Architecture-Fundamen...
"The movie Tron: Legacy [1], which revolves around a world inside a computer system, features a character named Zuse [2], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Zuse_Year_2010
Your point makes all sense and I totally agree with it. And it made me remember an old joke about programming languages of the future, through a fictional book cover: [1]
C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It was an impressive success on that challenge.
That means most of the decisions Dennis Ritchie (with the help of others) took when designing the language were the right ones for solving the problem at hand [1], otherwise the language wouldn't have survived as strongly as it did. [2]
[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.pdf
[2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
One day we will eventually realize that we are indeed traveling through space on "Spaceship Earth".