[HN Gopher] Are sockets the wave of the future? (1990)
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Are sockets the wave of the future? (1990)
Author : Lammy
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-05-07 22:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| ajaimk wrote:
| Can someone explain how Google Groups has posts from 1990?
| ChrisClark wrote:
| They bought all the Usenet archives, I forget what company it
| was though, Dejanews?
| smcameron wrote:
| It's (some of) the old DejaNews stuff.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| So many software solutions have promised to be the future and
| failed. If you write software with APIs that are a few years old
| already, you'll not have to worry about it.
| zwieback wrote:
| You still have to pick the right one of the older APIs, though.
| In the 90s there were plenty of other networking protocols and
| APIs to choose from but TCP/IP and sockets won out.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| Wow, some famous people on that thread:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Vogels
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer
|
| Jump out immediately, maybe there are others.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| To save anyone else the lookup, djb was not quite 19 yet :)
| zwieback wrote:
| That was the fun thing about Usenet back then - lots of open
| exchange between key people and anyone could join in (which
| eventually was its undoing).
| bigdict wrote:
| IRC is still like that.
| Lammy wrote:
| Meta: The "opposing arrows" icon is Expand All. Next to the
| Subscribe checkbox. It was non-obvious to me.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| For anyone needing context, STREAMS was SysV's competing API for
| I/O. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STREAMS
| JohnMakin wrote:
| so I'm guessing this response nailed why it didn't catch on:
|
| >Regardless of what the wave of the future is, presently if you
| write to the TLI interface you won't be able to compile your
| code on a socket-only system whereas if you use the socket
| interface you'll be portable to most TLI systems (since they
| usually come with socket interface libraries). If you aren't
| concerned about optimal efficiency, writing to the socket
| interface now would be more portable.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| My understanding was that the thinking at the time was that
| the IP family protocols (ie tcp, udp, etc) would soon be
| replaced by OSI protocols and the sockets api was too tightly
| coupled with IP protocols and so your applications would need
| more difficult upgrades in the future if you wrote them
| against sockets. But your quotation disagrees with that
| claim. I think part of the implied benefit of the epic
| library is that it would seamlessly transition when the new
| OSI protocols were used.
|
| Obviously, we now know that the OSI protocols didn't get used
| (unless you count ldap or x509 or everyone talking about
| layers all the time) and so the more flexible api was not
| required.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > The disadvantage is that you can't write programs like FTP
| or sendmail using the RPC protocol. Not programs that will
| interoperate with other FTP's and sendmails, at any rate.
|
| > While RPC is good for some things, it is not the answer to
| all the networking problems. Sometimes you just gotta write
| at a fairly low level to interoperate with other programs.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_Transport_Interface
| describes the (slight successor to) the TLI api mentioned and
| has a shallow comparison table to tcp.
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(page generated 2023-05-08 23:00 UTC)