Re: [9fans] datakit

[George Michaelson <ggm@apnic.net>]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:35:18 -0700 geoff@collyer.net wrote:

>The Math and CS Research Datakit nodes were taken out of service while
>I was at the Labs.  I was told that Datakit technology is used in the
>field, though I don't recall details.  It was expensive and the 1127
>folks seemed glad to be rid of it, though it certainly did seem to me
>to have some very desirable properties for a network.

which ones? (no really, I'm interested whats your initial bullet list on this,
because I suspect people don't converge as much as they think they do on them)

>
>Instead we now have IP running over dumb networks that guarantee us
>very little and for which the solution to every problem seems to be
>another protocol/RFC.  At least it's a full-employment act for
>programmers (or would be in a working economy).

Is this code for 'I do not support the current embodyment of the
end-to-end principle' (which is a very over-used concept, but I still
think has some merit)

because dumb networks seem to 'work better' for many measures, beyond the ones
about maintaining the cabal of alchemists who run them.

Datakit never made it offshore that I know. US telco technology which works
often does make it off shore (the Lucent 802.11 cards swept the pool here) -So
its hard for me to say if it had 'merit' as a platform.

Faced with the non-Internet technologies on offer at the time, I am heartily
glad we're not running LAT, or DECnet or a host of other 'smart' nets.

Most of the network technologies I've used wind up lying: they mask the data timing
constraints which they depend on to work (LAT) or they over-state their ability
to provide global addressing (DECNET) or they over-engineer the wrong bits (OSI)

To argue against myself (for once) its notable that a lot of people are now putting
back into the Internet the kinds of things (kludges?) it left out, to try and
get session-layer, presentation layer behaviours.

-George