Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

> the laptop thing in particular is
> always funny to me, because in practice it's very similar to that old
> situation where bell labs people had slow connections to their terminals
> at home. it's too bad ancient terminals weren't battery powered, or
> maybe the plan 9 gods would have already put some thought into this.

I believe this must have been a party trick mostly. They were likely
still required to show up in the office.

The latency of these connections was very good, so that's how I
explain their lack of optimizations in rio for limiting the amount of
roundtrips.
Or they used an older version that didn't have the very slow rio yet.
And obviously mostly everything was text back then, so no need to fix
the roundtrip-bottleneck for high bitrate media like images.

If they had our use-case, I don't know if they would have gone for the
kind of optimization that I have in mind, as this leads to diminishing
returns very fast. Fully meshed, non-centralized distributed systems
might be too juicy for them to ignore for solving this kind of
problem.