From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 8443 invoked from network); 28 Jun 2022 16:11:30 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 28 Jun 2022 16:11:30 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFBE140CC9; Wed, 29 Jun 2022 02:11:16 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mta-202a.earthlink-vadesecure.net (mta-202a.earthlink-vadesecure.net [51.81.232.240]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id EB63840CC0 for ; Wed, 29 Jun 2022 02:11:12 +1000 (AEST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; bh=qUqe7mD8nnHslimglogccShfCvH32qMhc9gqsO oN/8E=; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=earthlink.net; h=from:reply-to:subject: date:to:cc:resent-date:resent-from:resent-to:resent-cc:in-reply-to: references:list-id:list-help:list-unsubscribe:list-subscribe:list-post: list-owner:list-archive; q=dns/txt; s=dk12062016; t=1656432672; x=1657037472; b=QPvJuvR/QKkmariCKUp/92+sdQQT3CdIqglhgsYfUs1fHlyf0AR+9RO Xym4XKR28kpVbDYwkwaPc3WNUCbREOibrwoTSnUNrvJ4ARv8eQwr/OGq2g5ORFQEbN4AXQO B0WMKDkFORqBIuh9IYHSPrIdw1KV2ntunXkybdV7I6MRJjXeTKrpFqIGGztthRhjnZaSILd BjDEKSCUIbADZaLRNQ25u5RBNZpn2aQVhs5WQnrwFnS0LfyRtZcZ5M690A7ctkcjdqtsIJr aT2htuHY7DtayIfO+81UkAr1N2M5Zh1bT6AfI6NLliUWcedRS8udM5a7BNK8Y6lVac7nQjw IUg== Received: from [192.168.1.93] ([47.14.68.45]) by smtp.earthlink-vadesecure.net ESMTP vsel2nmtao02p with ngmta id 031e2213-16fcd4bd2aa5aa6f; Tue, 28 Jun 2022 16:11:12 +0000 Message-ID: <4d26b9fe-a087-7e9f-9bb1-aa1a85bf39d5@earthlink.net> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2022 12:11:10 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.10.0 Content-Language: en-US References: <2803DC51-6CBC-4257-B40C-8A559C27CAE3@planet.nl> <20220625230939.GG19404@mcvoy.com> From: Tom Teixeira To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Authentication-Results: earthlink-vadesecure.net; auth=pass smtp.auth=tjteixeira@earthlink.net smtp.mailfrom=tjteixeira@earthlink.net; Message-ID-Hash: FAYQ6NR2O3XESRJBMEH7D5SU5BUMFDST X-Message-ID-Hash: FAYQ6NR2O3XESRJBMEH7D5SU5BUMFDST X-MailFrom: tjteixeira@earthlink.net X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Research Datakit notes List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On 6/28/22 8:45 AM, Rob Pike wrote: > One of the reasons I'm not a networking expert may be relevant here. > With networks, I never found an abstraction to hang my hat on. Unlike > with file systems and files, or even Unix character devices, which > provide a level of remove from the underlying blocks and sectors and > so on, the Unix networking interface always seemed too low-level and > fiddly, analogous to making users write files by managing the blocks > and sectors themselves. It could be all sockets' fault, but when I > hear networking people talk about the protocols and stacks and routing > and load shedding and ....my ears droop. I know it's amazing > engineering and all that, but why aren't we allowed to program the I/O > without all that fuss? What makes networks so _different_? A telling > detail is that the original sockets interface had send and recv, not > read and write. From day 1 in Unix land at least, networking was > special, and it remains so, but I fail to see why it needs to be. Two observations: At the time, I think everyone was searching for the right abstraction. I don't remember the whole talk, but just an anecdote by, I think, David Clark. I don't remember if this was just a seminar at MIT LCS or perhaps at SIGOPS. In any case, David talked about trying to get some database people to use the virtual memory and file systems abstractions that had been built by Multics. They agreed that these were nice abstractions, but in the mean time, "get out of our way and let us at the disk." Since networking developers and users were all searching for the right abstraction, and new hardware, protocols, and software interfaces were being proposed on what seemed like a weekly basis, many of the proposed interfaces tried to expose low level mechanisms as well as high level stream abstractions, preserving the hope that something like TCP could be implemented at user code level rather than the kernel. Secondly, I had to dig up a reference for the Chaosnet software (MIT AI memo 628 available at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/ai/AIM-628_chaosnet.pdf and probably other places). The Unix implementation used the rest of the path name to specify connection setup parameters in the typical case which seemed more unix-like than sockets. But the Chaosnet software was definitely swept away in the Ethernet/sockets storm surge.