[HN Gopher] Are sockets the wave of the future? (1990) ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-08 23:00 UTC)