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They don't get into it, but the AIM host infrastructure was based on the event-based non-blocking libraries written by Lippke. The host complex was a distribut
by lanstin 7y ago
They don't get into it, but the AIM host infrastructure was based on the event-based non-blocking libraries written by Lippke. The host complex was a distributed hash table (routed on relevant data, e.g. Screen name, ICQ number), with the extra step that you can migrate the in-memory state from one host to another while still taking incoming work. Quite a powerful infrastructure to build highly-available services. Only oddity is that you needed to have the clients (AIM clients and internal datacenter callers) have the ability to detach from one end point and re-attach to another end point when the bucket containing doing work for that client migrated to new hardware.
In the layer you were writing code, it was routed by the thing you hashed on, so it was sort of SDN like in its ability to separate the application state from the physical hardware. Amazingly good server technology. AOL had all kinds of cool tech - dynamically assigned (/24) subnets, IP Tunnels from the client, giant compression/caching farms that essentially cached all the static assets on the internet, etc. etc. In the 90s that is; those machines Eric was deploying onto were less powerful than your smart phone.
- djsumdog 7y agoThe early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even Yahoo and MSN) were over a decade ahead of that garbage before FB eventually caught up with having a messaging system that didn't suck ass. In fact most things Facebook did originally it did poorly: poor quality photo storage (Flickr offered high quality or even original quality for a fee), garbage messaging, etc. It eventually caught up after it got big, because everyone was already using it .. and all the other platforms lost market share or became niche.
- popz41 7y agoI believe messages were originally built on SMTP, then it moved to XMPP, then it all moved to MQTT
- benbristow 7y agoQuite an interesting thread posted last New Years here of how Facebook scale for demand at New Years Eve when everyone is sending Happy New Years messages at midnight https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741
- peterwwillis 7y agoAll these systems stay proprietary, and then others can't build on top of their previous work. Seemingly any "science" which is designed to make money gets locked up in intellectual property or patents and the state of the art never progresses. We have probably re-invented the exact same systems over the last 30 years, poorly, because companies are too bass-ackward to share their engineering work.
- icedchai 7y agoAIM was rock solid. It made me sad to see it go away a couple years back.
- danesparza 7y agoI love that you mention ICQ number and the article posits that "AOL Instant Messenger was where it all started". ICQ (the original chat client) was around for a full year before AIM launched.