15 ms·
Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years
- alangibson 5y agoI got half a page of text then "To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in." Gopher is starting to look pretty good.
- kevincox 5y agoI doubt gopher would be any different. It is just better now because the users aren't trying to monetize it.
- netfortius 5y agoWhen someone starts an article with a protocol which has been among the first to be forbidden/blocked/tracked-and-shutdown-at-source, when possible/firewalled on any organization network, for the last 10 years, then I don't know what'd be the incentive to read any further :-(
- samhw 5y agoThat's fine: it doesn't suit their needs. No protocol is meant to be all things to all people, and every organisation has its own security posture and its own environment. I don't think any of that entails that FTP is somehow failing to fulfil its contract. Implementing transport encryption is not within its scope. It has to be run over a secure channel, which can easily be done with FTPS.
- lostfocus 5y agoThe fact that this is on medium dot com is rather funny.
- anaganisk 5y agoIts HTTP?
- yessirwhatever 5y agoI'm more tired of people writing on Medium than I am of modern web. To authors everywhere: Stop writing on medium.
- robertlagrant 5y agoWhere should they write that pays?
- yurishimo 5y agoHow much does medium pay? I didn’t even know that was an option!? Good ole Google Ads on a WordPress blog seems fine historically. At least substack loads fast…
- door103 5y agoNot everything needs to be about money. Software engineers get pretty absurd salaries already. Most of the high quality blogs I’ve seen are pro bono.
- convolvatron 5y agowriting is a craft. you need practice (which i'm really quite out of). writing is a power. even though literacy seem down - you can use this to make your point. not just to convince people, but to spark discussions that allow us to try to chip away to get to the underlying truth of the matter. face it - most of the authors on medium aren't really insightful or entertaining enough to get paid. there is plenty of room in society for open mic nights
- robertlagrant 5y agoWhy are you mentioning software engineers?
- matkoniecz 5y agoSubstack seems to be an option, is less user-hostile. Though I would not expect some piles of money unless you have an army of invested readers.
- AnnoyedComment 5y ago
- crawl_soever 5y agoHappy to see Gopher listed! We even have a HN portal on Gopher which is pretty well suited for the folder listing format. https://github.com/michael-lazar/hn-gopher https://github.com/michael-lazar/hn-gopher
- nunez 5y agoso happy to see that michael lazar wrote this. he also wrote rtv, a terminal reddit viewer, whose fork (tuir) i still use today.
- superkuh 5y agoYou don't have to use old clunky protocols to escape the commercial web. Just don't visit commercial websites designed by collectives using JS libraries. Disable JS by default and leave a site when nothing displays. There is plenty of good web buried under all the commercial crap. We don't have to abandon HTTP. That said, eternal-september.org is a great way to get back into usenet.
- EamonnMR 5y agoWhat groups (besides the obvious specific tech focused ones) are worth going on? I'm able to get on via sdf.org but I never actually found any engaging discussion.
- superkuh 5y agoI've been posting intermittently to alt.cyberpunk, alt.startrek, and alt.irc for a handful of years. It's slow, maybe a post a week, but when things happen it's a place to talk. Gotta be the change you want to see.
- madengr 5y agoMy first modem was 300 baud, through I believe 150 baud preceded that. I miss BBS and the old internet.
- timbit42 5y ago110 baud preceded 300 baud, then 1200 baud. Here is a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_spe...
- mmaunder 5y agoNewsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts. Telnet text based muds are one of my favorite things we used to have. You’d telnet to a host and play a text based game where you’re trying to make progress walking through a world solving puzzles.
- hrunt 5y ago> Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts. I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years. The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway. That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt's been years and I still angry about yEnc, lol. It suffers from all the same problems that UUEncode did, and that MIME had already solved. Using magic words in the body text as delineators, splitting parts using the subject line, it's terrible.
- nsonha 5y agoThe other day someone mentioned FTP and I asked them "what is that" because I have completely forgotten about FTP
- romwell 5y agoIt also happens to be a political slogan, so if it's mentioned out in the open, they probably don't mean the File Transfer Protocol.
- 300bps 5y agoThe connection speed varied from 1200 bits/s in the 80s to 56600 bits/s in the 90s As my username will attest to, 300 bps modems were very common in the 80s. I got my first one in 1985.
- wglb 5y agoYes. My first modem was 110. 300 was exciting, and 1200 was outrageous.
- icedchai 5y agoMy first modem was 1200, back in 1987. I got a 2400 in 1989. I remember upgrading to a 9600 baud modem in 1991. It was insane.
- kerneloftruth 5y agoI took a LISP class in graduate school in the late 1980s, and dialed up to their VAX on a 300 baud modem from my commodore 64. Ah 40 character lines crawling across the TV/monitor. It felt powerful!
- softwarebeware 5y agoThis article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive. The best use of the web, retro or modern, is when ordinary people share with each other in the open and on the same level. It's the commercialism and hierarchicalism that ruins everything.
- perryizgr8 5y ago> This article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive. None of the protocols discussed in TFA have anything to do with the web. In my opinion, www was created with a strong server client model, and was not as "democratic" as some of the other protocols prevalent at that time.
- forty 5y agoSpeaking of being tired of the modern web: I think HTTP/HTML are fine. However medium really sucks, can't everyone start hosting their webpages somewhere else? This is slow on my mobile (even with adblocker) and this "open in app" bar doesn't want to disappear even if it's bringing no value
- sammorrowdrums 5y agoI moved to write.as and it’s much more tailored to people who want to just share their blogs etc. like Medium was originally!
- almog 5y agoTheir free tier is invite-only for now though.
- mayanraisins 5y agoIt looks like they switched to invite-only this year. A client of mine would like to start blogging, and I was hoping to recommend the write.as free tier. I'd be interested to hear what other alternatives folks here recommend, or a write.as invite link from a paid user if anyone has one to spare.
- xigoi 5y agohttps://scribe.rip/ https://scribe.rip/
- savolai 5y agoThe ux with full size images or enlarging them onclick does not quite seem up to par. https://medium.com/interaction-reimagined/regular-expressions-you-can-read-a-new-visual-syntax-526c3cf45df1 https://medium.com/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression... https://scribe.rip/interaction-reimagined/regular-expressions-you-can-read-a-new-visual-syntax-526c3cf45df1 https://scribe.rip/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression...
- 5y ago
- anthony_romeo 5y agoI would make an important note on FTP: it’s not a secure protocol. The last time I cared about FTP, the recommendation was to move toward SFTP or FTPS for production/public environments for this reason.
- robertlagrant 5y agoIt's 100% not secure. I don't know much about FTPs, but I think I only trust sftp.
- anthony_romeo 5y agoMy understanding is that FTP/FTPS is analogous to HTTP/HTTPS but I left FTP for ssh long ago and never looked back.
- 123pie123 5y agocorrect, SFTP uses FTP over SSH
- tialaramex 5y agoNo. This is completely wrong in two different ways First: The parent was talking about FTPS, which is the FTP protocol spoken over TLS, similar to how HTTPS can be HTTP/1.1 spoken over TLS Second: SFTP is not FTPS, and it also isn't FTP spoken over SSH. Instead. SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH which, like FTP, is concerned with file transfers, but matches what its authors actually wanted from file transfers in the modern era, rather the concerns FTP had decades ago.
- 123pie123 5y agonot sure I fully understand your comment, I said correct as my first statement agreeing with the parent and thus your explaination (ie FTPS is FTP over TLS) at what point did I mention that FTPS is SFTP?? my comment regarding SFTP was in reference to the parents comment >but I left FTP for ssh long ago and never looked back. but you're correct that >SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH
- 300bps 5y agoOne protocol I didn’t see mentioned but I still use every day is IRC. It’s one of the best ways to get new files today and been around since 1988.
- diegocg 5y agoSo, basically: (mostly) dead protocols. That is precisely why they don't need to change. Protocols that are used widely are those who have no option but to change in order to adapt to real world problems
- Apreche 5y agoAnyone interested in using old protocols should check out Project Gemini. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ It's still obviously very small, but Gemini space is growing.
- nu11ptr 5y agoMisleading title I think. I assumed these were protocols in wide use that did not require changing because they were so well designed. Instead, this is about old protocols that didn't change...because nobody uses them anymore. That said, it is an interesting retro blast from the past. As someone who cut their teeth during the BBS and early days of the web, it always brings back nostalgia. Computers were just more fun back then IMO.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoNo one uses newsgroups anymore? Hmm, well, I guess I don’t use them for their chatting purposes, but they are very much alive for file transfer.
- smokey_circles 5y agoI maintain a usenet subscription because the file transfer and search mechanisms are incredibly relevant today. There is a yuge amount of data still pushed around on the usenet. Which is not-so-coincedentally related to media formats and sizes (yarr)
- anthk 5y agoCheck Usenet and comp.misc plus the comp.lang* hier.
- nu11ptr 5y agoInteresting - I honestly didn't know Usenet was still in use.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SkipperCat 5y agoThey left out BGP, one of my favorite routing protocols! There's still a bunch of ancient routing protocols out there. They work pretty well, so I guess you can't argue with success.
- kazen44 5y agobgp has changed a ton however. with new additions to the protocol happening nearly yearly.
- rayhaanj 5y agoYup, even the BGP-4 RFC 4271 is from 2006 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4271 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4271
- kazen44 5y agoalso, BGP-MP added so many new options with regards to NLRI that it can be used for many, many different use cases. For instance, BGP can be used as an mac learning mechanism (EVPN), It can be used to communicate MPLS LSP's, it can even be used for source routing.
- stevekemp 5y agoVery true! Also another omission was "finger" - although I guess that isn't used so often these days..
- cblconfederate 5y agoWould be nice to see a new version of irc but it's going so slowly...
- rvba 5y agoFirefox depreciated FTP and in fact completely stopped supporting it. Sad.
- chasil 5y agoIt would be nice if that could be reimplemented as an extension.
- Jonovono 5y agoMy long (long) term plan of my browser (https://wapps.app https://wapps.app) is to bring us back to something similar to Gopher. First I want to make browsing web apps feel as good as browsing an app. Then I want to make it better. To do that I want to 'translate' the HTML into a common structure and create UI that can be similar across websites and rendered in a clean, easy to navigate way. Not sure if that makes sense. Join our Discord if you want to chat more about it (https://join.wapps.app https://join.wapps.app)
- erwincoumans 5y agoDoes anyone remember internet relay chat, IRC, with its channels? It is still here today as well.
- herodoturtle 5y ago/me slaps erwincoumans around with a large trout
- erwincoumans 5y ago/whois herodoturtle :)
- theonemind 5y agomIRC users. Pfft.
- herodoturtle 5y agoI was 11, our home PC ran “Windows 3.11 for Workgroups”, and mIRC was my gateway to a career in software. That, and reverse engineering GORILLA.BAS :-) These days I use irssi, so am completely out of touch with mIRC. Why the “Pfft”?
- theonemind 5y agoAn echo of a narrow slice of time. For a while, you could /ctcp version a channel and ircII would outnumber mIRC 10:1 (then obviously, less as time went on) and mIRC didn't have any scripting capabilities at all (mIRC < 4, I think, maybe < 3) compared to pretty good scripting capabilities for ircII! ircII scripting felt vaguely C inspired, and mIRC's scripting definitely felt foreign to the UNIX/IRC culture it got attached to. I never got seriously into scripting mIRC, and the mental model might have changed, but draft 1 of adding scripting into mIRC definitely had that Rasmus Lerdorf "I don't know how to make a language at all, I'm just making something work" feel, whereas ircII scripting felt vaguely coherent from a C-ish background. Very old impressions, and mIRC scripting might've gotten good in later versions. The earliest versions of mIRC scripting definitely felt very weird.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- btdmaster 5y agoMost of those are supported by curl, just prepend e.g. telnet:// gopher:// and ftp:// to the URL!
- hliyan 5y agoIs it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)? After 25 years on the web, I'm starting to feel format fatigue so much that I actually cherish reading man pages and internet RFCs on the terminal (and even occasionally reading web pages on lynx).
- q-big 5y ago> Is it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)? Just do it and post a reference implementation of a server and a client (assuming this is the architecture that you want to use), and the protocol specifications somewhere.
- skybrian 5y agoDo you know about the Gemini protocol?
- anthk 5y agoAnd Gopher.
- hliyan 5y agoQuite coincidentally, I found an example of just the type of experience I prefer in a neighboring HN post (SPADE): https://asciinema.org/a/bG7PPKj0AaJq087ZNPxSZwcCl https://asciinema.org/a/bG7PPKj0AaJq087ZNPxSZwcCl
- fimdomeio 5y agoI did this just as a way to put an idea to code. It's very rough. Web for cli only. Web 0.5 https://tilde.pt/~fimdomeio/index2.html https://tilde.pt/~fimdomeio/index2.html
- peter303 5y agoThis was done long ago. I forget the name, but there was a browser that only rendered the text parts. It was useful on slow modems or text-only screens.
- romwell 5y agoAn even more noteworthy protocol is MIDI[1], which has been virtually unchanged since its introduction in 1981, and is still the way that electronic musical instruments and software talk to each other. MIDI-over-USB has been popular for a while, but we're seeing a resurgence of "classical" MIDI over serial with the current synthesizer renaissance. And of course it's all the same on the software side. Note on: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
- ReleaseCandidat 5y agoBad timing, MIDI 2.0 has been officially published (almost exactly) 2 years ago. https://www.midi.org/specifications/midi-2-0-specifications https://www.midi.org/specifications/midi-2-0-specifications
- SeanLuke 5y agoI'm not sure this counts. Their similarity in name notwithstanding, MIDI 2.0 is explicitly a different protocol from MIDI 1.0. It's not meant to replace it, but to exist in parallel with it. Which is good because I suspect it's doomed. Anyway, MIDI 1.0 is still a standard protocol.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y agoIt will take some years. As of now no bigger DAW supports MIDI 2.0 AFAIK, which is also because almost no 2.0 devices exist (Roland's A 88 MKII is the only one I know of).
- speed_spread 5y agoMIDI 2.0 is the IPv6 of synths. The installed base of original MIDI is huge and the advantages of 2.0 are not immediately obvious, unless you have very specific needs such as microtonality. It might take 10 years for 2.0 to reach critical mass, if all vendors adopt it _en masse_, but there is no reason for it to "fail" outright.
- 5y ago
- wglb 5y agoBbs is not a protocol;ftp certainly is, as is gopher, NNTP is. Disappointed that NTP is not listed as it may well be the oldest continuously running protocol.
- mickael-kerjean 5y agoAnother article which mention both FTP and Dropbox. The infamous top comment on the Dropbox HN launch back is what led me down the rabbit hole of building a Dropbox like UI for FTP: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash FTP is amazing on so many perspective. About a month ago, I crawled the entire IPv4 range looking for anonymous FTP and found about 200k of them. As I wanted to publish the results and provide a way to get through those servers, I ended up building crawlers but quickly stopped as the sheer amount of movies, series, music I found would have been more problems than it's worth.
- whoibrar 5y agoreally interesting, thanks for commenting
- nobody9999 5y ago>As I wanted to publish the results and provide a way to get through those servers, Lists of the contents of Anonymous FTP servers have been produced since at least the 1980s. And in fact, they still exist: http://fy.chalmers.se/OLDUSERS/ivi/ftpsites2.html http://fy.chalmers.se/OLDUSERS/ivi/ftpsites2.html http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_docs/ftp/part1.html http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do... Back in the day, you'd download updated lists to find the stuff you were looking for. Because that was how you found stuff. Although there wasn't a lot of video or music out there on the public anon FTP servers. That was before Archie[0] and Veronica[1] and, of course, websites. Apparently, there was a discussion[2] about this here back in 2016, as well. I have fond memories of wuarchive.wustl.edu, simtel20.army.mil[3] and a bunch of other FTP sites I can't remember 30+ years later. A good topic. Thanks for posting it. Perhaps you should publish your list, or stand up an Archie server for it. I'd use it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel
- pkulak 5y agoI really expected to see email on that list.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/eGqxU https://archive.is/eGqxU
- _8j50 5y agoBalance is key in my opinion both for protocol and programming language standards. Decades is too long and months is too fast irrespective of use-case. I can see javascript,python updating every few years and once or twice a decade for HTTP,SMTP,SSH,Rust,C++. But that's just my opinion, what I stand firmly on is avoidance of extremes in either end.
- fckthisguy 5y agoI completely agree. The one-year release cadence for JS has been amazing and it's a much-needed improvement over the one every few years model they used to follow. More importantly though, I think JS has really benefitted from small improvement scopes: there's only a few new features that really matter ever year. That, along with clear roadmaps leading up to a release have made adopting new features easy.
- hyperman1 5y agoFor years I wondered about the insanity of the FTP protocol. Why take random ports at both sides? Did they hate firewalls? Some day, someone explained this allows for a client(with low bandwith) to setup a transfer between 2 servers(high bandwith) with the data not moving through the client. I've never seen this usage and don't know any ftp package supporting this, but it's pretty neat nevertheless.
- com2kid 5y ago> For years I wondered about the insanity of the FTP protocol. Why take random ports at both sides? Did they hate firewalls? Simpler answer: because Firewalls didn't exist at the time!
- InvaderFizz 5y agoNot sure if that is why the multiport setup, but the process you are describing is called FXP[0]. I used it quite a bit back in the late 90s. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Lammy 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashFXP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashFXP supports it.
- pavlov 5y agoAnother one of those weird Wikipedia trip articles that starts out rambling in a way that would never pass the “no original research” test today, then hits you out of the blue in the last paragraph with a matter-of-fact statement.
- throw0101a 5y agoLFTP supports this on the CLI: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp * http://lftp.yar.ru/features.html http://lftp.yar.ru/features.html See also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_FTP_client_software#Protocol_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_FTP_client_softw...
- rcarmo 5y ago...most of telco. Seriously, mainstream stuff is interesting and all, but there are hundreds of protocols needing a retrofit (or actually being re-encapsulated in TCP) in that industry.
- elb2020 5y agoAnother ancient but still supported protocol is the finger protocol. For the current weather on the South Pole, try this from the command line: finger south_pole@graph.no Or, if you want the weather in Boston, Massachusetts, try: finger boston@graph.no
- DHPersonal 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) I think it was Carmack who introduced me to that protocol through a dev talk, if my memory is correct.
- mnd999 5y agoStill not massively convinced HTTP needed to progress beyond 1.1. I’m sure someone at Google got a promotion out of it though.
- tialaramex 5y agoPretty early on it becomes apparent that you'd quite like to fetch more than one resource. In 1992 you're fetching one page of HTML markup or maybe a file somebody linked, but by 1995 you're definitely fetching a picture of the author's cat and the logo of the organisation they work for. Maybe there is a little animated GIF explaining that the page is under construction. Today obviously most documents on the web have lots of resources ("Under construction" GIFs are gone, but pictures of the author's cat are still very much a thing, now joined by audio and video, style and of course scripts). Obviously one thing you can do is, for every resources spin up a new HTTP connection to the remote server. These connections have no relationship to each other, so that's a bunch of extra overhead but nevertheless your browser today will probably try to do this several times per server. Still that's pretty inadequate, surely we can do better? So, OK, HTTP/1.1 also has keep-alive. We can re-use connections, ask for a resource, wait until that's delivered, then fetch another one. But notice this is strictly sequential. If you're a Unix person it's natural to try the next idea for HTTP, pipelining. Don't wait until things are delivered, just ask for everything you want, surely the remote server will provide one at a time, reading your next request, serving that, then the next one and so on, right? But for 1990s server programmers excited by threads this doesn't work. Their server has one thread gathering requests, and for each request it spawns a thread to provide the answer. If I try to pileline my HTTP requests I get muddled nonsense back from their server. Sometimes. Is that forbidden by the HTTP specification. Sure. Did it happen anyway? Yes. So your browser does not use pipelining in HTTP/1.1 Also, this suffers head-of-line blocking. If I request CreditCardStatement19960402.pdf and you must send a tape robot to retrieve that, too bad, even though I also wanted bankname.jpeg and hideousfont.css I can't retrieve those because I'm waiting for CreditCardStatement19960402.pdf. The network is idle while we wait for the robot. Google's servers and Google's browser spoke SPDY back in the day, which fixes a bunch of this. That doesn't exist any more because HTTP/2 was standardised and has the same fixes plus other stuff, some of which proved very useful, other things not so much. Only one way to find out.
- IronWolve 5y agoI was also sad that RLE graphics never took off, it was great way to get black and white photos over a slow modem. Wonder what a unicode based rle gfx format would look like.
- unnouinceput 5y agoSMTP anyone? I mean is still very much used, though it got extended, but you can definitely use the old one and BigCo will accept your email.
- bullen 5y agoSMTP(1971), ETHERNET(1973), IP(1974), UDP(1980), TCP&DNS(1983), HTTP&BGP(1989), DHCP(1993)
- Ekaros 5y agoI wouldn't honestly put HTTP on that list. Latest RFC is from 2014 and even the 1.1 was from 1997.
- tommica 5y agoI'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but 1997 was 25 years ago... Of course it is not the same as 30, but it is quite close
- cryptonector 5y agoThose are old, but they've been modified a lot over the years, including recently. TFA is about protocols that haven't changed in decades.