13 ms·

“I survived the TCP transition” (2013)

175 points by agomez314 4y ago

agomez314 4y ago
Some background: new leadership at ARPANET demanded all hosts to switch from the old protocol (NCP) to the new one developed by Cerf and Kahn (TCP). This change caught many by surprise, and the migration was a long and painful one for teams. "The transition from NCP to TCP was done in a great rush...occupying virtually everyone's time 100% in the year 1982. Nobody was ready" (Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press 1999)
jvanderbot 4y ago
Off topic: I met Vint Cerf at a Keck Institute for Space Studies [1] workshop on computing infrastructure in deep space. He was knowledgeable, energetic, funny, and volunteered to take notes for an all-day working session. The goal was to lay out requirements and benefits of flying servers to orbit around distant bodies for on-site analysis. You can get a lot of data from cameras, but you can't send nearly any of it back, so do interactive data reduction on site, right? He was at Google Loon at the time, working on their delay-tolerant networking & dynamic routing for their baloon-internet architecture. He's been super active in the NASA community working on their delay-tolerant networking architecture. The whole stack is really beautiful. In space, you know when nodes are coming over the horizon because they are in regular orbit, so you can plan routes for the future using "contact-graph routing", and use store-and-forward to massively increase throughput. (e.g., orbiters hold data automatically until they are in sight of the next hop). Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though :) JPL has an open-source implementation maintained by Scott Burleigh, another really neat person, and I think JHU/APL does too. [2] Anyway. The guy is smart, sure, but he's also immediately influential: You can't help but agree with him when he pushes these simple, effective ideas naturally. 1. https://kiss.caltech.edu/ https://kiss.caltech.edu/ 2. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  He gave a talk at a company I used to work at on the history of the internet and his thoughts on its future, it was really cool to listen to him talk on these subjects!
  - nominusllc 4y ago
    I'd love to see a video of this. Unfortunately archive.org is drawing a blank on this name. Do you perhaps have a link you can share to slides or video?
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      It was an internal lecture at IOHK, a crypto company [0]. I don’t work in the field anymore but IOHK was very fun for the chance to listen to people like Cerf, Leslie, Wolfson, etc. [0] https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg
      - nominusllc 4y ago
        Thanks!
- jedberg 4y ago
  > Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though Why do we take this for granted? I understand the laws of physics and all, but 120 years ago we didn't think humans could fly through the air, and now we have a million+ humans flying every day, and occasionally one goes to outer space. Why do we consider communication faster than the speed of light so unbreakable?
  - fbanon 4y ago
    120 years ago we knew that some things can fly, because we saw birds. We just had to figure out how to do the same with humans. On the other hand, we have never encountered anything in nature that goes faster than the speed of light. That's a pretty good hint that it's impossible to do so.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    "The speed of light" is probably not what you think it is. This constant, c, is actually about how time (one of our four dimensions, often labelled t) is related to the three spatial dimensions (often x, y, z). Light goes that fast (in a vacuum) because from the light's point of view that's how those dimensions are related, it's not really a "speed limit" it's up against, any more than you'd consider it a "time limit" that hours have sixty minutes in them. The light is just moving through time as well as space, and that's how it has to work. So, because it's about the relationship between time and space, what you're talking about with "faster than light" is actually a time machine. Now, you might notice that before the aeroplane there were birds (and bats, and insects, but lets focus on birds). Clearly flying is possible, a sparrow can do it. But you may have noticed from the lack of time travelling visitors that time travel does not seem to be possible.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      I knew that about the speed of light (but thank you for writing it out). My knowledge of entanglement is limited, but haven't we observed entangled particles seemingly communicate faster than light? While time travel may not be possible, maybe time traveling data is?
aebtebeten 4y ago
Obligatory t-shirt pairing: https://www.rightontheline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Screenshot-2019-03-12-at-16.28.56.png https://www.rightontheline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Sc...
- googlryas 4y ago
  Never thought I'd see Cerf in a t-shirt. I just assumed he was born and would die in a 3-piece. The man made POTUS look like a schlub when he accepted his Medal of Freedom.
- shagie 4y ago
  (dig dig dig...) The original tweet for any who want that link is https://twitter.com/webfoundation/status/1105425858913816576 https://twitter.com/webfoundation/status/1105425858913816576 (scroll, scroll... oh neat) The back of the shirt is https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1105467776477679616 https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1105467776477679616
AdamH12113 4y ago
Needs a (2013). The article was posted on January 1, 2013, the 30-year anniversary of the deadline for ARPANET nodes to switch over to TCP. The next New Year's Day will thus be the 40th anniversary.
- agomez314 4y ago
  added. Thanks!
kerblang 4y ago
[Cue 32-bit IP snark] blah
- dboreham 4y ago
  The transition to IPv6 basically spanned my entire career (in networking, I had a previous career as a hardware engineer). My first task was to participate in the IPNg mailing list because the company I had just joined had an OSI stack, and one of the NG proposals was to bolt TCP on top of OSI's lower layers (TUBA). And this morning I spent some time on the phone to my ISP asking when/if they will roll out IPv6 in my area. 30 year span.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    In 1994 I was talking to my colleagues about IPv6 and they asked how soon we would need to start transitioning. "Not this year," I said. "Maybe think about it next year in the budgeting process."
    - bombcar 4y ago
      IPv6 will roll out finally in 2049 or something, and immediately be replaced with IPv10.
      - xvilka 4y ago
        Why not IPv8?
        bombcar 4y ago
        IPv7-9 will meet the same fate (or worse!) as IPv5 did.
    - Bluecobra 4y ago
      I believe that was around the time BGP migrated from v3 to v4 (CIDR support). It's pretty neat that change got pushed through so quickly. Granted the Internet was much smaller then (< 1500 AS's and 20K routes). Makes you think if work on IPv6 started earlier everyone could have migrated over in one swoop.
VictorPath 4y ago
In thanks for his decades of work getting the Internet going, Postel spent the months before he died getting trashed by anonymous government officials in the Washington Post and elsewhere.
- rospaya 4y ago
  Why was that?
  - fanf2 4y ago
    There was a huge controversy over governance of the Internet, in particular the DNS, because it had become clear that Network Solutions had been handed a licence to print money as the monopoly controller of the DNS, and they were providing very poor service (filling in forms over email, very slow response times, $100 fees) and inconsistent enforcement of decency rules. Part of the response was the IAHC which came up with the template for the fix: break up the monopoly by splitting registries and registrars, force Network Solutions to relinquish some of its TLDs, and create more TLDs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC This was not immediately successful, until Postel (as IANA) instructed the root DNS operators (other than Network Solutions) to get the root zone from IANA instead of from NetSol. This caused an epic shitfest, as a result of which Postel reverted the root zone change, and the US NTIA got moving and started the foundation of ICANN. The company now known as Verisign is the direct successor of NetSol, and they still control .com and .net, and feed the root zone to the other root server operators.
    - jamal-kumar 4y ago
      Does anyone else remember when Verisign ran that sketchy ringtone company (Think crazy frog, schnuffel bunny, etc)? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba!
zwieback 4y ago
I started my coding career in the early 90s and at that time there were a buttload of non-TCP network protocols running on small computers (Macs, PCs, etc.) Netware, LANtastic, AppleTalk, Netbios stuff... Even though they all had something going for them I'm glad they have been steamrollered by TCP/IP
- kuon 4y ago
  IPX worked very well for LAN games, it required no configuration. Compared to how difficult it is to play together now (steam friends. xbox...), it was much better. Of course it had drawbacks, but for that it was great.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    That's just LAN play dying off in favor of (routeable) Internet play. If developers wanted to they could add IP LAN play to games, but there's just not enough demand.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The assumption is that if you're on an IP network, you already have addresses, etc (because you're routable to the internet). IPX/SPX worked without that assumption; it was bog simple to find some IPX cards, shove them in the computers, connect them, and go, even if you knew nothing. The closest for TCP/IP would be to support gaming over link-local links (those 169.* addresses) but everything is assumed to be on the internet now. And if you have TCP/IP for the internet, rarely do you care or need anything else for local comms.
      - jandrese 4y ago
        You could also do it over multicast. The big downside is that if some people are on WiFi then they'll be reduced down to 802.11b speed. A better solution would be to do server/player discovery via multicast and then stitch up unicast links for the actual gameplay.
dn3500 4y ago
It was almost a non-event for us. I was at a university computer science lab. We were already running tcp/ip before the transition on our Vaxes. We had a TOPS-20 system but rather than transition it, we just retired it. We made very little use of the relay services.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I vaguely recall at the time an email was sent out at Wesleyan mentioning they had cut over to the new system. IIRC they switched TOPS-20 to VMS around that time but I don't think it was related.
thatoneguy 4y ago
Meanwhile, Windows 95 didn’t install TCP/IP by default when setting up a new network card. It was such a problem in the late ‘90s / early ‘00s still that it was an interview question for my university dial-up support job.
- bombcar 4y ago
  That was right around the time of the Internet Memo of fame. At the time '95 came out it was HIGHLY argued what would take off (and for awhile it seemed AOL/CompuServe were winning). But the writing was already on the wall.
- glonq 4y ago
  Ah, fond memories http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/tcpip9x.html http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/tcpip9x.html It sucked less than fooling around with Trumpet Winsock on Win3.1 though!
arky22 4y ago
arky22 4y ago
- davidwihl 4y ago
samstave 4y ago
"Hi, I'd like to have a TCP transition." "Hello, would you like to have a TCP transition?" "Yes, I'd like to have a TCP transition." "OK, I'll get you a TCP transition." "Ok, I will have a TCP transition." "Are you ready to have a TCP transition?" "Yes, I am ready to have a TCP transition." Network Error (tcp_Error)
_ea1k 4y ago
The parenthesis in the title confused me. What transition happened in 2013? Oh, the article was from 2013 but was about something that happened in 1982.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  That's a HN convention. In titles, "(XXXX)" at the end means "published in XXXX".
elurg 4y ago
So when is everybody transitioning to QUIC?
- cpurdy 4y ago
  HTTP/3 has just been finalized as a standard this year, so I'd guess we'll start to see it be adopted maybe in 2028 or so It will be easy to add support on the back end (at least for any software that already supports HTTP/2). So adoption will be limited by the front end. Adoption may come sooner, but only if telcos and phone makers both agree that it will help them. (Mobile currently represents ~75% of web usage, and still growing.)
jamal-kumar 4y ago
There's an angle on all of this which I always thought was pretty interesting (Considering they only managed to update a consolidated TCP RFC in the past week especially): "At one of the quarterly meetings Vint Cerf came in and dropped a bombshell on us: he said TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction, or at least my reaction, was 'Wait: it's not done yet. We have this long list of things we still have to figure out'," Haverty recalled in his speech. The technology was out of developers' hands before they felt ready to let it go. Haverty said the teams he worked with always expected to fix and polish their work – not just build on top of what he referred to as an "experiment." "There's all sorts of operational issues that we went through and developed but they haven't made it into the real world,” he said. [1] [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_hard/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_ha...
throwaway787544 4y ago
We will have to abandon TCP eventually. We can't keep using the same protocol for 100 years. We should think about the next generation stack, what we would ideally like to solve, and not just tiny little incremental changes that preserve legacy design quirks. But sadly it's in the hands of industry rather than researchers and practitioners.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Why? IPv6 enabled the address range. In the TCP space alternatives exists (UDP/Quick). I do not believe TCP will be replaced. The only thing which surely will be replaced are the routing exchange protocols like BGP with all the shenanigans happening there. If you believe in space colonialism then there will be some kind of message oriented layer on top to deal with the latencies (think universal SMTP or something).
  - throwaway787544 4y ago
    There's a lot of limitations within those protocols that just make things unnecessarily difficult and limit functionality. Port numbers and the lack of logical service names, lack of routing across disparate unroutable routes, lack of carrying forward/back diagnosis of network segments, etc. HTTP as an additional transport protocol is a shitty hack that people use to work around some of those issues but more remain.
    - oaiey 4y ago
      Makes all sense but not enough to migrate away from TCP. Half of the things can be also solved by higher level services (and lower than HTTP).

175 points by agomez314 4y ago

Some background: new leadership at ARPANET demanded all hosts to switch from the old protocol (NCP) to the new one developed by Cerf and Kahn (TCP). This change caught many by surprise, and the migration was a long and painful one for teams. "The transition from NCP to TCP was done in a great rush...occupying virtually everyone's time 100% in the year 1982. Nobody was ready" (Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press 1999)

jvanderbot 4y ago

Off topic: I met Vint Cerf at a Keck Institute for Space Studies [1] workshop on computing infrastructure in deep space. He was knowledgeable, energetic, funny, and volunteered to take notes for an all-day working session. The goal was to lay out requirements and benefits of flying servers to orbit around distant bodies for on-site analysis. You can get a lot of data from cameras, but you can't send nearly any of it back, so do interactive data reduction on site, right? He was at Google Loon at the time, working on their delay-tolerant networking & dynamic routing for their baloon-internet architecture. He's been super active in the NASA community working on their delay-tolerant networking architecture. The whole stack is really beautiful. In space, you know when nodes are coming over the horizon because they are in regular orbit, so you can plan routes for the future using "contact-graph routing", and use store-and-forward to massively increase throughput. (e.g., orbiters hold data automatically until they are in sight of the next hop). Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though :) JPL has an open-source implementation maintained by Scott Burleigh, another really neat person, and I think JHU/APL does too. [2] Anyway. The guy is smart, sure, but he's also immediately influential: You can't help but agree with him when he pushes these simple, effective ideas naturally. 1. https://kiss.caltech.edu/ https://kiss.caltech.edu/ 2. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/

EddySchauHai 4y ago
He gave a talk at a company I used to work at on the history of the internet and his thoughts on its future, it was really cool to listen to him talk on these subjects!
- nominusllc 4y ago
  I'd love to see a video of this. Unfortunately archive.org is drawing a blank on this name. Do you perhaps have a link you can share to slides or video?
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    It was an internal lecture at IOHK, a crypto company [0]. I don’t work in the field anymore but IOHK was very fun for the chance to listen to people like Cerf, Leslie, Wolfson, etc. [0] https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg https://youtu.be/PvmreRAlHMg
    - nominusllc 4y ago
      Thanks!
jedberg 4y ago
> Nothing you can do about latency, with speed of light and all that though Why do we take this for granted? I understand the laws of physics and all, but 120 years ago we didn't think humans could fly through the air, and now we have a million+ humans flying every day, and occasionally one goes to outer space. Why do we consider communication faster than the speed of light so unbreakable?
- fbanon 4y ago
  120 years ago we knew that some things can fly, because we saw birds. We just had to figure out how to do the same with humans. On the other hand, we have never encountered anything in nature that goes faster than the speed of light. That's a pretty good hint that it's impossible to do so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 4y ago
  "The speed of light" is probably not what you think it is. This constant, c, is actually about how time (one of our four dimensions, often labelled t) is related to the three spatial dimensions (often x, y, z). Light goes that fast (in a vacuum) because from the light's point of view that's how those dimensions are related, it's not really a "speed limit" it's up against, any more than you'd consider it a "time limit" that hours have sixty minutes in them. The light is just moving through time as well as space, and that's how it has to work. So, because it's about the relationship between time and space, what you're talking about with "faster than light" is actually a time machine. Now, you might notice that before the aeroplane there were birds (and bats, and insects, but lets focus on birds). Clearly flying is possible, a sparrow can do it. But you may have noticed from the lack of time travelling visitors that time travel does not seem to be possible.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    I knew that about the speed of light (but thank you for writing it out). My knowledge of entanglement is limited, but haven't we observed entangled particles seemingly communicate faster than light? While time travel may not be possible, maybe time traveling data is?

aebtebeten 4y ago

Obligatory t-shirt pairing: https://www.rightontheline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Screenshot-2019-03-12-at-16.28.56.png https://www.rightontheline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Sc...

googlryas 4y ago
Never thought I'd see Cerf in a t-shirt. I just assumed he was born and would die in a 3-piece. The man made POTUS look like a schlub when he accepted his Medal of Freedom.
shagie 4y ago
(dig dig dig...) The original tweet for any who want that link is https://twitter.com/webfoundation/status/1105425858913816576 https://twitter.com/webfoundation/status/1105425858913816576 (scroll, scroll... oh neat) The back of the shirt is https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1105467776477679616 https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1105467776477679616

AdamH12113 4y ago

Needs a (2013). The article was posted on January 1, 2013, the 30-year anniversary of the deadline for ARPANET nodes to switch over to TCP. The next New Year's Day will thus be the 40th anniversary.

agomez314 4y ago
added. Thanks!

kerblang 4y ago

[Cue 32-bit IP snark] blah

dboreham 4y ago
The transition to IPv6 basically spanned my entire career (in networking, I had a previous career as a hardware engineer). My first task was to participate in the IPNg mailing list because the company I had just joined had an OSI stack, and one of the NG proposals was to bolt TCP on top of OSI's lower layers (TUBA). And this morning I spent some time on the phone to my ISP asking when/if they will roll out IPv6 in my area. 30 year span.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  In 1994 I was talking to my colleagues about IPv6 and they asked how soon we would need to start transitioning. "Not this year," I said. "Maybe think about it next year in the budgeting process."
  - bombcar 4y ago
    IPv6 will roll out finally in 2049 or something, and immediately be replaced with IPv10.
    - xvilka 4y ago
      Why not IPv8?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        IPv7-9 will meet the same fate (or worse!) as IPv5 did.
  - Bluecobra 4y ago
    I believe that was around the time BGP migrated from v3 to v4 (CIDR support). It's pretty neat that change got pushed through so quickly. Granted the Internet was much smaller then (< 1500 AS's and 20K routes). Makes you think if work on IPv6 started earlier everyone could have migrated over in one swoop.

VictorPath 4y ago

In thanks for his decades of work getting the Internet going, Postel spent the months before he died getting trashed by anonymous government officials in the Washington Post and elsewhere.

rospaya 4y ago
Why was that?
- fanf2 4y ago
  There was a huge controversy over governance of the Internet, in particular the DNS, because it had become clear that Network Solutions had been handed a licence to print money as the monopoly controller of the DNS, and they were providing very poor service (filling in forms over email, very slow response times, $100 fees) and inconsistent enforcement of decency rules. Part of the response was the IAHC which came up with the template for the fix: break up the monopoly by splitting registries and registrars, force Network Solutions to relinquish some of its TLDs, and create more TLDs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC This was not immediately successful, until Postel (as IANA) instructed the root DNS operators (other than Network Solutions) to get the root zone from IANA instead of from NetSol. This caused an epic shitfest, as a result of which Postel reverted the root zone change, and the US NTIA got moving and started the foundation of ICANN. The company now known as Verisign is the direct successor of NetSol, and they still control .com and .net, and feed the root zone to the other root server operators.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    Does anyone else remember when Verisign ran that sketchy ringtone company (Think crazy frog, schnuffel bunny, etc)? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba!

zwieback 4y ago

I started my coding career in the early 90s and at that time there were a buttload of non-TCP network protocols running on small computers (Macs, PCs, etc.) Netware, LANtastic, AppleTalk, Netbios stuff... Even though they all had something going for them I'm glad they have been steamrollered by TCP/IP

kuon 4y ago
IPX worked very well for LAN games, it required no configuration. Compared to how difficult it is to play together now (steam friends. xbox...), it was much better. Of course it had drawbacks, but for that it was great.
- jandrese 4y ago
  That's just LAN play dying off in favor of (routeable) Internet play. If developers wanted to they could add IP LAN play to games, but there's just not enough demand.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The assumption is that if you're on an IP network, you already have addresses, etc (because you're routable to the internet). IPX/SPX worked without that assumption; it was bog simple to find some IPX cards, shove them in the computers, connect them, and go, even if you knew nothing. The closest for TCP/IP would be to support gaming over link-local links (those 169.* addresses) but everything is assumed to be on the internet now. And if you have TCP/IP for the internet, rarely do you care or need anything else for local comms.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      You could also do it over multicast. The big downside is that if some people are on WiFi then they'll be reduced down to 802.11b speed. A better solution would be to do server/player discovery via multicast and then stitch up unicast links for the actual gameplay.

dn3500 4y ago

It was almost a non-event for us. I was at a university computer science lab. We were already running tcp/ip before the transition on our Vaxes. We had a TOPS-20 system but rather than transition it, we just retired it. We made very little use of the relay services.

dekhn 4y ago
I vaguely recall at the time an email was sent out at Wesleyan mentioning they had cut over to the new system. IIRC they switched TOPS-20 to VMS around that time but I don't think it was related.

thatoneguy 4y ago

Meanwhile, Windows 95 didn’t install TCP/IP by default when setting up a new network card. It was such a problem in the late ‘90s / early ‘00s still that it was an interview question for my university dial-up support job.

bombcar 4y ago
That was right around the time of the Internet Memo of fame. At the time '95 came out it was HIGHLY argued what would take off (and for awhile it seemed AOL/CompuServe were winning). But the writing was already on the wall.
glonq 4y ago
Ah, fond memories http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/tcpip9x.html http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/tcpip9x.html It sucked less than fooling around with Trumpet Winsock on Win3.1 though!

arky22 4y ago

davidwihl 4y ago

samstave 4y ago

"Hi, I'd like to have a TCP transition." "Hello, would you like to have a TCP transition?" "Yes, I'd like to have a TCP transition." "OK, I'll get you a TCP transition." "Ok, I will have a TCP transition." "Are you ready to have a TCP transition?" "Yes, I am ready to have a TCP transition." Network Error (tcp_Error)

_ea1k 4y ago

The parenthesis in the title confused me. What transition happened in 2013? Oh, the article was from 2013 but was about something that happened in 1982.

kstrauser 4y ago
That's a HN convention. In titles, "(XXXX)" at the end means "published in XXXX".

elurg 4y ago

So when is everybody transitioning to QUIC?

cpurdy 4y ago
HTTP/3 has just been finalized as a standard this year, so I'd guess we'll start to see it be adopted maybe in 2028 or so It will be easy to add support on the back end (at least for any software that already supports HTTP/2). So adoption will be limited by the front end. Adoption may come sooner, but only if telcos and phone makers both agree that it will help them. (Mobile currently represents ~75% of web usage, and still growing.)

jamal-kumar 4y ago

There's an angle on all of this which I always thought was pretty interesting (Considering they only managed to update a consolidated TCP RFC in the past week especially): "At one of the quarterly meetings Vint Cerf came in and dropped a bombshell on us: he said TCP had become a standard. Our immediate reaction, or at least my reaction, was 'Wait: it's not done yet. We have this long list of things we still have to figure out'," Haverty recalled in his speech. The technology was out of developers' hands before they felt ready to let it go. Haverty said the teams he worked with always expected to fix and polish their work – not just build on top of what he referred to as an "experiment." "There's all sorts of operational issues that we went through and developed but they haven't made it into the real world,” he said. [1] [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_hard/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/the_internet_is_so_ha...

throwaway787544 4y ago

We will have to abandon TCP eventually. We can't keep using the same protocol for 100 years. We should think about the next generation stack, what we would ideally like to solve, and not just tiny little incremental changes that preserve legacy design quirks. But sadly it's in the hands of industry rather than researchers and practitioners.

oaiey 4y ago
Why? IPv6 enabled the address range. In the TCP space alternatives exists (UDP/Quick). I do not believe TCP will be replaced. The only thing which surely will be replaced are the routing exchange protocols like BGP with all the shenanigans happening there. If you believe in space colonialism then there will be some kind of message oriented layer on top to deal with the latencies (think universal SMTP or something).
- throwaway787544 4y ago
  There's a lot of limitations within those protocols that just make things unnecessarily difficult and limit functionality. Port numbers and the lack of logical service names, lack of routing across disparate unroutable routes, lack of carrying forward/back diagnosis of network segments, etc. HTTP as an additional transport protocol is a shitty hack that people use to work around some of those issues but more remain.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    Makes all sense but not enough to migrate away from TCP. Half of the things can be also solved by higher level services (and lower than HTTP).