5 ms·

Is there anything fundamentally unique about this architecture? AOL chatrooms in 1995 too were blazingly real-time even on dialup. Anyone ever use progz/scroll

Is there anything fundamentally unique about this architecture? AOL chatrooms in 1995 too were blazingly real-time even on dialup. Anyone ever use progz/scrollers? With an OH (overhead) account you could flood rooms with thousands of messages a second. Rich text, not plaintext. And it'd appear in super fast "real time" to everyone in the chat.

paxys 3y ago
The biggest difference is that if you shoved a million active users in a single chatroom back then it would have crashed all of AOL. The same problem can have vastly different solutions at different scales.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Huh? Where have you ever seen a Slack channel with a million active users?
  - paxys 3y ago
    100K – https://slack.com/blog/news/top-u-s-retailer-h-e-b-rolled-out-slack-to-100k-employees-in-72-hours https://slack.com/blog/news/top-u-s-retailer-h-e-b-rolled-ou... 350K – https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-partnership-amazon-chime-voice-video-calls https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-... The Kubernetes Slack has close to 200K users right now. Amazon has 1.5 million employees, and I'm sure the majority are on Slack. Forget 1995, no service other than Slack can run group chats at this scale even today.
    - berkle4455 3y ago
      > I’m sure the majority are on Slack 80% of Amazon’s employees are warehouse and drivers.
      - paxys 3y ago
        Which still leaves >300K corporate employees.
        berkle4455 3y ago
        [flagged]
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Nothing. Not the geographically distributed customers, (unlike America Online), not the fact that this works both on the web and on mobile devices, nor the fact that mobile devices can't open persistent background connections due to power requirements, not the much larger scale, nor the fact that latency characteristics over dial-up modems were much, much higher than they are now, not even the fact that organizations get their business done using this architecture while AIM was mostly (not always) used to just chat with friends and strangers casually. No nothing at all. But really is the internet actually doing anything new? My grandfather used to send telegrams overseas all the time. Does anyone remember teletype? How is that any different than us chatting with each other here on HN? Phaw, tech bros just keep reinventing the wheel.
- dijit 3y ago
  > Not the geographically distributed customers, (unlike America Online) AOL existed outside of America. my fondest memories as a would-be computer hacker in the early-noughts was sitting in a BT phone box in the UK at 3am using the lineman opcode for free local calls to connect to my nearest AOL pop, so I could use one of their trial CDs with a fabricated or stolen credit card (I deactivated the trial before the first payment, I was not a total thief).
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Sure but your experience is proof of how different the experience was. You had to call into an AOL pop using POTS and use a trial CD and some proof of payment (credit card) to perform this action. I can send my friend/coworker in Japan a Slack invite to their email and they can get started chatting on their smartphone in a minute or two. As I said, how is any of this really different than my grandfather sending telegrams? Or his father sending mail through the post?
    - dijit 3y ago
      I was making the argument that you made an assumption that didnt hold any weight. regarding doing what slack can do, I think we do have a bit of collective amnesia about what was truly good and truly bad about what came before. Slack does a lot of things, but its UX is actually pretty piss poor due to the bolt-ons (threads is just about the worst implementation I have ever seen), walled garden, weird account things (magic links~ if you want to see your other workspaces make sure you use the same email everywhere!), security (goodbye decent realtime bot api) and the client which feels slow despite using more resources than it should given its status as a program that needs to always be running. To take one example of a worse system: IRC scales to tens of thousands of users on a single machine; doesn't have emoji or picture sharing though- but the bot API is simpler for sure, you can connect in one click if the person has an IRC client (or you pass a webirc link) - no signup needed. I think the problem with slack is exacerbated in europe (or rest of the world in general), where the latency of fetching thousands of tiny assets or chats is many-many times higher than in California. Also; the reason I had to do that was because my mum wouldn't permit a home internet connection; broadband was a thing at the time. Dial-up was not mandatory in 2002. IRC with dial-up was faster than slack is today too; you can argue that slack “does more” though.
prng2021 3y ago
Consul, Envoy, websockets. These are architectural components called out in the article. Are you saying that AOL used this same architecture and you don’t see anything “fundamentally unique”? If you’re using the word architecture even though you mean product functionality, you can simply go to https://slack.com/help/articles/115003205446-Slack-plans-and-features https://slack.com/help/articles/115003205446-Slack-plans-and... Look at the functionality listed there and see how many things AOL supported which Slack does not and vice versa.

paxys 3y ago

The biggest difference is that if you shoved a million active users in a single chatroom back then it would have crashed all of AOL. The same problem can have vastly different solutions at different scales.

Solvency 3y ago
Huh? Where have you ever seen a Slack channel with a million active users?
- paxys 3y ago
  100K – https://slack.com/blog/news/top-u-s-retailer-h-e-b-rolled-out-slack-to-100k-employees-in-72-hours https://slack.com/blog/news/top-u-s-retailer-h-e-b-rolled-ou... 350K – https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-partnership-amazon-chime-voice-video-calls https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-... The Kubernetes Slack has close to 200K users right now. Amazon has 1.5 million employees, and I'm sure the majority are on Slack. Forget 1995, no service other than Slack can run group chats at this scale even today.
  - berkle4455 3y ago
    > I’m sure the majority are on Slack 80% of Amazon’s employees are warehouse and drivers.
    - paxys 3y ago
      Which still leaves >300K corporate employees.
      - berkle4455 3y ago
        [flagged]

Karrot_Kream 3y ago

Nothing. Not the geographically distributed customers, (unlike America Online), not the fact that this works both on the web and on mobile devices, nor the fact that mobile devices can't open persistent background connections due to power requirements, not the much larger scale, nor the fact that latency characteristics over dial-up modems were much, much higher than they are now, not even the fact that organizations get their business done using this architecture while AIM was mostly (not always) used to just chat with friends and strangers casually. No nothing at all. But really is the internet actually doing anything new? My grandfather used to send telegrams overseas all the time. Does anyone remember teletype? How is that any different than us chatting with each other here on HN? Phaw, tech bros just keep reinventing the wheel.

dijit 3y ago
> Not the geographically distributed customers, (unlike America Online) AOL existed outside of America. my fondest memories as a would-be computer hacker in the early-noughts was sitting in a BT phone box in the UK at 3am using the lineman opcode for free local calls to connect to my nearest AOL pop, so I could use one of their trial CDs with a fabricated or stolen credit card (I deactivated the trial before the first payment, I was not a total thief).
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  Sure but your experience is proof of how different the experience was. You had to call into an AOL pop using POTS and use a trial CD and some proof of payment (credit card) to perform this action. I can send my friend/coworker in Japan a Slack invite to their email and they can get started chatting on their smartphone in a minute or two. As I said, how is any of this really different than my grandfather sending telegrams? Or his father sending mail through the post?
  - dijit 3y ago
    I was making the argument that you made an assumption that didnt hold any weight. regarding doing what slack can do, I think we do have a bit of collective amnesia about what was truly good and truly bad about what came before. Slack does a lot of things, but its UX is actually pretty piss poor due to the bolt-ons (threads is just about the worst implementation I have ever seen), walled garden, weird account things (magic links~ if you want to see your other workspaces make sure you use the same email everywhere!), security (goodbye decent realtime bot api) and the client which feels slow despite using more resources than it should given its status as a program that needs to always be running. To take one example of a worse system: IRC scales to tens of thousands of users on a single machine; doesn't have emoji or picture sharing though- but the bot API is simpler for sure, you can connect in one click if the person has an IRC client (or you pass a webirc link) - no signup needed. I think the problem with slack is exacerbated in europe (or rest of the world in general), where the latency of fetching thousands of tiny assets or chats is many-many times higher than in California. Also; the reason I had to do that was because my mum wouldn't permit a home internet connection; broadband was a thing at the time. Dial-up was not mandatory in 2002. IRC with dial-up was faster than slack is today too; you can argue that slack “does more” though.

prng2021 3y ago

Consul, Envoy, websockets. These are architectural components called out in the article. Are you saying that AOL used this same architecture and you don’t see anything “fundamentally unique”? If you’re using the word architecture even though you mean product functionality, you can simply go to https://slack.com/help/articles/115003205446-Slack-plans-and-features https://slack.com/help/articles/115003205446-Slack-plans-and... Look at the functionality listed there and see how many things AOL supported which Slack does not and vice versa.