> I was there in the early days when it was pretty simple. I think you have an interesting idea of 'simple': A lot of software becomes orders of magnitude simp

> I was there in the early days when it was pretty simple. I think you have an interesting idea of 'simple': A lot of software becomes orders of magnitude simpler to design and reason about once you have enough RAM to organize it in the obvious way. For example, for many parsing tasks, a recursive-descent parser is the obvious way, but you can only design your software that way once you have a language that can directly express recursion and a computer that can grow a big enough call stack (on the stack or in the heap) to allow the parser to juggle nontrivial sentences. Otherwise, you're left the laborious, non-obvious, labor-intensive, but ultimately pointless task of turning your design into a program your tools can implement. > So, it leaves me with an ability to be presented something new, or different and very quickly I can understand it. Honestly, I think that says a lot more about your intelligence than your history. That's actually a pretty fair definition of intelligence, in fact. How about this: Teaching networking now is teaching TCP/IP and everything that TCP/IP rests upon, such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Theory naturally flows from practice, and that is the practice. The OSI Model? Gone. Out. Forget it. Nobody actually implements all seven layers; at most, we have four. NCP? What? If you know what NCP stands for, congratulations, you know something entirely useless. "Jeopardy!" would love you. So why teach the stuff we know is useless? It actively discourages students. It makes them think they're just wasting their time, primarily because they are. The history of computer networking is a valid topic. It should be taught in its own course, it deserves its own course. It does not deserve to be shoved into a course on how networking actually works.