The man who made the Internet possible

Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast".  You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast.  Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.

And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed.  We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP".  And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.

Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson.  He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved.  WAY improved.  TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application.  The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.

Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS.  He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.

IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.

Enter Jacobson again.  He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion.  What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.

So why do I say that he made the Internet possible?  Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth.  There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.

And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers.  As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster.  That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode.  The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.

All because of Van Jacobson.

Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you. 

You guys are a bunch of nerds

The comments to yesterday's post were simply hilarious.  I clearly am not the only nerrd around here.

Oh, and Rick T - sometime I will have to tell you about watching a guy install a vampire tap but forgetting to use the spacer while drilling into the cable.  Drilled right through the center wire ...

Happy Birthday, Ethernet

Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox released the Ethernet spec on this day in 1980.  This is why old timers sometimes refer to it as "DIX Ethernet".

And yes, I am one of those old timers. 

Comprehensive study identifies all Roman roads

Well, for some values of "comprehensive" and "all":

The study published earlier this week mapped out the roads into what the Roman network could have looked like at the peak of the empire's power, sometime between the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. That network of main roads and little countryside paths didn't centralize in Rome, though. Tom Brughmans, classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leads on the project, told Reuters that, "...when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether." 

It is said that history is 90% n geography and 10% common sense.   It would make no sense at all for traffic from Hispania to Syria to be routed to Rome.  The direct route goes via Constantinople:

Hopefully Stanford's Orbis will be updated to include the new found roads.  We've seen Orbis here before. 

 

Commercial shipping is being hacked

I haven't blogged about this, but apparently it's a thing now and has been for maybe a decade.  This is a really good breakdown of what one of these attacks could do (and more importantly, could NOT do) to a container ship or a tanker.

Well THAT was fun

Yesterday was recoil therapy with Big Country.  He brought a collection of Enfields and a Springfield 1878 trap door in 40-70 which was great fun.  Another guy had a "Quigley" rifle = a Sharps 1874 in 45-120 (!).  That one kills on one end and maims on the other.

Many thanks to BC for participating in an experiment to see if going to the shooting range is effective in treating cancer.  Probably not, but I feel better already. 

Helicopter Gunship vacation

Viva Las Vegas, baby:

At Gunship Helicopters we offer:

• The only place in the world you can shoot full-auto belt fed from a helicopter as a civilian
• 71 acres of mountainside range space
• A truly authentic military experience

I was surprised that they have packages under $1000, but they get more expensive pretty quickly.  But things like this make me proud to be American.

 

What caliber for Orca?

Something weird with Orcas started around 6 years ago in the Straight of Gibraltar: Orca pods started ramming sailing boats.  Hundreds of boats have been attacked, so many that there is a Wikipedia page about the situation. 

Well it seems that yachtsmen have started returning fire: 

 I dunno - a pellet gun is maybe not my first choice.  But since this is Europe, it may be the best option they have.