[TUHS] Code bloat (was: How Unix brings people together, or it's a small...)

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Feb 10 02:49:53 AEST 2017


On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 09:42:09AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 9:36 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >> The best one seems to have been the 3Com stack, which puts IP in the
> >> kernel and TCP in a daemon. By the way, this implementation is also
> >> where SLIP seems to have originated.
> >
> > As much as I love all the nostalgia, and as cool as SLIP was, if I never
> > have to experience the pain of trying to run TCP/IP over a modem again,
> > I'll be happy.  For me, SLIP was just not worth it.  Too much overhead
> > when bandwidth was too precious.  A dial up terminal emulator was a
> > better answer in my experience.
> >
> > Don't get me wrong, SLIP was cool.   Modems were slow.
> 
> Let's not forget the latency. 128ms of latency over modems was
> awesomely low... That changed relatively little, even as the speeds
> went from 1200 baud up to 57.6k.
> 
> While I am nostalgic for my early coding days on a 1200 baud video
> screen and a 300 baud printer, I do not miss the speed or the latency
> issues...

Exactly.  I live in the Santa Cruz mountains, which is awesome (well,
mostly, right now we're having tons of mudlsides, too much rain).  I'm
quite remote, we have a mountain lion that comes through here nightly
(I know because I lost a dog to it and they showed me the radio collar
tracking, on a map it looks like someone took a pencil and scribbled 
back and forth as hard as they could through our place).

In spite of that, I'm typing away to you all, I'm 3ms away from 8.8.8.8
(Google's dns server).  Go wireless.  It's pretty remarkable to be here
and have decent net connectivity.

I do not yearn for the days of SLIP.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 



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