[ih] RIP Danny Cohen

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Tue Aug 13 18:38:55 PDT 2019


I never knew Danny Cohen.  But I've known his name forever, for his
classic 1980 Internet Experiment Note 137, "On Holy Wars and a Plea for
Peace".  If you have ever heard of a big-endian or a little-endian
computer architecture, you have been using Danny's descriptions.

In it, he brilliantly compares the foolishness of byte order
differences to the foolishness of the Lilliputians in Jonathan
Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, who fought wars over which end
of an egg should be broken in order to eat it -- the big end, or
the little end.

It made a big impression on me.

See:

  https://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt

	John Gilmore
	



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