[ih] Failed Expectations: A Deep Dive Into the Internet’s 40 Years of Evolution (Geoff Huston)

[Karl Auerbach]

One of my own observations is how we institutionalize our techno-dislikes.

ISO/OSI was indeed a disaster, largely self inflicted.

But it did contain a lot of good ideas.  And we've tended to put 
distance between the Internet of today and those good ideas.

My own hobby-horses about things we could have pulled from the OSI 
carcass are these:

   - A much better checksum algorithm.  (The OSI Fletcher checksum looks 
scary but there are ways to compute, anew and incrementally, it that are 
fast and use only standard 2s complement arithmetic. And it can catch 
byte reversals that are common when someone forgets to put a hton*() in 
their code.)

  - An association (session) layer.  This would have made mobility much 
easier by allowing an "association" to span multiple transport 
connections as devices move and change their IP addresses.  It also 
could have reduced the web's addiction to cookies. (OSI made the mistake 
of making their session layer excessively complicated,  incomprehensibly 
documented, and never explaining what it was good for.)

     --karl--

On 5/30/23 4:23 PM, Dave Taht via Internet-history wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 5:17 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> EXCERPT:
>>
>> In a recent workshop, I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the
>> Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we’ve
>> managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we’ve
>> encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly
>> resisted to be deployed despite our confident expectations to the contrary!
>> What have we learned from these lessons about our inability to predict
>> technology outcomes? Are the issues related to the aspects of the
>> technology? Are they embedded in the considerations behind the expectations
>> about how a technology will be adopted? Or do the primary issues reside at
>> a deeper level relating to economic and even political contexts? Let’s look
>> at this question of failed expectations using several specific examples
>> drawn from the last 40 years of the Internet’s evolution.
>>
>> *The Public Debut of the Internet (and the demise of O.S.I.)*...
>>
>> [...]
>> https://circleid.com/posts/20230524-failed-expectations-a-deep-dive-into-the-internets-40-years-of-evolution
> hilariously I was also within seconds of posting this. Larry lurks on
> my starlink mailing list... adding to cc.
>
>> --
>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
>> living as The Truth is True
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>