[ih] TCP RTT Estimator

[John Day]

Test case. According to your criteria is UDP a protocol?  What about IP?

John 

> On Apr 13, 2025, at 06:28, Joe Touch via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 12, 2025, at 7:33 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> The general principle was that the "on the wire" formats and meanings were standardized, so that any implementation of TCP could communicate with any other implementation.
> 
> “On the wire” all protocols are groups of bits. Even if some patterns are prohibited, that’s still not a protocol. 
> 
> A protocol is a tuple of wire messages sent/received, time events occurring/set up, user messages produced/consumed, and FSM relating them all. The “on the wire” part is 2/7 of that and never enough to endure comm. Decades of advice to the contrary not withstanding (the IETF rule that even generic APIs were not part of a protocol). 
> 
> The specific parts of TCP that were left “floating” may be interoperable but might not too. Two endpoints’ timeouts or calculations could interact in ways that grind data  xfer to a halt. 
> 
> So that principle above may have worked mostly well enough for TCP so far, it fails as “general”. 
> 
> Joe 
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