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The New Coffee Room

  1. TNCR
  2. General Discussion
  3. Wanna feel old?

Wanna feel old?

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General Discussion
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  • Doctor PhibesD Doctor Phibes

    @jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:

    My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.

    He worked for Harris?

    I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.

    jon-nycJ Offline
    jon-nycJ Offline
    jon-nyc
    wrote on last edited by
    #15

    @Doctor-Phibes said in Wanna feel old?:

    @jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:

    My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.

    He worked for Harris?

    I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.

    He did. I went to high school there.

    "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
    -Cormac McCarthy

    1 Reply Last reply
    • Doctor PhibesD Doctor Phibes

      @jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:

      My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.

      He worked for Harris?

      I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.

      jon-nycJ Offline
      jon-nycJ Offline
      jon-nyc
      wrote on last edited by jon-nyc
      #16

      @Doctor-Phibes said in Wanna feel old?:

      He worked for Harris?

      So Harris hired my dad because he had experience in designing central office switching systems for the telephone network. Harris wanted to sell the behind-the-scenes hardware to the carriers.

      They invested all this money helping define the standards so they could get a leg up on the designs. They hired my father in 1982.

      Fast forward a few years, the FCC decided to do a lottery to give away cellular licenses (as opposed to an auction, the other way they’ve distributed spectrum for new services). These lotteries were for licenses at local city level.

      The result was chaos. Mom and pop applicants won many of the lotteries. No big company was going to invest in building a network unless they had decent geographical coverage. The mom and pops weren’t going to build anything at all. It took several years for the majors to sort out buying all these licenses and consolidate coverage.

      In the mean time Harris lost patience and exited the business.

      They offered my dad roles in other divisions, but he was a network guy at the end of the day. So he took a job at the defense contracting arm of Magnavox, which made frequency-hopping radios for the Air Force (division later sold to Raytheon). My dad retired from that job in 1996.

      "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
      -Cormac McCarthy

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      • 89th8 Offline
        89th8 Offline
        89th
        wrote on last edited by
        #17

        I was born a little less than 10 years after we last walked on the moon. To me, that is clear "past history" stuff, but my youngest kid was born 22 years after 9/11, and to me that event happened "recently". I've also been out of high school for 24 years.

        I know I'm not as old wise as some of you but time speeds up faster each year. I still "feel" (mind, not body) like I'm in my late 20s (I'm 42). Do any of you feel the same, mentally at least? I look at my father in law who is 76 and I'd have to imagine he thinks "there is no way I'm 76" often.

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        • AxtremusA Axtremus

          The Internet is 50 years old.
          (More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf )

          KlausK Online
          KlausK Online
          Klaus
          wrote on last edited by
          #18

          @Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:

          The Internet is 50 years old.
          (More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf )

          Interesting. The paper only seems to describe the IP part of TCP/IP, though. But is TCP/IP the most important piece of tech that made the internet the internet? I'd argue that the HTTP protocol, which didn't arrive until the early 1990s, was at least as important. Specifically, its stateless-ness is what makes the internet scale to the dimensions we see today. TCP/IP was developed with stateful connections in mind.

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          • jon-nycJ Offline
            jon-nycJ Offline
            jon-nyc
            wrote on last edited by jon-nyc
            #19

            How about Jon Postel TCP/IP made the internet the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee HTTP made the web the web.

            "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
            -Cormac McCarthy

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            • KlausK Online
              KlausK Online
              Klaus
              wrote on last edited by Klaus
              #20

              Sounds fair. There's also HTML, which enables browsers and then later, JavaScript, which enables real web applications.

              It's interesting that the original HTTP specification is just 700 words long, but still found it necessary to point out that "A well-behaved server will not require the carriage return character." and "The client should not assume that the carriage return will be present.".

              The most important sentence is the last one: "Requests are idempotent . The server need not store any information about the request after disconnection."

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              • AxtremusA Away
                AxtremusA Away
                Axtremus
                wrote on last edited by Axtremus
                #21

                And this:

                Future HTTP protocols will be back-compatible with this protocol.

                Assurance of future compatibility right from the start, leaving all future implementations with a known starting point to discover/negotiate new capabilities.

                These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.

                KlausK 1 Reply Last reply
                • kluursK Offline
                  kluursK Offline
                  kluurs
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #22

                  I was using Medline and Lockheed Dialog back in the 1970s (300 baud modem), then worked for Quaker Oats where Xerox was beta-testing the "paperless office" using the Star system which was "borrowed" by Steve Jobs and Apple to develop the Mac.

                  1 Reply Last reply
                  • AxtremusA Axtremus

                    And this:

                    Future HTTP protocols will be back-compatible with this protocol.

                    Assurance of future compatibility right from the start, leaving all future implementations with a known starting point to discover/negotiate new capabilities.

                    These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.

                    KlausK Online
                    KlausK Online
                    Klaus
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #23

                    @Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:

                    These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.

                    Hey, nice slides!

                    Do you have any thoughts on bringing quality of service methods into the WWW protocol stack? E.g., bandwidth or latency guarantees.

                    Doctor PhibesD 1 Reply Last reply
                    • KlausK Klaus

                      @Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:

                      These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.

                      Hey, nice slides!

                      Do you have any thoughts on bringing quality of service methods into the WWW protocol stack? E.g., bandwidth or latency guarantees.

                      Doctor PhibesD Offline
                      Doctor PhibesD Offline
                      Doctor Phibes
                      wrote on last edited by Doctor Phibes
                      #24

                      @Klaus said in Wanna feel old?:

                      @Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:

                      These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.

                      Hey, nice slides!

                      Do you have any thoughts on bringing quality of service methods into the WWW protocol stack? E.g., bandwidth or latency guarantees.

                      Klaus, the thread is 'Wanna feel old' not freaking suicidal

                      I was only joking

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