This is a collection of brief satirical essays on networking and Internet design topics from the 1980 and 1990s.\u00a0 This makes for something of a niche market.\u00a0 Danny Cohen, the author, was a long time ISI-er with whom I never quite overlapped, though we passed rather closely for ships in the night.\u00a0 He had headed off to found Myricom around the time I appeared on the ISI scene.\u00a0 We certainly knew many of the same people. When I heard this collection was being published through a mutual friend, I made a note to check it out.<\/p>\n
The essays here are actually better written than I was expecting.\u00a0 I wasn’t expecting anything bad, mind you, but they’re a significant cut above the usual academic tomfoolery or April 1 RFC. Cohen does a rather nice job making sound technical points while keeping his tongue firmly in cheek.<\/p>\n
That said, these are primarily making points about protocol design, the old ISO\/OSI vs. TCP\/IP wars and other technical battles.\u00a0 While many of the points raised remain valid – even compelling – sifting through the history and obliqueness to get to them can be tricky.\u00a0 I find it humorous that Cohen uses mass transit analogies to describe his protocol insights where a modern writer might use protocol analogies to make transit points.\u00a0 Funny old world.<\/p>\n
Overall these are primarily interesting to networking\/technical folks, but there are a few gems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a collection of brief satirical essays on networking and Internet design topics from the 1980 and 1990s.\u00a0 This makes for something of a niche market.\u00a0 Danny Cohen, the author, was a long time ISI-er with whom I never quite overlapped, though we passed rather closely for ships in the night.\u00a0 He had headed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2137,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2136\/revisions\/2137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}