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Rendezvous Developer Stuart Cheshire Interviewed
overunderunderdone writes "Found this interview of Stuart Cheshire, the Apple employee who developed Rendezvous (a.k.a. Zeroconf) and co-chairs the ZEROCONF working group. He provides some interesting history behind Zeroconf. But I thought his ideas for the future of Rendezvous was more interesting. He envisions a single protocol for everything from the keyboard, hard disk, peripherals, to the net connection -- just one kind of socket in the back of your box."
Bolo, hands down, rocked.
I remember playing Bolo in the University of Michigan's massive "fishbowl" computer lab around 1993. And I remember Bolo sent the entire support staff into a frenzy: everyone was playing it.
Of course, those were the days when the lab consisted of hundreds of PowerMac 6100's but only a handful of Windoze boxen.
Anyway, Stuart, if you're reading this: Bolo was (is?) a fantastically cool game. Many hours when I shoulda been working were spent tooling around in top-down tanks, pummelling pillboxes.
Slightly, off-topic, but I'm afraid there's a new generation of comp-sci students out there who missed out on the glory days of Bolo. (Of course, I get misty-eyed when I hear someone mention TRS-80s and Z80 assembly language, but that's another story -- and another era missed out by today's new generation of computer hot-shots. Not to mention the whole mid-80's coin-op video game revolution. To think, there's a whole bunch of folks who don't know what it's like stack a row of quarters on the top panel of a Pac Man or Donkey Kong stand-up game...)
You can make things fast, cheap, simple, easy to configure, secure, etc., but not all at the same time. That is the first lesson of engineering, and it applies to peripheral connections as much as it does to other engineering problems.
If you spend any time around UI designers, quite a few of them think this way. We work hard to try and simplify the onscreen User Interface so that it becomes transparent to day to day work, but you get behind your computer and there are so many cables, you can't see anything else.
Jef Raskin had a neat idea for a universal, hermaphroditic connector, where you don't even have male and female parts, you just slap two of the connectors together. It always fits, it always works. Neat.
There's an actual picture of what I'm talking about in his book. It's kind of hard to visualize until you see it.
IR is basically a serial port that uses IR instead of a wire to make the interconnect. Bluetooth uses 900Mhz to make the interconnect instead of LED's. USB is another serial protocol, just faster than RS-232. Same with firewire, just faster still. For the most part they are really just varied serial ports.
Ethernet(10BT,100BT,1000BT) is a bit different.
What we are seeing with firewire and USB is a progression of serial protocols towards an ethernet kinda environment, where there may be more than one device on the line at the same time and you can have little hubs/switches to coordinate the traffic.
I wouldn't really say that many of them are optimized for one thing or another. IR is just as limited as an RS-232 port, just made it easier on notebook designers to save space. USB was done since rs-232 had some serious speed limitations. Firewire for pretty much the same reason. Bluetooth - well...it was more of a way to elimnate wires...cool idea.