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20 Network Changing Products
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Network World piece about products that have changed networking over the last twenty years. From the article: "SendMail 1998 - Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet. Eric Allman wrote the original version of this open source mail-transfer agent while he was at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. He stopped development on it in 1982, however, and didn't revisit it until 1990. In 1998 he founded SendMail to sell the software's first commercial version, the SendMail switch."
And Sendmail also happens to be one of the absolute worst widely-deployed programs in the history computer software. Man, I despite that program. How could anyone have thought that configuration file format was a good idea? You know it's bad when you have to have a preprocessor to translate something (semi-)tolerable into its syntax.
The e-mail revolution succeeded DESPITE sendmail, not because of it, though I give it some small credit for flexibility. It was just barely adequate enough to keep people from writing a replacement (thought we have some now).
No point to this post, except to voice how much I despise sendmail. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ok, maybe I'm a Unix guy, but was this really something that changed the network? I know a lot of people have it installed, and run webservers, etc on it (usually because they are forced to or don't know any better), but if you want to put this on there it just seems like there are others that should be there like Solaris, Red Hat, Suze, FreeBSD just to name a few.
No Sigs!
I'll grant them most of these entries, but Apache was clearly not the first free web server. NCSA httpd was the first, and Apache is a derivative of that. The two coexisted for a few years, during which period it was possible to switch between them without even changing the config file. I think NCSA httpd project finally expired around 1996.
OK, that was the good things. Now let's remember the bad things and how they started.
- Adware. Ah.... the Gator download manager (TM). Didn't you love this thing? It was free! Only it began displaying some ads in your computer. What could possibly go wrong?
- SPAM. Funny, the other day i began receiving mails about mortgage rates. Idiots, I'm too young for that. I'll ignore it, they're 1 in a 100.
- Popups. OK, this is getting annoying. I'll have to block images from these free websites like XOOM, Geocities, Angelfire and so on.
- Web viruses. The other day something weird went on. I went to a porn website, and the next day my PC began opening popups. WTF?
- Email viruses. Ack! All I did was open my mail on Outlook express!
It's funny. We take these things for granted, but I remember the days when they didn't exist AT ALL. It was a wonderful era. Also worthy of notice is that all of them (except popups) were possible thanks to Microsoft Windows(TM).
I agree with you on something. Remove skype and add MSN/YIM/AIM/ICQ.
These non-anonymous chat services changed the way we relate to people on the web, replacing the untrusty anonymous IRC. It gave the ability to chat to every joe user.
why is open source high on your list of what makes something good? open or closed, a product can still be better than something else...
portfolio
Yes, it is true. Mike Tyson could probably kick
Muhammad Ali's ass. Of course, Mike Tyson is also
nearly 20 years younger. So, who is the better boxer?
For as much email has been run through sendmail in
the last couple decades, I'm always disappointed at how
little respect it receives.
I built my first mail server in 1993 using sendmail.
It brought internet email to my company over a serial
uucp link. By 1996, sendmail was moving nearly 87,000
internet messages a day for our company (not bad for a
486DX4-100 with a whopping 32M RAM (64M?)).
Saying the latest mail software (qmail, postfix, etc.)
is better than something written in 1972 - 27 years ago -
isn't saying much. (Well, maybe: Duh!)
Heck, 27 computing years is like 350 human years.
So, before you complain about security holes (one
in the last two years?) or complexity (like any other
programming language, practice makes perfect), why don't
you tell me which mail transport software you used in
1975, 1985 or 1995. Then, follow that up with which
transports you expect to see a lot of in 2010 and 2020.
Matt
This is a fallacy, and one that Linus himself debunks in his auto-biography.
A monolithic program may look more complex and harder to maintain and secure (and I'll admit, I hate sendmail), having a HUNDRED binaries as part of this program would add an order of magnitude of complexity that is entirely unnecesary.
Think: While it is true that a singular, small program which does one task is simpler than a monolithic giant, the program (as a whole, encompassing all the small parts) will still need to do all the same stuff a monolithic program has to do, except now it has to deal with message passing between small binary executables, queueing or drop files, and a number of other issues where security is a concern.
It's not as simple as taking parts out of the whole design and implementing them independantly; adding "parts" to the "whole" creates issues which do not exist in the monolithic.
qmail is able to do this fairly well, but it only has about 4 or 5 executables, IIRC, and it is compiled very carefully against bernsteins' special stdio and other library files that he's hardened.
See also: Linux Kernel vs. Hurd or Minix.
~Will
sig?