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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."
MMDF was around at the time, was more flexible, and you could write new channels to handle any new protocol you could imagine.
It suffered from not being bundled and requiring you to exercise a license agreement.
Even in those days sendmail had a poor reputation for security. We deployed MMDF and felt pretty smug when the Robert Morris worm turned up a few years later.
(Indeed, all of the original Unix tools are written as pipelined utilities. If Sendmail had been written in this manner, you would have had a few hundred executables - BUT they would have been faster, more secure, and much more flexible. Small, modular kits have always been the "accepted" Unix way of Getting Things Right. Large, monolithic lumps have always been disparaged as probably bug-ridden and Bad.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have no sympathy for anyone who whines about port 25 being blocked. Judging from the number of zombied PCs trying to send spam to me, I would say that port 25 should be blocked by default at consumer ISPs.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Seriously, anyone who calls themselves an Old-Timer in a field that is barely over 60 years old, is either a former co-worker of Turing or Von Neumann - the only generation with any business adding the word "old" - or they don't have enough understanding of the field to qualify.
Operating Systems in general are relatively new things. MULTICS is "historic", but only in the sense that it isn't in use. It has many ideas I consider valuable today, and I wish it was easier to get hold of MULTICS code, but it is far from ancient.
The odds are fairly high, though, that most "old-timers" on Slashdot are from the Unix or even the CP/M generation. Some might even call themselves "old-timers" when they only really started with DOS 3.1 or even something as modern as Windows 3.0!
I predate CP/M - not by much - but that doesn't matter because I don't claim to be an Old-Timer. Experienced, sure. Aware, certainly. Old-timer? No. I can tell you what I saw - from the control center at Jodrel Bank's Lovell Telescope to Imperial Computer's minis at Daresbury, from dusty Forth manuals to robotics and micromice - the word was Small. Small was good. Small was in. Small made Smartware one of the best damn integrated packages of that era in computing - and it outperformed many later generation systems. Small made Acornsoft's "Elite" the hottest game ever published by any title, as a percentage of the userbase it sold to.
Not sure if PETSpeed was small & unit-based. Wouldn't surprise me. You couldn't fit much even in a 32K machine, so modules would be logical.
As for Linus -- we're talking about Torvalds, right? The one who produced Linux, probably the most modular (and therefore smallest) OS ever released on this planet? The one who gave up on monolithic maintenance because he couldn't scale, so modularized even the maintenance process? You'd use him as an illustration for monolithic design, given that he hasn't used that in Linux in God-lost-count number of years?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)