The past is a foreign country with a crap, state-mandated networking stack

[hirez]

This (as linked by the estimable @tef on the rather less estimable Twitter) was an odd read

Comments

[neilh]

And there was me reminiscing, not long ago, about Phil Karns KA9Q stack, its not often you find a page marked "Last updated: 15 Mar 2002", even less often does that page contain links like: "For the diehards, and for historical interest, I'm still keeping my package here on the web"

[nalsa]

Arf. I had a conversation last week which - thanks to tiny amounts of booze - rapidly descended into "When I were a lad, we had to manually turn ferrite cores with crank 'andles, clockwise for 0, anticlockwise for 1. The ethernet stack was a bunch of cogs in a pile" -sort of thing. Anyway, back in the day when all we had was IPX because "TCP/IP was too insecure" I'd regularly pretend to be a printer so I could access stuff on a different network segment. That was hilarious.

[quercus]

Have you seen "TCP/IP" and "Ethernet" stacks on Arduinos? The ones that look like an EPROM full of pre-stored packet images, and they spit the same packet out (sometimes with a little data boilerplated in) no matter what the context? You'd dream of stacks of cogs in piles!

I think the final comment on IPX was when Novell (Who?) plugged it with a big poster advert campaign - and a picture of a suit throwing shapes, in exactly the same manner as the contemporaneous Jim Carrey film, 'Liar Liar'.