apenwarr-on-gmail.com
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- Did you ever wonder why “Internet” is capitalized?
When I first joined the Internet in the 1990s, I found some now-long-lost introductory tutorial. It talked about the difference between an internet (lowercase i) and the Internet (capital I). An internet is “any network that connects smaller networks together.” The Internet is… well… it turns out that you don’t need more than one internet. If you have two internets, it is nearly unavoidable that someone will soon figure out how to connect them together. All you need is one person to build that one link, and your two internets become one. By induction then, the Internet is the end result when you make it easy enough for a single motivated individual to join one internet to another, however badly.
Internets are fundamentally sloppy. No matter how many committees you might form, ultimately connections are made by individuals plugging things together. Those things might follow the specs, or not. They might follow those specs well, or badly. They might violate the specs because everybody else is also violating the specs and that’s the only way to make anything work. The connections themselves might be fast or slow, or flakey, or only functional for a few minutes each day, or subject to amateur radio regulations, or worse. The endpoints might be high-powered servers, vending machines, toasters, or satellites, running any imaginable operating system. Only one thing’s for sure: they all have bugs.
Which brings us to Postel’s Law, which I always bring up when I write about networks. When I do, invariably there’s a slew of responses trying to debate whether Postel’s Law is “right,” or “a good idea,” as if it were just an idea and not a force of nature. (View Highlight)
title: “apenwarr-on-gmail.com”
author: “apenwarr”
url: ”https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=202007”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
apenwarr-on-gmail.com
Metadata
Highlights
- Did you ever wonder why “Internet” is capitalized?
When I first joined the Internet in the 1990s, I found some now-long-lost introductory tutorial. It talked about the difference between an internet (lowercase i) and the Internet (capital I). An internet is “any network that connects smaller networks together.” The Internet is… well… it turns out that you don’t need more than one internet. If you have two internets, it is nearly unavoidable that someone will soon figure out how to connect them together. All you need is one person to build that one link, and your two internets become one. By induction then, the Internet is the end result when you make it easy enough for a single motivated individual to join one internet to another, however badly.
Internets are fundamentally sloppy. No matter how many committees you might form, ultimately connections are made by individuals plugging things together. Those things might follow the specs, or not. They might follow those specs well, or badly. They might violate the specs because everybody else is also violating the specs and that’s the only way to make anything work. The connections themselves might be fast or slow, or flakey, or only functional for a few minutes each day, or subject to amateur radio regulations, or worse. The endpoints might be high-powered servers, vending machines, toasters, or satellites, running any imaginable operating system. Only one thing’s for sure: they all have bugs.
Which brings us to Postel’s Law, which I always bring up when I write about networks. When I do, invariably there’s a slew of responses trying to debate whether Postel’s Law is “right,” or “a good idea,” as if it were just an idea and not a force of nature. (View Highlight)