alt Hacker NewsDoing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
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You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.
> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
> Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated.
We're slowly reinventing OSI, one step at a time: OSI had multiple sessions per transport connection (QUIC), 20 byte addresses (IPv6) and a directory system with public-key infrastructure (DANE, vCard, SSHFP, etc).
It's a shame TUBA (CLNP + TCP) failed.
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.