On 2019-03-20 10:28 a.m., Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Mar 2019, Dave Taht wrote:
>
>> Another ietf idea that makes me crazy is the motto of "no host 
>> changes" in homenet, and "dumb endpoints" - when we live in an age 
>> where we have quad cores and AI coprocessors in everybody's hands.

Dumb endpoints is a huge change from the design of the internet (and 
ARPAnet), with a dumb middle and smart ends:  I suspect the original 
commentator was talking about mere /relative/ dumbness...

>
> This isn't a resource problem, it's a code problem. The IETF wants 
> 10-15 year old hosts to be able to connect to a network and perform 
> basic networking. It might not be very optimized, but the basic 
> function should be there. New functionality can optimize for different 
> factors, but making older host stop working is frowned upon.

Fortunately this is a solved problem in capacity planning: you replace 
machines often enough that they're not constantly out of service being 
repaired. 10 to 15 human-years is the equivalent of 70 to 105 of the 
dog-years we use in this silly business (;-))

The oldest machine I use is a dps8-m, and I'll be slightly amazed if we 
can provide native TCP. Right now I ssh into the virtual machine that's 
running it, all so I can continue to fiddle around with Multics.

--dave (DavidBrown.TSDC@HI-Multics.ARPA) c-b

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain