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