What's the point of articles like this? I see them crop up all the time where someone from the future looks back on some distant past WAY out of context, and says things like "This was INSANE!" "Who would ever design something like this!?" "Look at how much smarter this other idea would have been!". It's not constructive or interesting.
The answer is universally this: whoever designed <thing> at the time couldn't even fathom <modern thing>, and didn't need to fathom <modern thing> while they were designing <thing>. What they did at the time made perfect sense for the constraints they were aware of.
It’s still interesting, and I appreciated the concise essay.
It’s also good to remind the next generation of engineers (and ourselves) to be humble because we stand on the shoulders of giants who they themselves stood on the shoulders of giants, and on and on
Agreed. But please consider my efforts to have my network team to move out of the default MTU and deploy jumbo frames.... because it's always been 1500 and we feel safer keeping it in 2024.... :(
I always wondered where this 1500 came from and now I see it was not really a coincidence, I find that in fact really interesting.
It reminds me of origins of PAL/NTSC 25/30 Hz (actually a bit less than 30, for good reasons). Also, sometimes film material of 24fps has been played back at 25 fps on tv, for convenience.
Yeah, that part is a bit grand-standey. It was awkward to read.
Also, it’s not very correct. You could dump bits straight into a memory buffer and still sanitize them before use. It’s not as insane of a security issue as presented. It’s more like downloading a file today and not executing it. It technically passed though your system memory, it was just never executed as instructions.
Well, I think it made the author feel good about themselves so maybe they didn’t notice it doesn’t serve a purpose to the reader. It happens a lot.
The answer is universally this: whoever designed <thing> at the time couldn't even fathom <modern thing>, and didn't need to fathom <modern thing> while they were designing <thing>. What they did at the time made perfect sense for the constraints they were aware of.