An instant messenger on a Lisp machine. From the "Communicating with Other Users" manual by Symbolics, July 1986.

#Symbolics #LispMachine #LispM #Lisp #Retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #Networking #InstantMessaging #InstantMessenger #Chaosnet

A Short History of #Chaosnet:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html

[Tomorrow's] #lisp y #gopher #show #planning
Lisp:
- #chaosnet (my own initial pass) - the #moon
- Check up on @amoroso 's #interlisp adventures
- @svetlyak40wt and @galdor on the 'stodon about making common lisp intro material
Gophers:
- I don't know what a #laundromat is but I'm excited to find out
- Checking in on #gopherClub and #tildeverse gophers
- Replace tcp with chaosnet for gopher?

- Side issue: Explore the wisdom of #links for non-gopher browsing

-another bring-a-friend day !

#chaosnet #quest update; I wanted the medium of fake ether to not be centralised, and not to look like IP, so it's a line of daisy-chained objects chattering explicitly slowly and awkwardly to neighbors by TCP, since I wanted there to be collisions and propagation times. This has nothing to do with chaosnet, but it's my first pass at approximating how a chaosnet ether might work in some senses.

Real ether is a 75 ohm terminated coax line.

Anyway, servers can dump/receive packets over "ether"s

The @SDF #mastodon #retrospective email
[Twitter users said they prefer]
- advertising
- algorithmic targetting
- one central server
- ["]
- ["] (the corporate server only communicates with itself; little propagation delay)

in contrast I am very happy with the friends I have made on mastodon.

I think that mastodon specifically and w3 activitypub generally are a step on the journey (back... to #chaosnet ;)

#chaosnet Alright so beyond having to simulate an ether - somehow - a minimal chaosnet is a self-clocking uncentralised system. I think the minimal (simple case) communication is just like this:
[ether is quiet, I think my clock phase has rolled around]
Me:
RFC - request for connection.
[Gets to server, what I requested suits a simple type response]
Server:
ANS - instead of forming a connection, just send back some data, the interaction has ended.
Suits #gopher fine in my opinion.

#chaosnet #implementation
Some of the moon's commentary on chaosnet:
Have the computer consider itself its own little virtual ether and its network device to be a bridge to an ether
I'm just not sure what the ether my network device is bridging me to can be that's not centralising.
I'm leaning towards having a udp-fueled linear doubly linked list of nodes and a separation of concerns between that and the software side[s] as the ether. Getting this to act like self-clocking chaos is a challenge

Reading https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6353/AIM-628.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y now... #chaosnet #Moon
beforehand, I know that this was a high performance networking protocol for stable and predictable networks, in contrast to TCP which was intended to continue working if at all possible

It looks like chaosnet-bridge has a utility for chaosnet-through-unix-sockets. I'm not used to networking other than TCP and UDP though.

It seems like there should be a #lisp package for this.

Chaosnet: The #Lisp Machine network protocol that was beat by TCP/IP

"The only really visible remnant of #Chaosnet is the CH DNS class. There’s something about that fact that I find strangely fascinating. The CH class is a vestigial ghost of an alternative network protocol in a world that has long since settled on TCP/IP. It’s exciting, at least to me, to know that the last traces of Chaosnet still lurk out there in the infrastructure of our networked society. The CH DNS class is a fun artifact of digital archaeology. But it’s also a living reminder that the internet was not born fully formed, that TCP/IP is not the only way to connect computers to each other, and that “the internet” is far from the coolest name we could have had for our global communication system."

https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html

#lispmachines