
The Internet Is Held Together with Bubble Gum and Baling Wire - CarolineW
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/29/the-internet-is-held-together-with-bubble-gum-and-baling-wire/
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mchahn
Years ago (1989?) there was a push for a "data super-highway" (pushed mainly
by Al Gore, leading to the myth that he said he invented the internet). I was
at a conference on the subject. There were a lot of talks on possible
alternatives. The audience had a lot of telco people, who assumed it would be
based on the phone infrastructure.

To make a long story shorter, at one point a neckbeard stood up and said "we
already have it. It's called the internet". Most of the audience laughed and
the speaker pointed out that something so fragile and unreliable could never
scale out.

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DougN7
If you work with email at the protocol level, it's flat amazing how well
everything works given the hundreds of non-conforming bits of text you
receive. Just parsing email addresses accurately in the wild is a feat.

