vintage screwlisp account
#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.
Mar 4, 2023 at 5:53amWeb
Show threadvintage screwlisp accountMar 4, 2023
What I'm currently thinking to simulate an ether:
The "ether" is a doubly linked line of hardware packet holder transcoders. Each one maintains TCP connections to it's upstream neighbor, downstream neighbor, and the server it serves.
[yes tcp sucks aesthetically here]
Then, and this might be anathema, in order to write to the ether, I byte-by-byte send data to my "transcoder" which
- replies with its current CHECK byte
- immediately writes the byte to its 0/1/2 neighbors including the server
Show threadvintage screwlisp accountMar 4, 2023
The mechanism for communication on chaosnet is that everyone just writes ~512 bytes to the ether. In general a server has answered many RFCs by forming a two-way connection to instances of programs running on it (to the requesters). Yet outside of file transfer, 512 bytes is basically a lot of bytes, so at the time it was not found that collisions formed much of a performance constraint.