[e2e] Open the floodgate - back to 1st principles

[David P. Reed]

At 03:40 PM 4/25/2004, Cannara wrote:
>But, in commercial nets, which now
>must use TCP/IP because that's what comes on all the boxes, and allows
>Internet/corporate-web access for browsing, there are generally few parallel
>sessions running.

IBM made this argument against general purpose file systems.   They said 
that all "real" business applications were record-oriented databases, so 
they should be implemented directly on disk drives, using application 
specific record-sizes and blocking factors, and tuning the disk hardware 
level format directly to the structure of the application.   Thus ISAM was 
born.

There are still some applications where file systems and relational 
databases introduce overheads of a factor of 2-5 over what is possible on 
the raw hardware.    And there are still some programmers who yearn for a 
day when operating systems let you write hardware channel programs that get 
executed in the disk controller.

Others have realized that the benefit of abstraction means not having to 
recode their applications every 2 years - which is worth even a substantial 
overhead.

You are free in your specialized corporate applications to use whatever 
protocols you like - typically you can still write code in device drivers 
that gets down to the raw hardware.   I commend that strategy to you.