[ILUG] Whatever happened to real computer scientists?

[Niall O Broin]

On 16 Apr 2006, at 14:19, Paolo Marchiori wrote:

> Niall O Broin, Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 02:11:12PM +0100:
>> Kevin - you are just going to have to accept that UUCP is no longer a
>> "widely used networking technology"
>
> The italian army is still widely using X.25. Go figure.

I did a lot of work with X.25 in ESA back in the day. X.25 definitely  
qualifies as venerable, and there was a world wide network long  
before the upstart TCP was so widely deployed, and organisations such  
as armies, governments and space agencies tend to hang on to these  
venerable technologies for a long time.

It seems however that ESA is finally abandoning X.25 for their world  
wide network - the OSI (there's a another venerable near dead  
technology) stack that ESA uses will be validated for use on Solaris  
10 but NOT over an X.25 transport.

TBH I don't think there'll be too many people crying - X.25 has so  
many configurable options that the number of different ways to break  
a link is huge. And interestingly, many of these ways will only break  
the link under certain circumstances, thus making debugging even more  
fun.

> (ps: I guess you all remember the story of "magic and more magic")

For those who don't, see this page:

http://www.livingstonmontana.com/access/dan/191magicswitch.html

Sadly for the mystique of the story, that page has a corollary about  
a measurement made which seemed to indicate a slight difference in  
ground potentials on the machine concerned, which really was the only  
logical explanation for the switch's behaviour.

I, however, have no such explanation for my tale of the haunted  
Compaq :-)



Niall