alt Hacker NewsI wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
Replies
he's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
> if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
The computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.
I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:
1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.