On 5/8/07, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 5/7/07, James G. Sack (jim) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> TCP/IP made explicit the concept of endpoint addresses, and discovered a
> new definition of "network".
I see, I think. I'm a fifth of the way through the talk and so far
what I've gotten is that phone numbers are paths. A phone number
isn't an end point, but rather how to construct a path to the end
point. Very subtle difference, and I'm not sure I see how it matters.
The phone number was only used to establish the network route. After
the route was established and the call was in progress, the number is
no longer used. None of the voice information indicates where it is
supposed to go; it is up to the network to keep this state
information. The phone network was made up of several links
concatenated together, and if one of them go down, there is no way to
recover because the nodes only knew about their neighbors, nothing
about the destination or the content of the data.
Apparently, by embedding the destination in a packet, and adding some
buffering, the IP network could dynamically create routes, getting
around the need to establish the whole route ahead of time and gaining
the ability to route around network faults more easily (not to mention
the time sharing aspect, which is also a great win).
So the concept of the phone number is basically the same as an IP
address, but the IP address was better utilized by improving how the
physical links were being used (adding more intelligence into the
nodes).
-- Rick
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