[c-nsp] Ode to the old days

[Nick Hilliard]

Ryan L wrote:
> It's a source of anxiety for me these days.
> 
> Generally means no patching has occurred and likely vulnerabilities gone
> unaddressed. ;)
> 
> Can barely keep up anymore.
> 
> 10 years is impressive though. That's like a hundred in switch years.

10 years is impressive, but I don't miss the "old days".  They were the
days of too little bandwidth and crashing daemons, of immature protocol
standards and rubbish implementations, of too little ram, trash cpus and
underspecced fiber gear, all costing too much money.  Of staying up too
late night after night because things would fall over if you didn't, of
leased lines and of stupid telcos trying to stop any innovation beyond
ISDN.  Of ATM, frame relay, X.25 and V.35 and anything which looked like
a modem.  Of Windows 3.11 and versions of Linux which couldn't handle
arp to save their life and of having to rebuild SunOS4 libresolv because
the standard version was so horribly broken.  Of sendmail and SLIP and
INN on machines with not enough disk space. And X.400.  I will stop
there because OSI was so bad that I don't want to remember any more
right now.

If anyone is interested in a celebratory bonfire of these horrors, count
me in so I can grimly stamp on the ashes.

Not bitter.

Nick