October 2019
Beginner
708 pages
26h
English
When engineers try to design and build more sophisticated systems, they divide the system into components and place different functions in different components. These decisions have far-reaching effects. The telephone system took one approach, and the designers of today’s internet protocols took a different approach.
The traditional analog telephone was a fairly simple device that did very little on its own. The telephone network accepted a dialed phone number, routed and established a connection to the called phone, and managed the conversation. The telephone system was a classic example of a “smart” network with “dumb” endpoints.
The Ethernet is a “dumb” network. It doesn’t tell hosts how to take turns ...