Back when HTTP and SMTP were designed, the Internet was mostly old Unix machines talking to each other. Everything was a file full of `char`, piped to an 80-column terminal. Text-based made sense. Decades later, when the computer world was bigger, faster, and more unified, other systems kind of cargo-culted off of those earlier successes. And isn't it neat that you can telnet into port 80? I think another big reason…
A case against text protocols
21–23 of 23 posts
Re: A case against text protocols
#22Back when HTTP and SMTP were designed, the Internet was mostly old Unix machines talking to each other. Everything was a file full of `char`, piped to an 80-column terminal. Text-based made sense. Decades later, when the computer world was bigger, faster, and more unified, other systems kind of cargo-culted off of those earlier successes. And isn't it neat that you can telnet into port 80? I think another big reason…
Re: A case against text protocols
#23Back when HTTP and SMTP were designed, the Internet was mostly old Unix machines talking to each other. Everything was a file full of `char`, piped to an 80-column terminal. Text-based made sense. Decades later, when the computer world was bigger, faster, and more unified, other systems kind of cargo-culted off of those earlier successes. And isn't it neat that you can telnet into port 80? I think another big reason…