Scale it up, and you have Taara[1]
IP over Lasers
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: IP over Lasers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but kinda cool making it from scratch. Also this uses air as the medium.
About 25-30 years ago we had an FDDI network, and the hosts had optical bypass switches on them. The FDDI network comprised two fiber rings, one going clockwise and the other anticlockwise. If a host dropped off the network, the optical bypass switch would loop the two rings to each other, creating one big ring. Two non-adjacent hosts dropping off the network would break the ring. The optical bypass was surprisingly…
Check out relatively recent Google TPU paper where they used an optical switch to connect neighboring TPUs
Re: IP over Lasers
#43Re: IP over Lasers
#44I was vibe researching TUN/TAP devices a few days ago. Cool to see such cool projects using them. I was mostly thinking about making a VPN prototype through.
Re: IP over Lasers
#45We know neolithic internet used free air lasers because we haven't found either optical fibre connectors or copper Ethernet in the trenches we dig at neolithic settlements.
Re: IP over Lasers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite the same thing as doing it in an atmosphere.
That's right, the beam pointing problem is far harder when everything is moving.
Deterministic space dynamics vs chaotic fluid dynamics (or worse, as the sibling comment by eqvinox illustrates).
Space is hard by many aspects, but on that part it's much easier than on earth.
Re: IP over Lasers
#47I don't know why, but I would have expected higher speeds. Maybe my mind just assumes "lasers = fast". It would be interesting to know which factors make this setup unreliable at higher speeds.
Individual bits always go fast, the difficulty is always telling many apart. Speed is kind of the wrong word. It's about throughput
Re: IP over Lasers
#48They built a program they called (relay) that sends packets between a tun network device & a uart serial device https://github.com/mikeakohn/small_projects/blob/main/ip_ove... I .... wonder if they considered just using PPP/SLIP?
A while back I was doing some IP-over-UART shenanigans and it took me a surprising amount of research to discover the existence of SLIP. I think it's one of those things that at some point "everyone knew about" and ended up being poorly documented as a result.
Mid-90s you definitely had to know about SLIP to get your Linux or NeXT boxen to connect to your ISP.
Re: IP over Lasers
#49They built a program they called (relay) that sends packets between a tun network device & a uart serial device https://github.com/mikeakohn/small_projects/blob/main/ip_ove... I .... wonder if they considered just using PPP/SLIP?
A while back I was doing some IP-over-UART shenanigans and it took me a surprising amount of research to discover the existence of SLIP. I think it's one of those things that at some point "everyone knew about" and ended up being poorly documented as a result.
CSLIP is even better.
Re: IP over Lasers
#50A typical computer is connected to the local network using either an Ethernet cable or WiFi. This project connects two computers together through lasers. No mention of carrier pigeon? IPoAC has three RFCs!
I'd not expect that to be "typical", unless you're in the middle of some pretty huge nature reserve and still need to file taxes online.