On 3 Oct 2019 at 20:50, Cian Witherspoon wrote: > So it's actually going against those assumptions that I'm looking > for in this discussion. What if it isn't any of those? What if it's > more like the telegraph? well, the telegraph led to the fax (yes, really) and later they came up with the teletype. Everything since is pretty much elaboration. > What happens when you start putting interesting limitations on the > tech and its use? Everyone, even many modern novelists, tend to just > keep it as a generic internet, or phone system (which allows you to > run a basic internet), just faster than the fastest ships available. Well, even then there are limitations. Even if range is unlimited, you *can't* connect to everybody. So mail will get forwarded. and quite likely via something like the early internet/usenet "bang paths" (basically the "address" line is a list of nodes to route thru) This isn't as nice as domain based addressing, but it allowed you to *deliberately* route around nodes that had problems (or that you had reasons to not want your message to pass thru) "News" (ie messages aimed at anybody who is interested) works differently. You'll want to organize it by topic/subtopic etc (like usenet news, and fidonet groups). In the OTU, neither is a big problem. In variant TUs with lots of alien starfaring civilizations, it gets a lot weireder until you have Vinge's "net of a million lies" from "A Fire Upon the Deep". among other lines you *need* stuff like his "Language-path" header as messages get translated and re-translated along the way. > What if it's the high tech equivalent of messenger pigeons? (Charles > Stross had this, with entangled pairs of quantum bits that got used > up and had to be shipped by STL ships). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers RFC 1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 Also RFC 2549 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 > One of the more interesting models I saw was EVE Online - lorewise, > the ansible was made of a paired array of entangled hydrogen atoms > that transmitted electrical signals between them. This forces a model > based around a client array onboard, with the service array being > connected in a server rack to a switchboard. Network topography > becomes an important part of warfare. The limitations placed on the > model drives stories based around dealing with them. Sounds like the linked "wormholes" Laurence Dahners uses in his Ell Donsai stories. They use the paired "chips" *mostly* to connect devices to switching units (much like a telephone exchange) which then connect it to whatever other device you want to contact. Yeah, that does have the problem of somebody blowing up an exchange/server and rendered all the devices that connect to it useless. But smart folks will have connections tpo multiple servers *or* a few *direct* connections (think leased line phone service) that don't *use* the servers. Also, since both the "wormholes" and quantum entanglement are *by definition* undtectable/untraceable you only have to worry about destruction of the "server" if the links are server to server, rather than device to server. For small "link" equipment, you'd go with device to server and only the folks providing the service know where the servers are. For "large" link equpment, you'll use normal methods (radio, cables, and the like) to connect to the servers and only use the ansible links to connect *between* servers. That *does* make the servers a point of failure. Which is why you take a tip from the way the Injternet is set up. You have all the servers connect to multiple servers. So taking one out means you've only isolated the folks connected to it. Everybody else just continues on because they can route thru a different server. That sort of thing was one of the design criteria for the ARPAnet and for the Internet that grew from it. -- Leonard Erickson (aka shadow) shadow at shadowgard dot com
