this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
40 points (100.0% liked)

retrocomputing

4097 readers
9 users here now

Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
SDF@lemmy.sdf.org
cognitivegears@lemmy.sdf.org
Penkster@lemmy.sdf.org
40
Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic) (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 4 months ago by CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been playing with an idea that would involve running a machine over a delay-tolerant mesh network. The thing is, each packet is precious and needs to be pretty much self contained in that situation, while modern systems assume SSH-like continuous interaction with the user.

Has anyone heard of anything pre-existing that would work here? I figured if anyone would know about situations where each character is expensive, it would be you folks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The 'ed' editor was designed for high latency networks. I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes, I would read up on 'ed' and related tools.

[–] scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Delightful!

"Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"

Gave me a giggle. That 100k loss has got to hurt for a user who still tries to run 'vi' on a classic system, I imagine.

Edit:

Another gem:

"Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity."

[–] jaredj@infosec.pub 3 points 3 months ago

I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes

Directions unclear; shoelaces tangled

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ed is great (in this context). I think there's been posts about it on here before. It's just a text editor, though.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah. I've had mentors regail me of other tools they used alongside 'Ed', but I wasn't listening very attentively. Hopefully that's something that can be dug out of the history of the Internet.

I would definitely choose the old reliable stuff over something new and fancy, if I had this use case.