| Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane. I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is in the realm of reducing internet latency in routers by doing clever things with their packet buffers. Some 5 or 10 years after the howto was written Cisco/Belkin reached out to us. Someone had patented putting a wireless card in a router, and they wanted our help with showing there was prior art. That process opened my eyes because to a couple guys like us it seemed like an obvious thing to do to put a wireless card in and network with it, like any other network card at the time it just had an antenna instead of a cat5 cable. Nothing 'inventive' about doing it, its just a logical step. I think they ended up settling so maybe that original patent-holder gets a couple cents on every wireless router, not sure. I remember the hostname that document was served from when it was written, a tower PC hostname 'screamingslave' (NiN reference), and it served that document from the Redwood Estates (remote) side of the wireless link. 'for work' my work is all cloud infra, I still run my own personal server -- something I built and configured to run openstack, to be a "cloud in a box" -- hostname 'mantaro' (a reference to the river that is the source of the amazon), and that document is served from a VM running within, hostname 'immora' (doom reference). It seems to be surviving the HN hug-of-death so far, but it was written in what was state-of-the-art for 1998, just a plain html doc, with maybe a css style sheet (did the original even have that?). Yeah no Nuxt/Vue SPA with some nosql backend. If you wanna see another of my efforts in 98, I was also involved in bringing 'directory services' to Linux, tldr something more modern (at the time) than NIS, using LDAP for managing your users and other directory objects. That doc can be found here http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/ |
I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious...
Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more.
For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.