The article kind of misses out on the networking standards of the time - there were many of which TCP and IP were just one, most of the rest were either proprietary (DNA SNA BNA etc) and incompatible, or owned by telecoms who wanted to be able to charge per packet(X.25).
TCP/IP won (IMHO) because the implementation was open source, and because no one was going to make a buck by locking others out (or charging them for the right to build an implementation). Plus there was a working reference implementation available for the taking
1, bidirectional sockets probably should've been ≥2 fd's, not 1.
2, non-blocking semantics and poll/select suck.
Can't blame anyone in 1983 for not getting "async I/O" right since we're still struggling; at least now we have some decent answers (like io_uring on Linux.)
> Many early modems were acoustic couplers attached to telephone handsets using Velcro — one part was a microphone, the other a speaker. You connected by dialling the phone...
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> Tools like the Unix-to-Unix Copy Program (UUCP) used scripts that called cu or similar tools to establish connections, then transferred data...
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> UUCP was how we sent mail, read network news, and received (small) files. For much of the research community, it effectively was the network...
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> Sockets changed all this.
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> Source: https://blog.apnic.net/2026/07/28/hooray-for-the-sockets-interface
So much has changed... yet so much has not... All are pure marvels and based on dear miracles...
I disagree with this. Separating lookup from connect(2) or sendmsg(2) is cleaner. If an application doesn't care about the difference, most people are using higher level APIs built on top anyway, and most of those will provide a quick way to hide DNS details from you.
You can have sockets without DNS. You can pick whatever strategy you want when there are multiple A records. You can use SRV records instead. And most importantly imo, it mirrors the listening API.
Wouldn't this add a ton of complexity for anything that extends DNS, like DoH, DoT, VPNs, firewalls, etc., and you'd still need to connect by IP for LAN connections or P2P?
Cause what you're asking is not just to do the regular DNS lookup inside `connect`, but to have the OS manage roaming and continuously updating DNS while the connection stays up?
I don't know about that. I don't know. That's a lot of complexity deep in the kernel and ossified.
I'm happy with the QUIC solution that allows you to migrate IPs and it's all userspace. It would be very hard to evolve a network protocol that had to be crammed into 3+ different kernels.
Sockets won over over-engineered monstrosities like STREAMS or X.whatever
And yet, sockets are a terrible interface. They don't provide a way to get the details of the underlying connection for features like migration, checkpointing, or introspection. E.g. there is no way to get the current sequence number for TCP (there is "connection repair" mode now, but it's Linux-specific).
Well, you can say that sockets abstract the low-level details, but then these details hit you in the face when you need to do protocol-specific name resolution.
I now believe that we could have switched to something like IPv6 two decades ago if the socket interface simply allowed binding multiple address families to one socket and handled the name resolution internally.
Sockets also cemented the "one connection - one address" model that is _still_ dragging back the IPv6 adoption. MPTCP or QUIC are still barely supported.
TCP/IP won (IMHO) because the implementation was open source, and because no one was going to make a buck by locking others out (or charging them for the right to build an implementation). Plus there was a working reference implementation available for the taking