The Network is the Computer(by Cloudflare)を懐かしむ

「The Network is the Computer」は1970年代にSun Microsystemsの商標だったが、今年になってCloudflareが商標として取得し、CloudflareのCTOが当時のSunのメンバーにインタビューしている。流し読みしていたら、懐かしい話が盛りだくさんだった。

The Network is the Computer: A Conversation with John Gage

I’m talking to John Gage who was what, the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, which is what Wikipedia claims and it also claims that you created this phrase “The Network is the Computer,” and that's actually one of the things I want to talk about with you a little bit because I remember when I was in Silicon Valley seeing that slogan plastered about the place and not quite understanding what it meant.

John Gateは1982年に創立されたSunの21番目の社員で「The Network is the Computer」というフレーズを作った人だとWikipediaに書かれている。

Well, trademarks are dealing with the real world, but the inspiration of Cloudflare is to do exactly what Bill Joy and I were talking about in 1982. It's to build an environment in which every participant globally can share with security, and we were not as strong. Bill wrote most of the code of TCP/IP implemented by every other computer vendor, and still these questions of latency, these questions of distributed denial of service which was, how do you block that?

商標がCloudflareに移ったが、当時のSunのBill JoyとJohn Gateが多くのベンダのTCP/IP実装をコーディングして遅延を改善していたのに対し、CloudflareはDDoSから遅延を守っているという点で、The Network is the Computerを継承しているという。

So DARPA had tried to implement, as you did, from the spec, from the RFC, the components, and Vint had designed a lot of this, all the acknowledgement codes and so forth that you had to implement in TCP/IP. So Bill, as a graduate student at Berkeley, we had a meeting in Arlington at DARPA headquarters where BBN and AT&T Bell Labs and a number of other people were in the room. Their code didn’t work, this graduate student from Berkeley named Bill Joy, his code did work, and when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf asked Bill, “Well, so how did you do it?” What he said was exactly what you just said, he said, “I just read the spec and wrote the code.”

DARPAのメンバはRFCを元に実装しようとしたが動かず、それをやってのけたのはバークレーを卒業したBill Joyだった。Bob KahnとVint Cerfが「どう実装したのかい？」と聞いたら「仕様を読んでコードを書いただけだ」と答える大物っぷり。その後のSunを創業し、JavaやSPARCを作ったり、Steve JobsがNeXTを創業した際に支援をした話などが続く。

Over the years as Sun grew from 15 people or so and ended up being like 45,000 people before we were sold off to Oracle and then everybody dumped out because Oracle didn’t know too much about computing. So Ivan Sutherland, Whit Diffie. Ivan actually stayed on. He may actually still have an Oracle email. Almost all of the research groups, certainly the chip group went off to Intel, Fujitsu, Microsoft. It’s funny to think now that Microsoft’s run by a Sun person.

そのSunがOracleに買収されたとき、Sunには45000人の社員がいたが、Oracleはコンピューティングを知らなかったので、ほぼ全員がdump outされた。ただ、おそらくIntelや富士通、Microsoftに再就職している。Microsoftで元Sun社員が働いているのをfunnyだと言っている。

同じようにRay Rothrock、Greg Papadopoulosとの対談も懐かしいキーワードに溢れているが、その全てをインタビューしているCloudflareのCTOのJohn Graham-Cummingも、なかなか生き字引のような人物で、しかも調べたら2019年からCloudflareのCTOになる前はイギリス政府に対してアラン・チューリングへの謝罪を要求していた人物として有名だったようだ。そのイギリスでチューリングが紙幣の肖像に選ばれるというニュースもあり、乗りに乗っている感じだ。