Gregory's ServerLove this little chunk of hard-earned wisdom from Dave Clark, an early Internet pioneer.
"If you want your application to be robust, you got to put the shit in."
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Oops, forgot to link to the full interview. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738738 @darius this is great, thanks for sharing it. Funnily enough I learned the value of a well-placed retry loop at the same gig which relied heavily on FTP, because noisy failures for transient errors meant being paged in the middle of the night.
[DATA EXPUNGED]
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Important point here that mail (in this case over SMTP) was basically the earliest internet application that had to "just work" because it was fire-and-forget. FTP came before mail, and was critical, but also it was something that when it failed, it failed noisily and you could call someone to fix it. If your mail is not delivered, you might never know!