TCP/IP and Shipping Containers

A year ago, at a private meeting at Warburg Pincus, I heard Nick Gall of the Meta Group give a great talk on why TCP/IP is like container shipping -- both were initiated about thirty years ago, revolutionized their industries, and have proven surprisingly robust while other technologies have had to be updated every few years. I was so impressed that I invited Nick to give the same talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Glad to see that ZDnet blogged the talk. Nick gives us some great insight into just why TCP/IP is so durable.

nate koechley [ 9 August 2005 02:08 AM]

Does this Wired article from 1999 give make similar points, or did Mr Gall extend the metaphor in interesting ways? I'm not trying to call anyone out, it's just that I enjoyed the initial Wired article and would like to hear more on the same theme.

Only four decades ago, contemporary photos of Singapore's port showed shirtless workers stumbling down wooden gangplanks carrying enormous bundles of bananas on their backs. It was called break-bulk shipping.
This inefficiency irked Malcom McLean, a crusty North Carolina trucker who defied convention to spark a logistics revolution that continues to reverberate today. Dubbed the Father of Containerization, he laid the foundation in the 1950s for what would arguably become the world's first truly packetized transport network.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.10/ports.html

thanks.

Nick Gall [15 August 2005 01:53 PM]

Nate, I think my talk goes WAY beyond what appeared in the Wired article, though I think the Wired article was excellent and cite it in my presentation. Where I go beyond the Wired article is in teasing out the key architectural principles that enabled the success of not only the Internet and containerized shipping, but also the Web, email, and even SIP. The essential challenge is how to artitect a system that is open-ended in both its use and its implementation. I use the concept of IFaPs (Identifiers, Formats, and Protocols) to discuss this. You can read a great description of my talk by Daniel Steinberg at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6113. If you read the comments, you can even find a link to my presentation. Let me know what you think.

nate koechley [15 August 2005 02:31 PM]

Thanks for the reply Nick. I wasn't able to make the conference this year, but loved the topic of your talk and the wired article. Will definitely check out the notes you pointed me to. Thanks!

TCP/IP and Shipping Containers

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