On The Metal Tom Lyon
Dec 23, 2019
Tom Lyon, active on Twitter and associated with DriveScale, discusses various topics including the Williams tube, Mercury delay lines, Datapoint, AppleTalk, ARCNET, Sun's Network Disk protocol, the Internet Collapse of 1986, Larry Roberts, Telenet, the history of networking technology, nerdy family background, working with the UNIX group, Enrof source code, ATM networking and IP switching, understanding a tweet, the history and approach of Nova Systems, and making servers simpler with DriveScale.
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Sun-1's Software Memory Refresh
- Tom Lyon, employee number eight at Sun, recalls the Sun-1's software-based memory refresh.
- Debugging was difficult because breakpoints would stop the refresh, causing memory loss.
NFS Architecture Origins
- Tom Lyon wrote down the original NFS architecture during a 1983 offsite meeting.
- This architecture largely persists in NFS today, demonstrating its foresight.
NFS, POSIX, and Auto-Mounters
- Many issues attributed to NFS stem from auto-mounter problems, especially in Linux.
- POSIX's incompatibility with NFS arises because it doesn't address networks, unlike NFS, which predates it.
