Robert Brockway wrote: > On Tue, 20 Apr 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > >> I imagine a world where MLB generates a data stream of the Red Sox in the >> World Series. They send one data stream, and it multicasts to all the >> millions of people watching. The stream is kept as consolidated as possible > > Actually this sort of thing was done long ago. As far back as 1992-4 I > saw concerts & shuttle launches over multicast.
> Actually, a little farther back than that. IPv5 (yes, 5) AKA Streams-II (RFC 1819) was used around 1990 (and even earlier in SIMNET) in the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI). IPv5 and its main users "just assumed" multicast for everything. DIS's primary "backbone" was a set of satellite channels and was "inherently multicast". You sent your data to the sat on your assigned "channel" and all the ground stations received all the channels. There was a bunch of transport layer magic that I was never exposed to, but the final result was an ethernet feed that had all the packets from all the other sites comin' at ya. This was used for training simulators (F16, A10, F14, tank, helo, and "others") that were connected to the DSI. You could have exercises that combined people sitting in all these trainers, all over the world. You could, for instance, have the A10 drivers on the West coast and tankers in Kentucky, with helo drivers in St Louis, all in the same exercise, either against each other, or working together against another force. These protocols became the Distributed Interactive Simulation protocols, and eventually ended up as the basis for online games. The Wikipedia articles for DIS and SIMNET are pretty accurate, allowing for time and distance. These protocols are the basis for the online game protocols used by both Playstation and XBox. That's why we went from IPv4 to IPv6, IPv5 was already taken and used. --tep _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
