seen a take about tcp and it's just making me come out in "well actually" and i need to vent
like, sure, tcp/ip is great, but it's worth learning about sequence numbers (syn cookies), or congestion collapse (tcp reno), or the vestigial options no-one handles correctly
we're told things like "tcp/ip was split so that ip can be simple" and then people cough and mumble out "ip fragmentation and reassembly"
the point i want to make is that a lot of tcp's good design is accidental, the bad parts have been fixed, mostly, and the adoption of tcp was way more about social factors than technical ones
the protocol everyone adopted wasn't the polished turd we know and love. that and tcp/ip4 has been so successful that it has effectively sabotaged efforts to replace it
it isn't so much well designed but well positioned, lucky, and malleable enough to overcome problems (of which there were many)
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