Comment by mhandley
2 years ago
I don't think we're losing knowledge of how the Internet works, but we're almost certainly losing knowledge of why it was done that way. I remember Bob Braden saying (and I paraphrase):
"When we designed the early Internet, we had a huge blank space to work in, and we agonized over what the best way to do things would be. Ever since, people have been filling in all the other parts of that space."
This was 20 years ago, but he's probably even more correct today. Of course they didn't get everything right by a longshot, but we're definitely losing the rationale for why things were done the way they were. As a result, it's quite common to stumble into old problems that had been engineered around before.
I don't think we're losing the macro "why" at all. We may be losing the wisdom of the path they walked to get to their design, which is certainly very valuable from a pedagogical and historical perspective.
I think that's the point, isn't it? That we're in danger of losing a lot of important history & context that underpinned the "macro"
Yes, that's the whole point I was trying to make. Without history of the why we tend to make the same mistakes all over again. Extracting the why is much more difficult than simply writing a book, there are psychological prompts to do that