Epic Ping Storytime Thread

Storytime. A recent lunch conversation at work reminded me of this one. I've told this story several times in the past, but never on twitter. So cast your mind back to the early 1990s. Microsoft's corporate campus was running an Ungermann-Bass XNS based ethernet (not TCP/IP or IPX/SPX). I was on the NT networking team and I was responsible for a component known as the "Browser" (people may remember the browser as "bowser.sys"). The browser did two things: (1) it received anonymous datagrams and parsed them, delivering them to applications and (b) functioned as the core of the network browsing protocol (MS-BRWS if anyone cares).

A Twitter thread by Larry Osterman tells a technical story about Microsoft's early-1990s corporate network, the NT networking team, and a component called the "Browser." The joke comes from the absurdly old networking details and the pun that people remembered the browser as "bowser.sys," making an epic technical anecdote out of a lunch conversation. EN: A Twitter thread by Larry Osterman tells a technical story about Microsoft's early-1990s corporate network, the NT networking team, and a component called the "Browser." The joke comes from the absurdly old networking details and the pun that people remembered the browser as "bowser.sys," making an epic technical anecdote out of a lunch conversation.

• @ithueti / 667 2019-03-04