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Comment by bazil376 | Hacker News Reader

“Can I have port 22?”

“Yes”

the early days of the internet are so fantastical to me I can’t stand it. Makes me sad to be too young to have witnessed it.

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Wow that's a lot less negotiation than is required to tell a TCP joke! ;)

  Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

  Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.

  OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.

  OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.

  Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?

  Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.

  OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. 
  It will last 10 seconds, 
  it has two characters, 
  it does not have a setting, 
  and it ends with punchline.

  OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke 
  that will last 10 seconds, 
  has two characters, 
  does not have a setting, 
  and will end with a punchline.

  I'm sorry, your connection has timed out...

  ...Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

OMG, this is brilliant! How have i never heard this one before!?! Thanks for sharing! :-D

I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it. ;)

OMG another good one! :-D

Even if you were old enough, you probably wouldn't have witnessed it because it was only being worked on by a small number of people. There must be amazing future things which are in their early days right now but you and me aren't involved with them and nobody knows for sure what they even are until they explode.

I'm old enough to remember the early days of Bitcoin and how nobody I talked to about it had ever heard of it and was either dismissive ("That would be easy to hack" / "that can't work") or just treated it like a random chit-chat that didn't matter.

There was also that time Jon Postel asked all the DNS root server operators to make his server the root, and they did. https://www.wired.com/2012/10/joe-postel/

You don't really need permission to take a port; you can run your service on 80/tcp if you like.

Here it's different than this, the question is rather "Can it be recorded that port 22 is reserved for my tool so it becomes a worldwide convention?"

There is no worldwide convention. Go ahead and run your services on whatever ports. That's what I do.

Yes there most certainly is a worldwide convention. Please read the article before commenting. Just because you don't happen to follow the convention does not mean it doesn't exist and isn't worldwide.

No convention at all, just FTP defaulting to 21 and SSH to 22 and websites to 80 randomly.

There is no Internet Police that will give a fine for using the 'wrong' ports.

(In fact, not running SSH on port 22 is an industry best practice in 2024, sadly.)

You are thinking of a law, not a convention.

A convention is a common language. It is something you have the right to break when needed / suitable but which is otherwise nice to follow when interacting with others.

Such conventions allow you to omit the port when typing a URL in a browser for instance. They allow taking nice shortcuts and avoiding verbose / irrelevant technical details.

(now, some conventions are mandated by laws indeed. For instance, if you are setting up electricity somewhere, you'd better use the right colors. One might argue that we ought to call such things rules)

Conventions are defaults. Every browser I have assumes port 80 (or 443) for http (or https) by default for a reason.

> There is no worldwide convention.

Yeah, if only there were an authority that we could agree on to assign numbers for internet things like ports.

Some sort of internet assigned number authority…

https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...

You can, but you'll have to deal with the consequences of violating conventions and the impact of that might matter very little or a whole lot depending on the situation. Running a random service over port 80 can be a good idea (lots of networks have that port open), but you'd better be willing to deal with the traffic from people/bots/crawlers looking for a webserver there. If you aren't careful you can break things on your own network or get yourself cut off from others. The rules and standards that exist are there to make everyone's lives easier and promote things working. Deviate from them at your own risk.

Ah yes back when NANOG was an irc channel and anyone could join and discuss their routing problems.

It was a simpler time for sure

The early days of the internet were dominated by InfoSeek Net Search, then later on Alta Vista was the search engine of choice. Then later on, Google appeared and everyone else couldn't compete.

That's closer to an abridged history of "World Wide Web" search engines.

The internet was decades old when Infoseek appeared.

the internet was decades old when http appeared.

Was it DEC than ran Alta Vista? They were involved in some search engine

Indeed.[1]

I recall using it as my main search engine at altavista.digital.com before they moved to get its own domain at altavista.com.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

I remember when AltaVista was the best, and despairing because it was so terrible.

At a dinner party, we were arguing about how to move forward with discovery on the web, because the situation was so dire. Someone was arguing for keyword registration, a la AOL.

I really, really hope that someone wasn’t me; I’ve convinced myself over the years it wasn’t, but I didn’t have any better ideas, just knew that wouldn’t work.

I was using Archie and gopher in the late 80s. Do you mean web search instead of internet search?

> The early days of the internet were dominated by InfoSeek Net Search

That's 20-some years after the early days of the Internet.

I'd been using the internet for 14 years before InfoSeek Net Search appeared in 1994, this is honestly the first time I've heard of it.

I don't even consider myself an early user of the internet either, the people I learnt from had already been using it a good while.

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