[thread] I said this as a joke yesterday but there were plenty of interesting technical firsts that we achieved collectively at CricInfo. I moved from Signal Processing to Networking partly because of CricInfo. (1/n) https://twitter.com/vishalmisra/status/1290245538432966658

At CricInfo we created the world’s first (*) live blog and real-time content system (2/n)

https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/21879863/birth-proper-ball-ball-commentary-cricinfo

(*) http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/08/08/live.blogging/index.html

The scoring system, dougie, was itself ingenious. It had an application layer multicast system, back in 1992. The master dougie connected to 4 slave dougies, which in turn connected to more slaves, forming a tree. Each balls update propagated down the tree. (3/n)

We wrote our own lightweight, non-forking webserver with an extremely small footprint, Mathopd, predating apache. (4/n)

http://www.mathopd.org/ 

By 1996-97 we had multiple servers in many countries. For live updating of the scorecards and other stuff in the database, we developed our own application layer multicast system, to efficiently and quickly replicate content across to all servers. (5/n)

We didn't hit the genius idea of Akamai to automatically pick the closest server based on DNS and instead tried to do it at the webserver level. That didn't scale and so we fell back on getting people to manually select their nearest servers (6/n)

We had a distributed engineering organization back then. Development used to happen with people spread across parts of the US, UK, Holland, and Australia. We had meetings on irc and people rarely met each other in person. I still haven't met 90% of the people I worked with. (7/n)

We might have done one of the first live video streamings on the Internet. Partnering with Mick Jagger (!) - we hosted the live streaming of a cricket tournament in Sharjah because he wanted to watch it and didn’t have any other way to get it. (8/n) https://www.wired.com/1997/12/mick-jaggers-other-baby-internet-cricket/

There were many other firsts that happened and I was convinced of the magic of the Internet and decided to focus on networking as the area of research for my PhD.
(9/n)

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Register here: https://www.cvent.com/events/sigcomm-2020/event-summary-29cc3dd8a71844068c240b2bf515873e.aspx (n/n)