Some of my early career was spent working on Sun workstations and servers. Way back then they had the slogan “The Network is the Computer”. Clearly, that slogan is the old wine in the new bottle labeled “Cloud”, but that’s another story. As I sit looking at an hourglass or a spinning “progress” icon, I realize that the original slogan was incomplete, the full version is:

“The Network is the Computer… and that’s why it sucks so bad.”

Though, to be fair, the network is not the problem, as such. The problem is the way it is used. Specifically, the apparent pervasive assumption amongst programmers that all network operations have zero latency, infinite bandwidth, and are 100% reliable.