Re:Ask YC: Your Favorite Hack
by jgrahamc on Thursday October 18, 2007 @02:39AM
(#69572)
Back in the mists of time I wrote code in BASIC and assembly for the Research Machines 380Z/480Z computers. When they came out with their Z-NET network I reverse engineered (with a friend) the packet send/receive APIs and we built on top of it a reliable transport protocol that would enable us to guarantee delivery of about 128 bytes of data to a machine on the network.
The entire code was stuffed into an unused block of data within the operating system and when a packet was received the receiving code would get an interrupt and would promptly CALL the code in the packet. We were able to reliably deliver 128 bytes of machine code and have it execute on any machine.
This turned out to be very cool because it enabled us to build a complete package for network management and monitoring (we could do stuff like mirror the screen on any machine to another one).
The entire code was stuffed into an unused block of data within the operating system and when a packet was received the receiving code would get an interrupt and would promptly CALL the code in the packet. We were able to reliably deliver 128 bytes of machine code and have it execute on any machine.
This turned out to be very cool because it enabled us to build a complete package for network management and monitoring (we could do stuff like mirror the screen on any machine to another one).
John.