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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I was there for ATM, and I'm so freaking glad it lost. It's a prime example of "a camel is a horse designed by committee". A 53 byte cell with a 48 byte payload? Of course! What an excellent idea! We definitely want a 10% overhead on a ludicrously small packet, just so it has tolerable voice latencies if you scale it down to run on a 64Kb DS0, never mind that literally everything in the industry was scaling up to fatter pipes.

ATM was nifty if you had a requirement of establishing voice-style, i.e. billable, connections. No thanks. It was an interesting technology but hopelessly hobbled by the desire to emulate a voice call that fit into a standard invoice line.

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note that it was 'tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France', most other places had long enough latency anyways that they needed to have it anyways. and of course now everything needs echo cancellation.

I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does really sour one on the process.

I'd forgotten about the French connection here.

BTW, I searched Kagi for "tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France" and saw your comment. Wow. I didn't realize web crawlers were that current these days.

Kagi is a Google frontend, and Google appears to index Hacker News in real time. I bet they have written site-specific code to scrape /comments continuously.

LLMs too. A few months ago I posted a comment here in a thread where I speculated on the reasons an old law might have been written the way it was.

A couple hours later I asked Perplexity and the reasons it gave matched my speculation. I then clicked its link to its source--and it was my HN comment.

Not The Silliest Contrivance to happen to video standards :P

Thus its acronym, A Technical Mistake. Or, from the telco side, A Tariffing Mechanism.

If you’re primarily concerned with shuffling low latency voice around the place, and you want to do hardware forwarding on relatively inexpensive silicon, then that cell size is entirely sensible.

That approach of course didn’t age well when voice almost became a niche application.

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