davep wrote:This very Forum, and all others, are only possible and only exist because people like me figured out ways to conduct business over trusted systems online.
You were involved in Diffie-Hellman, or RSA? AES? Stream ciphers? It'd be interesting to know your cryptographic credentials.
davep, not to be flamingly obvious about this, but I was talking about a computer system series with
hardware fault tolerance, and you are talking about software.
In the most basic explanation, you take a fault tolerant hardware platform, consisting of multiple CPUs, and you implement a "loosely coupled", message-based operating system. The application level code and the middleware (which is what you are talking about) runs in this environment in two entirely separate CPUs, where every software program has a backup process and they talk (checkpoint one another) over a couple of high speed busses (two of everything, complete hardware redundancy).
No hardware failure can stop the execution of the application code. Every stock exchange, every commodity exchange, of the seven dozen or so all over the world uses our computers. Every credit card company, every bank, every billing application, every OLTP application everywhere has a NonStop® fault tolerant platform sitting in a secret chilled room counting money. Once a failure occurs, the computer "phones home", we repair it online and restore full fault tolerance. We are talking about "seven nines" of reliability - the probability of a properly integrated application running on a NonStop® fault tolerant system being available to the user is 0.9999999. (Which means our stuff has on average less than 3 seconds of downtime per calendar year.)
Those PCs and mobile devices and Wintel or Google or Unix servers that you see and touch are just front end hardware for the NonStop®. The computers I am talking about literally run the world, and even though we started installing them in 1977, most people have never heard about this part of the infrastructure - nor do we go out of our way to seek publicity (in fact we hide these computers in secret chilled rooms) but if we couldn't do business over the Internet, the net simply would not exist. Not to mention other critical applications such as nuclear power plants, hospital patient record keeping, FAA flight plans, insurance companies, and (it's ironic) the manufacturing facilities that build everything we manufacture the world over - including all our competitor's computers. (Michael Dell removed our logos and replaced them with his own.) It goes on and on - but if it absolutely MUST WORK or you are out of business, you need a NonStop® computer.
That is what I spent 35 years of my life building - the infrastructure computers that you didn't even know about, that run everything critical everywhere.