I can’t really blame anyone for this article. Even when I was writing up the ECU work on this blog, I had it in my mind that I’d be able to do a Lowflying article at some time.
Then, when Michael Calvert asked members if they could write more articles for the magazine ( because there was a bit of a drought of articles due to the Coronovirus ) that was my cue.
However, like the ECU blog itself, writing this up for Lowflying took a lot longer than I thought it would, and because of its length, it had to get split across a couple of months of the magazine too.
I also found it really tricky to guess the interest from the Lowflying readers – too techie and nobody would read it, too simplistic and nobody would get any benefit. In the end I went with an approach where I left out detail but explained everything from basic principles. Clearly Lowflying readers are intelligent, but they may not all have an engineering or computer background.
The one area that I didn’t know whether it would stick or not, was the use of Russian dolls to explain how internet communications protocols get embedded inside each other and have to be unpacked to get to the real data you’re interested in. I think the metaphor worked but only time will tell if that is evident or not.
The full article can be read in Lowflying, June and July 2020.
* These articles were first published in the June and July 2020 editions of Lowflying, the magazine of the Lotus Seven Club for Caterham and Lotus 7 enthusiasts.
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