✨ Nora Tindall  🪐

nerdsnipe for the evening: they've discovered a Universal Scalar - a single variable whose value is consistent throughout the universe at a given time - and built a machine that can modify and detect its value. how do you turn this into a usable communications system?

do CSMA/CD as fast as you can

That was my first thought (as well as a token ring variant), but neither would work because they assume co-operation between all stations. All it would take is one griefer to effectively jam the network with noise.

CDMA would solve this problem no?

You've never seen thin-net jam when one station had a bad card and made everyone else think the network was busy and never free? CDMA only works when every station on the network obeys the rules (or minimally breaks them; was it the 3Com card that transmitted early? Not sure).

I think in any distributed comms system you have to have a commonly agreed system of rules I.e protocol

You sure not confusing with Ethernet? CSMA/CD? CDMA is something different, more like FDM in the digital domain.

Sorry, yes. But here we don't have a spectrum, we just have a single value. An infinitely variable value, but just a single value. So the jamming resistance of CDMA doesn't seem to apply; the jammer effectively blocks the whole range in one go with a single transmission.