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Re: Peerage versus Peering

  • From: Jeff Young
  • Date: Sun May 04 20:50:01 1997 
you're certainly right about one thing, this is silliness.
webster certainly never contemplated this form of 'peer' so
it is useless to quote him.  i agree with peter, in this 
form 'peer' means a network of equal or similar size.  in 
the current state of technology, peer to me means capable
of asymmetry.  

i'm sure the rest of nanog will play a large role in defining
this term 'peer' in the coming months, native english speakers
and not.

Jeff Young
[email protected]

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> Subject: Peerage versus Peering
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> > From: Peter Lothberg <[email protected]>
> > Look up ''peer'' in a dictionary, in this context it means something
> > like ''networks of equal size''.
> >
> This silliness comes up every so often, not always from non-native
> English speakers.
> 
> Peer actually means several unrelated things.  One of which (the first
> definition in my Webster's) is a member of a body called "the House of
> Lords" -- noblemen....  This comes from the Latin for "equal", yet is
> distinctly not equality.
> 
> Although it seems that there are some who desire to apply that usage,
> that certainly is not what the rest of us are talking about here!
> 
> The 5th definition is the one which I understand to apply: any associate.
> 
> 
> > The internet is moving towards a scenario with a handfull global
> > players that will be ''peers'' everyone else will become a customer.
> >
> As a matter of network engineering, this Internet has not historically
> established a peerage, a heirarchy of "first among equals".
> 
> TCP/IP (and PPP and every other protocol I've worked on in this
> environment) establishes "peer-to-peer" connectivity.  A peer is merely
> any entity with which you have established communication.  More
> prosaically, someone with whom you "look closely".
> 
> Where this term comes from, to quote the dictionary, is "entymology
> uncertain".
> 
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