We are now half-way done with our Computer Networking class, so we took our midterm. This is only the second time that our cohort has had to take a proctored exam at an exact time with everyone logged into Zoom with our cameras on. It’s a strange experience that I don’t prefer to the alternative of having a harder task-based exam with a larger window of time for completion.

Because we had the midterm, there was not a lot of new content covered. We went back to the second chapter of our textbook to review a section we had skipped over on socket programming, which I found interesting. I hope we will have an opportunity to complete an assignment that has to deal with socket programming.

There are some differences when programming an application that uses TCP versus UCP since TCP is connection oriented and UCP is connectionless. However, one commonality is that both protocols are “open” and specified in the RFC protocol standard. This means that independent developers can easily work on implementing a server or a client program that can work together. This also means that the server/client programs would make use of the well-known port number established for UCP or TCP.