Keep-alive
In the bad old days of the internet, I remember seeing lots more terminal windows running behind the main window than you do now. Text would scroll by, logging events and babbling in a way that would make bug-fixing easier, but which never really existed for the end-user. There was one message I used to see every so often though.
Server to client: keep alive.
That always struck me as a very cyberpunk thing. Hidden in the terminal output, a simple message from the server to the users connected; it’s not hopeful or rebellious, it’s just a heartfelt request to survive.
Even when you are a software engineer like I would later become, when you know it’s a core function of persistent connections over TCP/IP, I don’t think that it loses that poetry. The server is literally sending a message to check that you are still there, like one of the turrets from Portal calling out into the void. It is trying to hold on to the tenuous connection that exists between itself and the client for as long as it can. Keep alive. “Show me that you are still there, so that I don’t have to give you up for lost,” it begs.
Keep alive...
