It's absolutely the way to go. It's the only way to hitch a ride on any amount of cheap gear since MIDI, but it's vastly more capable, the cables are as cheap as it gets, it has error checking built in, and resend of packets. (TCP does, UDP doesn't but is also useful). It can carry many kinds of info, can be digitally secured. Above all, it puts the entire matter of different standards into code, the way MIDI allows such in System Exclusive messages. And it's likely to be futureproof for centuries.Originally Posted by Galvonaut
TCP/IP is the one method likely to work for as long as most people can imagine without needing to change. And even if it does, it will be as part of a mass of human development, never at the mercy of one manufacturer.
Engineering hung onto RS-232 serial for many decades because for small dataflows it was ideal, and serial persists as a standard in USB, Bluetooth and many other later systems. Even if the relatively high voltage dual polarity signalling of RS-232 fades into oblivion, the future of the serial protocol is guaranteed, because it gets placed at the heart of every significant new comms net method anyway, for compatibility (Bluetooth will carry it even in the simplest form that cannot carry anything else!)
TCP/IP is a packet protocol, independent of the wiring or RF or optics that carry it. Like the serial protocol, it will long outlive any singular method of carrying it. Faster hardware will arise and fall into oblivion long before TCP/IP does, just as language has grown and seen the demise of semaphore, Morse telegraphy, and maybe even landline phones in a few more years.
MIDI was supposed to die, but it never does, because it's too good a machine control language. Stuff like that won't die so long as a few people use it. TCP/IP is by far the most powerful of them so far. So much so that there may never be a need to invent another, just new ways to carry that one. And unlike MIDI or serial, it was built from the start to handle convergent or divergent networks easily and securely, and with enough relay nodes, is literally bomb-proof (that was one of its aims, to withstand nuclear strike, and still allow cities to communicate). There may be slight changes, dialects, but this is something that nearly every machine will speak if it needs to speak at all. Trying to operate without it is like trying to get a top job in science if you don't know maths and one of the more commonly spoken languages in the world.
Now that so many tiny devices can use it, and run web servers, etc, anyone not using it will be walking, wondering why nearly everyone else is running, and flying.
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