We introduced the concept of a digital fountain as a scalable approach to reliable multicast, realized with fast and practical erasure codes, in a paper published in ACM SIGCOMM '98. This invited editorial, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the SIG, reflects on the trajectory of work leading up to our approach, and the numerous developments in the field in the subsequent 21 years. We discuss advances in rateless codes, efficient implementations, applications of digital fountains in distributed storage systems, and connections to invertible Bloom lookup tables.

中文翻译：

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数字喷泉回顾展

我们在 ACM SIGCOMM '98 上发表的一篇论文中介绍了数字喷泉的概念，将其作为可靠多播的可扩展方法，通过快速实用的纠删码实现。在 SIG 成立 50 周年之际，这篇特邀社论反映了导致我们方法的工作轨迹，以及随后 21 年该领域的众多发展。我们讨论了无速率代码的进步、高效的实现、分布式存储系统中数字喷泉的应用以及与可逆 Bloom 查找表的连接。