RFC 1149

Steven Bellovin smb at cs.columbia.edu
Thu Apr 4 02:50:50 UTC 2013


On Apr 2, 2013, at 9:16 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Steven Bellovin" <smb at cs.columbia.edu>
> 
>> DLT? I first heard it as a station wagon full of (9-track, 1600 bpi,
>> that having been the state of the art) mag tapes on the Taconic Parkway,
>> circa 1970. I suspect, though, that Herman Hollerith expressed the idea
>> about a stage coach full of punchcards, back in the 1880s.
> 
> The earliest reference to this I've been able to pin down is Andy Tanenbaum's,
> and TTBOMK -- and you of all people should know this, Steve -- he was talking
> about Usenet, which a few sites actually *got feeds of on magtape*, in the
> very early 80s.  Some of those tapes, in addition to UTZoo's backups of their
> spool, constituted the very earliest material given to Dejagoo.
> 
Yes, I know that story.  I'm talking what was said to me personally -- not
hearsay, earwitness evidence.  The road mentioned was the Taconic Parkway, part
of the direct route between where I was working at the time (IBM Watson Lab #2,
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/watsonlab.html) and IBM
Yorktown -- https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=612+West+115th+Street,+New+York,+NY&daddr=ibm+watson+labs,+yorktown,+ny&hl=en&ll=41.027571,-73.66745&spn=0.872312,0.95993&sll=40.807717,-73.965464&sspn=0.013675,0.014999&geocode=FSWtbgIdaGCX-ylpY-dMOfbCiTEUPDIPtH_nMw%3BFfTUdAIdCtuZ-yF0j-k3CpyMSikvG-JPT7jCiTF0j-k3CpyMSg&mra=ls&t=m&z=10
The context was the speed of an RJE link between the IBM 1130 I was running
(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1130.html) and a mainframe
in Yorktown.  (If memory serves, it was a 2400 bps half-duplex link, probably
via a Bell 201 "data set".  I don't remember for sure, though.  Anyway, that
was my first contact with networking, though I worried more about the
host part of it.  I did learn bisync rather thoroughly in my next gig,
at City College of New York Computer Center, at that time the central
computing hub for the entire City University system.)


		--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb









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