akamai yesterday - what in the world was that (now old guy stuff)

Ben Cannon ben at 6by7.net
Sat Jan 25 16:31:02 UTC 2020


The Civil Engineering version of this is SWER electrical distribution.  Single-Wire, Earth-Return. And it’s as crazy in implementation as it sounds now.




-Ben Cannon
CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC 
ben at 6by7.net <mailto:ben at 6by7.net>




> On Jan 25, 2020, at 8:24 AM, Allen McKinley Kitchen (gmail) <allenmckinleykitchen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 25, 2020, at 08:52, Paul Nash <paul at nashnetworks.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> So, I grew up in South Africa, and one of the more fascinating /
>>> cooler things I saw was a modem which would get you ~50bps (bps, not
>>> Kbps) over a single strand of barbed wire -- you'd hammer a largish
>>> nail into the ground, and clip one alligator[0] clip onto that, and
>>> another alligator clip onto the barbed wire. Repeat the process on the
>>> other side (up to ~5km away), plug the modems in, and bits would
>>> flow... I only saw these used a few times, but always thought they
>>> were cool….
>> 
>> Do you remember anything about the actual type of modem?  Or where you deployed them?
>> 
> Decades ago, I cobbled together a 20mA current loop interface that may have been an early version of this .. ran a set of Baudot machines (pre-ASCII, upper case & figs only) mostly just to have fun with a set of old ASR 32 teletypes.  I used a couple of 500’ spools of zip cord lying on the ground from end to end. Never mind backhoes - it was lawn-mower vulnerable. (However, being flat on the ground seemingly made it less vulnerable to lightning strikes.)
> 
> Of course, this was hardly critical infrastructure!
> 
> Blessings..
> 
> Allen

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20200125/d3aad680/attachment.html>


More information about the NANOG mailing list