Beetle-Net

Manual transfer of data was the only way to go in the "old days". There was bike-net also. I used to take my 800 bpi tapes over to the computer room and knock on the back door, they would sneak them in. The official way was they logged in tapes twice a day, slow turn around. There was a slight risk of bike accident especially if I was not looking, perhaps distracted by scenery :) The risk with Beetle-Net was that if you left the top down some wacko would walk off with your tape. One of my fellow students came back to his car to find the tape unspooled down the hill, somebody stood on one end and rolled the reel down the hill. We tried manually re-rolling the tape and decided there was to much dirt and grime on it. Later in the 80's I held the local record for awhile, I carried 10 LMSI 12" 2GB optical disks from one end of the hospital to the other, they had planned on doing a network transfer via ftp. The sneaker was faster. 20GB/10 minutes = 2 GB/minute in 1985. Mike mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu