13 May
1999
13 May
'99
2:52 a.m.
--- John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
... the other night... I remembered a wire delay line memory
Sure, it would be abusive of the Net's resources. You'd need to contend
with the possibility of dropped packets...
Imagine a chain of machines or routers or whatever that would simply
pass a special kind of packet to another machine, echoing and mirroring
packets back to my machine.
...wouldn't we create a long delay line
with large data capacity? Obviously the speed of access is nothing
like a hard drive or RAM, but it would be a neat hack, no?
This very concept came up for lengthy discussion when I was in college at
Ohio State. Then, we envisioned using UUCP to store and forward two weeks
of data, based on the known propagation rates from node to node (since some
would forward messages only after 23:00 to save on toll charges).
We never implemented it, but we did have a theoretical model that probably
would have worked. As you say, access times were hell, but you could store
lots of data if you absorbed hard drives all over the planet.
-ethan
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