On Apr 2, 2013, at 9:16 PM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Steven Bellovin" <s...@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