On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 9:55 AM Aaron Gould <aaron1@gvtc.com> wrote:
Thanks Jared, When I reminisce with my boss he reminds me that this telco/ISP here initially started with a 56kbps internet uplink , lol
Oh, gods, what have you done?! This comment will bring everyone out of the woodwork, reminiscing about the good ol' days.... 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.... One of the first ISPs I worked at had an AGS+ as the "core" router (and a pile of IGS's) -- the AGS had metal plate in the front to access the "line cards", and a monster big squirrel fan - the squirrel fan was strong enough that the vacuum / airflow would keep the metal plate sucked on if you didn't do up the screw.. anyway, the device also had a watchdog timer, which would reboot the box if IOS[1] locked up, and the fan would slow down while this occurred -- so, for a long time, our fastest / most reliable monitoring was an empty PC case placed on the floor under the rack -- when the router locked up, the fan would slow down, the front would fall off[2] and bounce on the PC case, making an unholy racket - and alerting the NOC that something bad was happening.... Anyway, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones... W [0]: In .za we called them crocodile clips -- true story. [1]: For all you young whippersnappers, that's the Cisco IOS, not the Apple iOS.. :-/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM -- Unlike the rest of this email, this is off-topic, but still great....
-Aaron
-- I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad idea in the first place. This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair of pants. ---maf