Just a quick story involving punched tape distribution. The meteorogist in the story has since past away - but he would have appreciated it if these packets *had* been lost: Briefly: Mom's best friend's husband was a meteorologist for the government up on Donner Summit (the infamous one!). He had this handy typewriter that spat out punched tape. You could pass the punch tape back through and it would regenerate what ever you typed. Cool! There was a toggle on the gadget that allowed you to regenerate on the local teletype or broadcast to ALL the teletypes across the U.S. - generally used to distribute locally gather weather statistics. Well, my friends and I liked singing and I found the lyrics to "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (showing my age here). I probably don't have to go on here with what happened. Just suffice it to say that the punched tapes worked great and every meteorologist in the US had five copies of the lyrics. I'm sure that everyone was wondering what people were eating up on Donner Pass this season! K

-----Original Message----- From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:smb@research.att.com] Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 10:20 AM To: John R. Grant Cc: Roeland Meyer; Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu; 'Scott Bradner'; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Packet Loss

In message <Pine.LNX.4.30.0012150921140.15394-100000@grant.liveonthenet.com>, " John R. Grant" writes:

...

Yesterday, Roeland Meyer wrote:

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I know for certain that it dates back to the pain-frame daze and originally refered to 9600 baud open-reel tape <snip>

<cringe> that would be 9600 bit per inch GCR format 9-track tape, don't you think? </cringe>

They didn't have nearly that density -- when I heard the phrase, it was 800 or 1600 bits per linear inch (1600' reels), with 8 bits (plus parity) across. And 200 bpi 6-track tapes were still in use, though being phased out.

--Steve Bellovin