At 11:09 PM +0100 3/22/03, Lars Appel wrote:

..

>PS: I am not against the occasional off-topic postings that used to be
>on HP3000-L in the past. I just feel overwhelmed by extensive religious,
>political, best drummer, local weather, and whatnot discussions that
>seem to have taken over the list recently. I don't want to say anything
>against those type of discussions, I just wonder if there aren't more
>appropriate places on the internet to place them.

Two crucial concepts jumped at me immediately as I studied Lars'
paragraph: "overwhelmed" and "more appropriate places".

Both concepts, of course, are relative.  One person may get
overwhelmed by something that barely makes a dent on another.
Ditto for "more appropriate places".

Lars' post contained, implicitly, another crucial concept: Courtesy
(which, perhaps, could be defined as "attempting NOT to overwhelm
the limited channels of others -- even though our own channels may
have ample bandwidth for OUR purposes").



For a wonderful story involving early bandwidth-challenged
communications (specifically, the Transatlantic Cable), I'll break
my own advice and I will use some hp3000-L bandwidth by reproducing
a message that popped into my mailbox a few weeks ago, from our
distinguished colleague Bruce Toback:

__________________________________________________________________________

Friday afternoon, a package arrived at my office from Amazon that had a
more than usually disruptive effect on my productivity. One culprit was
a book I'd ordered and more or less forgotten about: _A Thread Across
the Ocean_, by John Steele Gordon
(<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0802713645/opt>). The book
describes the trials -- financial, technical and legal -- involved in
putting in the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

What makes the book so memorable is the degree to which this technology
really did change the world -- much more than the Internet has. The
time necessary to get news from Europe or Asia widely distributed in
the Americas suddenly dropped from two weeks to less than a day. The
difference in technology shows up most starkly while the cable is being
laid.

Because no ship available at the time could carry 2,500 miles of cable,
two ships were used, lent by the British Royal Navy. The ships sailed
out to the middle of the Atlantic where the cable was spliced together,
and the two ships set off in opposite directions. The crews were in
constant contact with each other through the cable, continually testing
it to insure that no damage occurred.

When the ships had gone about 110 miles from the rendezvous, the cable
broke on one of the ships, where it had been damaged during a severe
storm. The advance agreement was that if the ships had proceeded less
than 100 miles from the rendezvous when contact was lost, they were to
return to the rendezvous for another try. But because the distance was
so close to 100 miles, one captain chose to return to the rendezvous
anyway. He waited a week before proceeding on to the agreed port.

What's hard to internalize, even though it's perfectly obvious, is that
once the cable malfunctioned, these two ships might as well have been
in different galaxies for purposes of communication. Today, getting a
message across 220 miles is something that we never have to think
about. 140 years ago, 220 miles was indistinguishable from infinite,
once those seven strands of copper parted.

The story has its share of stupid engineering mistakes, too.
__________________________________________________________________________



In addition to the book, I ordered the (unabridged) tapes from Books on
Tape.  They served as my faithful companions on a recent long drive.  The
book, of course, has very nice graphics, which are missing from the tapes.
The recorded tapes are not "appropriate" as a channel for graphics :-)

Be it as it may, I believe that 99% of hp3000-L subscribers would find
lots of valuable material in this book.

   _______________
  |               |
  |               |
  |            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
  |          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
  |        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego
  |      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs
  |    d          |  Adager Corporation
  |  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
  |               |
  |_______________|

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