Internet as delay line memory?

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu May 13 09:15:35 1999

To put myself to sleep the other night, I was thinking about the recent
discussions about core memory, and I remembered a wire delay line memory
I'd once disassembled as a teen, and thought about the old mercury delay
line memories, and then moved it to the Internet.

Sure, it would be abusive of the Net's resources. You'd need to contend
with the possibility of dropped packets, which might invalidate the entire
experience. But like the "unused" CPU cycles on your PC, there is a
great deal of unused bandwidth. Not everyone's pipe is full, and these
pipes are a form of transient memory.

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. By taking advantage of the delays in
transmitting packets around the world, across fiber lines, under
the sea, up to satellites, etc. 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?

- John
Received on Thu May 13 1999 - 09:15:35 BST