Internet as delay line memory?

From: Steve Robertson <steverob_at_hotoffice.com>
Date: Thu May 13 09:41:54 1999

On Thursday, May 13, 1999 10:16 AM, John Foust [SMTP:jfoust_at_threedee.com] wrote:
>
> 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
>

Clever...

Steve Robertson - <steverob_at_hotoffice.com>
Received on Thu May 13 1999 - 09:41:54 BST