On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 10:01:47PM -0700, Fred Cisin wrote:
> > > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cargo plane full of tapes!
> > That would be "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded
> > with tapes, hurtling down the highway".
>
> hence the phrase "to paraphrase" to alter it to the cargo plane project.
>
> BTW, it is usually quoted as a "STATION WAGON full of tapes".
The two variations I'm most familiar with are... "a station wagon full of
magtape", and "a 747 full of CD-ROMs".
I wish I had a picture of the time I hauled away a station wagon full of
DEC RL02 cartridges. There were at least 30 in there. Never mind the
primary use of the carts as boot media, etc., just the bandwidth alone
compared to my 1200 bps modem (at the time) was pretty hefty. That, and,
of course, the fact that I didn't _own_ a 300MB+ device that could _hold_
the data makes it more interesting.
One of my buddies who used to run a monthly UNIX meeting/pizza gathering
out of his house, worked at Bell Labs in Columbus from the mid-1980s
through the late 1990s. Around 1986, he used to ferry a 300MB RM05-style
disk pack back and forth a couple of times a week from Columbus to NJ on
People's Express - it was about $35 each way, no reservation required.
He was going to get paid the same if he sat on a plane or if he watched
bits flow down the pipe, plus the data got there a whole lot faster.
(I don't know how fast AT&T could move data internally from state-to-state
at the time, but at 64Kbps, it would take at least 12 hours, not including
any error correction or protocol overhead).
One other "ship it" bandwidth story I heard from the late 1980s or
early 1990s, a company with an office in the Asia-Pacific region wanted
to move several megs a month of financial data back to the States. They
asked their telecommunications provider what the cheapest way to do this
was (over some trans-oceanic cable or satellite). When they looked at
the amounts of data involved and the cost of even a 64Kbps pipe, it was
determined to be fast enough, and a whole lot cheaper, to put the data
on 8mm cartridges and ship 3 sets for redundancy.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 25-Jul-2004 20:40 Z
South Pole Station
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Ethan.Dicks_at_amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
Received on Sun Jul 25 2004 - 15:59:00 BST