Reply #9: You left off Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol [View All]

[csziggy]

Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: May 4, 2001 1:15 PM PDT

One of the Internet's most obscure technologies came to life last weekend: transmitting network information by carrier pigeon.

In 1990, David Waitzman wrote RFC 1149 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt), a tongue-in-cheek standard for using pigeons to transfer information using the Internet Protocol (IP). On Saturday, a group of Linux enthusiasts in Bergen, Norway, succeeded in exchanging some data using the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol (CPIP).

The group transmitted a "ping" command, among the most basic operations of the Internet, in which one computer sends a signal to another, which in turn signals that it is attached to the network. In the experiment, packets of network data were printed on paper then attached to pigeons' legs. Upon their arrival at the destination, the data was transferred to the computer using optical character recognition software.

The Bergen Linux Users Group had some assistance from the Vesta Brevdueforening carrier pigeon club and Alan Cox, a programmer at Linux leader Red Hat and top deputy of Linux founder Linus Torvalds.

The pigeon protocol didn't mean the fastest of networks, though. Taking an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information makes the pigeon network about 5 trillion times slower than today's cutting-edge 40 gigabit-per-second optical fiber networks.

With a bit more luck than the Bergen group experienced, a basic Web page probably could be loaded in a couple of hours, participant Vegard Engen said in an e-mail interview.

More: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-257064.html

The highly unofficial CPIP WG - http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/