[TUHS] forgotten versions

[Bakul Shah]

400MB is less than a CD's worth! Compressed (MP3) would reduce the space
by a factor of 11 or so. 

> On Jun 21, 2022, at 6:55 PM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> There was this persisting story that Ken got permission from somebody
> like CBS or Sony to have a very large amount of classical music on a
> 400MB drive, for research purposes. No, really: he was doing some
> psycho-acoustic thing comparing compressed to uncompressed for
> somebody, or improving on the fraunhoffer algorithms which became MP3.
> The point was, the rest of us had to listen to CDs and Ken had the
> complete works of Bach (or something) on a hard drive, which we were
> told he kept in the office, and played at home over a landline of some
> horrendously high bandwidth, un-imaginable speeds like a megabit,
> imagine, a MILLION of those suckers. How dare he. Thats more than the
> whole of queensland. I imagine the truth is much less interesting, and
> there was no major IPR fraud going on at the labs coding stuff as MP3
> like we imagined, under the table.
> 
> I imagine this would also have been a Datakit T-1. But surely that was
> a 1.44mbit carrier? T1 was smaller than E1 because europeans and
> asians learned to count to 32 not 24.
> 
> -G
> 
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 10:48 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Plan 9 used Datakit as its network for quite a while. The Gnot terminals had an INCON interface, a megabit (approximately) twisted pair adjunct to Datakit. I had an INCON link running over a T-1 link to my house - great excitement back in the day. (The kernel downloaded over the line and booted the machine up to the window system - there was no local disk - from power up, in 7 seconds.) NJ Bell needed to install a new nitrogen-pressurized 26-pair cable, supported by a new telephone pole, to set it up, because I had already used up all available pairs on the existing line to my house. All included at no extra cost. (You pay for the service, not its construction.)
>> 
>> When the internet became unavoidable, we used Plan 9's import mechanism to import the single external TCP/IP interface from our gateway machine, over Datakit, to the Gnots. We did the same, but importing now over IL (an ethernet protocol built by Phil Winterbottom) when our terminals became PCs.
>> 
>> That's how I remember it, at least, but I might have got some details wrong. I think much of this is covered in http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/
>> 
>> -rob
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 10:13 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:56:02PM -0600, Jacob Moody wrote:
>>>> I recently stumbled across the existence of datakit
>>>> when going through the plan9foundation source archives.
>>>> Would be curious to hear more about its involvement
>>>> with plan9.
>>> 
>>> Pretty sure datakit predated Plan 9, didn't Greg Chesson work on that?
>>> He was my mentor at SGI, my memory is datakit was sort of early on in
>>> his career and then he did XTP, which nobody knows about but I believe
>>> is still used by the military.
>>> 
>>> Unless the early Bell Labs datakit and the Plan 9 datakit are different
>>> things.