Monday, December 31, 2012

All these years and I still don't get it.

So back in the day, when the internet was new (and I really mean that, when it was new), a co-worker of mine was blown away. We were NOC techs (and he the senior tech) for one of the original six backbone providers; the people the government turned the DARPANet over to, to be the Internet. I told you I was serious about the internet being new.

Anyway, CIDR was still something everyone was trying to get their heads around. There was a great cheat sheet someone had made, but we couldn't remember where to get it. So my co-worker went to a search engine (back before there was Google), yahoo I think, or maybe dogpile.

Anyway, my co-worker searched for it on the internet. He went from his computer in the Network Operations Center, to a computer in California, only to find that the first link was on a computer sitting 10 feet away from us.

For some reason, this blew his mind, and he spent a good hour of our shift flipping out over it and trying to make me understand just how awesome it was that a computer in California, knew the contents of the computer behind us in the NOC.

Still don't see why it was so awesome...

Probably because I spent time on BBS systems connected to DARPANent when I was teen, and was already used to it.