a bit of humor for a rainy sunday (in Philly)

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 93 19:30:03 EDT
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Subject: Vacuous Satisfaction
From: daugher () cs tamu edu (Walter Daugherity)
Keywords: topical, smirk, computer


(True)


The Internet Multicasting Service was scheduled to demonstrate Internet mail
etc. on the White House lawn yesterday (October 21, 1993) but at the last
minute was told there would be no electrical power available.  Making the
best of it, Carl Malamud said:


"We're pleased to announce that the White House demonstration
we were planning, though slightly changed in execution from
our original goals, made a form of technical history.  Though
our project proposal was approved for Internet connectivity,
some slight logistical misunderstandings resulted in a
decision by White House staff that no power would be available
to any of the vendors, making operation of our computers a real
challenge.


We went ahead and made sure that our configuration would work
both with and without power in our facilities and at other
remote sites.  The system worked beautifully but, due to the
no-power requirement, during our actual installation we reverted
to Plan B and installed the world's first Powerless LAN (pLAN).


We're pleased to report that this pLAN worked and implementation
was flawless.  The boxes sat on the table and were able to
do everything you would expect out of a computer with the power
switched off.  At this level of functionality, we successfully
demonstrated interoperability between machines from Sun Microsystems,
Persoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, and many other leading firms
in the computer and communications industries."


Walter C. Daugherity
Texas A&M University
daugher () cs tamu edu

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