This claims that connect calls were aborted after 3 milliseconds and could successfully connect to servers within 3 light milliseconds, but that doesn’t make sense because connecting to a server 500 miles away should result in it sending a handshake signal back to you, which would be received 6 milliseconds after the call had been made and 3 milliseconds after it had been aborted.
His defense on the handshake is to acknowledge that he lied about the 3 millisecond timeout but the story is still true anyway. This is the opposite of convincing! What do you expect a liar to say, “Dang, you got me”? Elsewhere, to fix another plot hole he needs to hypothesize that Sun was shipping a version of Sendmail V5 which had been modified for backwards compatibility with V8 config files.
There is some number of suspicious details at which it becomes appropriate to assume the story is made up, and if you don’t think this story meets that bar then I have a bridge to sell you.
For what it’s worth, I sent this story to a friend the other day, who’s probably ~50 now and was very active on the Internet in the 90s—thinking he’d find it amusing if he hadn’t come across it before
Not only did he remember this story contemporaneously, but he said he was the recipient of the test-email for a particular city mentioned in the article!
This is someone of high-integrity whom I trust, and makes me more confident this happened, even if some details are smoothed over as described
This is addressed in the FAQ linked at the top of the page. TL;DR: The author insists that the gist of the story is true, but acknowledges that he glossed over a lot of intermediate debugging steps, including accounting for the return time.
See also: The case of the 500-mile email
This claims that connect calls were aborted after 3 milliseconds and could successfully connect to servers within 3 light milliseconds, but that doesn’t make sense because connecting to a server 500 miles away should result in it sending a handshake signal back to you, which would be received 6 milliseconds after the call had been made and 3 milliseconds after it had been aborted.
This story appears to be made up.
See the FAQ.
His defense on the handshake is to acknowledge that he lied about the 3 millisecond timeout but the story is still true anyway. This is the opposite of convincing! What do you expect a liar to say, “Dang, you got me”? Elsewhere, to fix another plot hole he needs to hypothesize that Sun was shipping a version of Sendmail V5 which had been modified for backwards compatibility with V8 config files.
There is some number of suspicious details at which it becomes appropriate to assume the story is made up, and if you don’t think this story meets that bar then I have a bridge to sell you.
For what it’s worth, I sent this story to a friend the other day, who’s probably ~50 now and was very active on the Internet in the 90s—thinking he’d find it amusing if he hadn’t come across it before
Not only did he remember this story contemporaneously, but he said he was the recipient of the test-email for a particular city mentioned in the article!
This is someone of high-integrity whom I trust, and makes me more confident this happened, even if some details are smoothed over as described
This is addressed in the FAQ linked at the top of the page. TL;DR: The author insists that the gist of the story is true, but acknowledges that he glossed over a lot of intermediate debugging steps, including accounting for the return time.
wow, nice, thanks for sharing 😅