Comment by dang

4 years ago

Past related threads (less than I expected given how often it has been reposted):

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7 comments)

17 comments

dang

Reply
zenexer  4 years ago

I know this gets posted quite often, but I still enjoy reading it every time.

  • ghayes  4 years ago

    Agree, I will always upvote it because it’s a good story for those who haven’t read it, and it begets really good comments and other war stories from seasoned devs.

    • KennyBlanken  4 years ago

      What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the fact that the story is utter nonsense.

      I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how TCP works.

      There is no way any of what he wrote actually happened, including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."

      3 replies →

abeppu  4 years ago

I would enjoy seeing a "greatest hits" list of pages that are repeatedly submitted and discussed here.

trollied  4 years ago

I think I read about this for the first time on a dialup BBS in the 90s :)

  • kingcharles  4 years ago

    I tried to read about it on that BBS, but it was more than 80 miles from my house and I couldn't afford the long distance phone charges.

    • eashman  4 years ago

      You obviously didn’t have a Novation Apple Cat modem that could wardial random 5 digit calling card codes for 3rd party long distance carriers.

      I really hope there are a few other people here who know what that sentence means or I’m officially ancient :(

    • desireco42  4 years ago

      I almost feel younger people will not understand what you are referencing :) I was SysOp of FidoNet node.

thot_experiment  4 years ago

A classic and wonderful piece of internet lore. If I ever have kids this is one of the ones I'll be telling around the campfire. The one about the internet going down because the delivery truck blocked LoS is a good one too.