[HECnet] Here there be dragons...

[Paul Koning]

> On Sep 5, 2020, at 4:13 PM, John Yaldwyn <jy at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> 
> Hi Mike,
> 
> I live in a rural area here in New Zealand.
> 
> The best internet on offer is 5Mbps/500kbps ADSL, slow satellite with horrendous latency, or rural broadband on 700 MHz LTE. 

That's not so bad.

I remember when DEC's internal "Engineering Net" first extended to the UK (Reading, near London).  I'm pretty sure it wasn't what was then called a "high speed link" so most likely that was a 2400 baud link.  High speed, for us, meant 9600 baud.

Yes, a few organizations with big budgets, like ARPAnet, had a super fast backbone -- 56 kbps.  

I remember how boggled my mind was when Ethernet first appeared, with 10 Mbps wires and network interface cards capable of running at a fair fraction of that speed.  DEUNA couldn't do wire rate, I'm pretty sure, but it came respectably close.  QNA was even faster, when it worked.

	paul