Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Besides the drinking in the bar, the reason the Norwegians were there at all was David Waitzman. Eleven years earlier, Waitzman, now 35, had written a document titled "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers" -- IP datagrams being the small packets that information gets broken into as it traverses the Internet. (IP stands for Internet Protocol, the method by which data is sent between computers.)
"What inspired it was someone [who said], 'Do you know the old tin can connected by string?'" says Waitzman, who works for BBN Technologies, now a unit of Verizon and one of the companies originally involved in building the Internet. "Someone mentioned that and then I thought about homing pigeons, carrier pigeons. Now that's a pretty obvious idea, trying to do networking with them."
Obvious, of course, is a relative term. Most people who hear talk of tin cans and string think of elementary school. Waitzman sat down and wrote his proposal, technically called a "Request for Comments" or, as it's known among techies, an RFC, which was published online by the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California on April 1, 1990. The ISI assigned Waitzman's proposal the number 1149.
What Waitzman did was actually part of a larger tradition of practical jokes that technologists have long been staging. Eric Raymond, a veteran observer of hacker culture and author of the open-source manifesto "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," calls it "the artful hack." "There's a sort of grand tradition of the artful hack that is intertwined with the history of the Internet and the hacker culture," says Raymond.
High points include the MIT students who, in 1982, just before a Harvard-Yale game, planted an electric-powered weather balloon under the 40-yard line of Harvard's football field. Released after a Harvard touchdown during the first quarter, the balloon expanded to about 6 feet in diameter, proudly sporting the message "MIT," then burst into a cloud of white smoke.
"The ideal artful hack is clever, technically sweet and harmless and has a sort of glorious pointlessness about it," says Raymond. "And the RFC 1149 implementation is absolutely perfect in this respect."
There's an odd mixture of pointlessness and purposefulness in both Waitzman's document and the Norwegians' implementation. Waitzman wrote the proposal essentially on a lark -- because someone had mentioned tin cans and string and because he wanted to contribute to the long-standing tradition of April Fools' Day RFCs. (He wrote another pigeon-related RFC in 1999.) But he took great pains to write it carefully, even using as a model the well-honed language of the Talmud, which, as a religious Jew, he's familiar with.
Waitzman says "the Talmud is fascinating because of the precision -- especially in the oldest pieces that the rest of it is a commentary on. Every single word is weighed so precisely and if a word is missing it means something ... If there's redundancy in some phrase, you have to learn something from both pieces of the redundant text. And in a very weak way, when I was writing these documents I was weighing words and trying to get the maximum value from each word."
This careful attention to language is key to the proposal's humor. At one point Waitzman writes that "audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays," which is an RFC way of saying that pigeon poop can help track the bird's path.
The Norwegians in their own way were having fun, but also seemed keen on demonstrating craftsmanship worthy of the hacker tradition. "Of course it was done for joke purposes but the project itself was pretty serious. We have been serious about it. We had an appropriate implementation," says Engen, sounding sternly humorous in a way that perhaps only Scandinavians can.
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