It's no longer a joke

It's a standard day in the office. You're all surfing happily away, and then one of you asks 'Hey, is the net slow for you guys?' And sure enough, everything turns to treacle, then you check in with the Sysadmin, an between cigarettes and cups of

It's a standard day in the office. You're all surfing happily away, and then one of you asks 'Hey, is the net slow for you guys?' And sure enough, everything turns to treacle, then you check in with the Sysadmin, an between cigarettes and cups of coffee he tells you that the server is playing up, or there's sunspots, or rats are chewing on the ISDN. And then someone says 'Hey, why don't we just use carrier pigeons - it's easier and more reliable'. Well, it's no longer just a funny thing to say; a bunch of Norwegian programmers have done just exactly that - data over pigeon.

But the joke has an even longer history. Back in 1990 David Waitzman published a paper entitled 'A standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers', ostensibly and April Fools joke, but it was published and seen by many. So the office joke has some basis beyond smart-asses waiting for the network to come back up.

So back to the whacky Norwegians. Over beer, the inspiration for many odd things, they decided that they would actually test the pigeon theory. Out into the countryside they went, with a mess of birds and a couple of notebooks attached to printers and scanners. At one end, one coder wrote a ping, printed it out, and stuck it to the leg of a bird. An hour or so later the pigeon touched down, the ping was scanned and entered, and a response typed, printed and sent back via the same bird. The pigeon returned, the text was scanned, and the ping was complete. And why was this done, what does it prove? Well, nothing, but it sure beats working for a living.