- A printed data packet has been sold at auction via Christie’s
- The sale price was $24,600 for a piece of paper that was once secured to a pigeon’s leg
- Pigeon internet began life as an April Fool’s proposal
A printed internet packet intended has been sold at auction for $24,600 (close to £20,800) at Christie’s - and while the lot had a listing of a comparatively modest $4,000 (call it £3,040), it had attracted considerable attention due to the fact that it was deployed via carrier pigeon.
The lot is a rare survivor of a 2001 experiment into the concept of pigeon-powered internet. Initially conceived as an April Fool’s joke, the ruse was embraced by the early Linux community, resulting in a 2001 proof of concept, which employed a racing pigeons.
Sold as part of Christie’s “Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts Including Americana and Science” auction, the tiny scroll came from the collection of American network engineer David Waitzman, to whom it was framed and presented in 2002.
Framed packet
In what might be described as one of the slowest pings in history, Norway’s Bergen Linux User Group (BLUG) ran the live experiment over 3 miles.
Measuring a tiny 41mm by 210mm (that’s 1.61 inches by 8.27 inches), the framed packet would have been tightly rolled and placed in a small message capsule attached to its pigeon’s leg.
The live experiment in 2001 occurred 11 years after Waitzman’s original proposal, entitled “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.” The document, labelled RFC 1149, remains online for posterity, and opens with the following passage:
“Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers, but many carriers can be used without significant interference with each other, outside of early spring.”
The document continues in a similar vein.
Keeping to the spirit of RFC 1149, the BLUG employed nine racing pigeons with a 3 mile flight between lofts, carrying printed IP packets in hexadecimal form, and dispatched them to their destination. Once the packets were scanned at the other end to confirm receipt, the process was repeated in the opposite direction… but with just four replies.
Artful hack
Auctioned by David Waitzman and the Bergen Linux User Group, the new owner of the framed packet will be responsible for a comparatively early – and certainly amusing – piece of internet history.
As the listing notes, “The RFC 1149 implementation has been described as a quintessential example of the Internet's tradition of the "artful hack," embodying the playfulness, technical ingenuity, and collaborative spirit that characterized the early Internet community.”