gaf@uucs1.uucp (10/21/89)
We heard from one of the traffic monitoring people at US West who noticed something peculiar around 5:05 PM Tuesday. He called his AT&T counterpart in Oakland to see what was happening. The call was answered, and the conversation went something like: "Hey, what's happening there?" "We've got an earthquake here, and, ..... oh ..... there's a big crack in the wall now ..... <buzzzzz>" I'd heard that AT&T was on the 10th floor of some building in Oakland, so I don't know how apocryphal this is. Haven't heard of any buildings that tall sustaining that kind of damage. Guy Finney It's that feeling of deja-vu UUCS inc. Phoenix, Az all over again. ncar!noao!asuvax!hrc!uucs1!gaf sun!sunburn!gtx!uucs1!gaf
levin@bbn.com (Joel B Levin) (10/27/89)
>From: gaf@uucs1.uucp >We heard from one of the traffic monitoring people at US West who >noticed something peculiar around 5:05 PM Tuesday. He called his AT&T >counterpart in Oakland to see what was happening. The call was >answered, and the conversation went something like: >"Hey, what's happening there?" >"We've got an earthquake here, and, ..... oh ..... there's a big >crack in the wall now ..... <buzzzzz>" In 1971, when the Arpanet, the original component of the Internet, was still young (approximately 16 IMPs, or packet switching nodes), monitoring its state was still very ad hoc-- another engineer and I periodically checked to see if any line states were changed or if any IMPs had failed to send their one line status message to our local teletype. Remember, this was when networking-as-we-know-it was mostly unheard of and remotely monitoring a private data circuit from a location thousands of miles away from either terminus of the circuit was a thing of the future. One morning in August, around 9:05 am several of the lines terminating in Los Angeles died, and with symptoms indicating it was not an IMP that crashed. After performing our usual tests, we called the Long Lines number in Los Angeles. We were informed that they had had an earthquake, there were some cracks in the building, and it would be a while before service was restored. (It was only a few hours.) Though we had no details, we in Cambridge knew about the earthquake well in advance of the news bulletins! /JBL