A piece of the world's oddest network deployment has gone up for auction — if you fancy owning a piece of pigeon-powered internet, it can be yours for just $4,000
A piece of oddball internet history has been sold at auction at Christie’s, with over $20,000 bid on a relic of an incredible experiment to send internet packets by pigeon
A rare piece of pigeon-powered internet history has been up for auction, with a printed data packet sold at Christie's for $24,600. The packet was originally conceived as an April Fool's joke in 2001 by American network engineer David Waitzman, who later framed and presented it to a fellow network engineer in 2002. The packet, measuring a mere 41mm by 210mm, was part of a proof of concept experiment conducted by the Bergen Linux User Group in Norway.
The 2001 experiment used nine racing pigeons to transmit IP packets over a 3-mile distance, employing a single point-to-point path for each carrier. Described as an "artful hack," the RFC 1149 implementation remains a testament to the early internet community's playful spirit and technical ingenuity.
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