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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

I linked this to my dad (who's been a network engineer and CIO-type for nearly thirty years) and his response kind of floored me: "yeah, we did this with ARCNET. Brine-soaked twine." So, one, this is Older Than It Looks, and two, apparently my dad might be a wizard?

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Also reminds me of ethernet over barbed wire. Seems like similar things have been done for a long time...

http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm

A long time!

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

Man, I wish my dad was technical. Treasure that relationship.

My dad did CS in the 70s then got into sales. So our tech talks usually go right to, "do your languages do recursion? That was a big deal when I was doing Cobol on UW's PDP8" or something along those lines.

Always with the recursion.

"Does this conversation?"

>Brine-soaked twine.

reminded about other sodium ion transmission channels - our nerves.

I've often wondered if Ethernet can be ran over brine or wet string, if even only just a few inches. I played with the idea once unsuccessfully but never put more than five minutes into it.

I wouldn't expect modern 100BaseT or such to work, but probably the older 10Base2 over coax type ethernet i'd expect to work.

"The standard on copper twisted pair is IEEE 802.3ab for Cat 5e UTP, or 4D-PAM5; four dimensions using PAM (pulse amplitude modulation) with five voltages, −2 V, −1 V, 0 V, +1 V, and +2 V."

if you can rig the equipment to provide five voltages over four dimensions...

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