# My first transcontinental message When I was in high school in the 1980s, the internet did not yet exist in the collective consciousness. If you wanted to communicate with someone far away, your best bet was to write a letter, mail it, hope that it arrived, and then wait weeks for a response, assuming that they ever got it. Sure, you could call someone on the phone, but it would cost you around US$6.73 in 2024 dollars, *per minute*. While working my way through college, one of my jobs provided me with access to [UUNET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET)[^1], a network that connected universities and research institutions at a number of locations around the globe. It was a very, very, VERY slow network compared to the internet today – sending an email with just one sentence of content could take several minutes – but it largely worked. One day I decided to try out this UUNET thing to see how it worked. I picked a node on the network far away from my location in St. Louis, Missouri – Madrid, Spain – and sent a simple ‘just a hello from WUSTL’ message to the sysadmin there. The fascinating thing about the system at that time was that you would get pings back from each of the nodes of the network that your message traversed on its way to the recipient. The actual pings I got back are long forgotten, but it was likely something along these lines: ``` Message sent from WUSTL node, 0.5 sec, 0 retries Message relayed through Pittsburgh node, 2 sec, 2 retries Message relayed through New York edu node, 1.2 sec, 1 retry Message relayed through New York uplink, 0.2 sec, 0 retries Message relayed through Atlantic satellite link, 8.2 sec, 0 retries Message relayed through London downlink, 0.2 sec, 2 retries Message relayed through London.FGM node, 2.5 sec, 3 retries Message relayed through London.L02 node, 2.5 sec, 3 retries Message relayed through Paris node, 1.8 sec, 1 retries Message delivered to Madrid node, 0.2 sec, 0 retries ``` Right there, on the green screen in front of me, I could watch as the message literally made its way across the globe. Notifications came back sporadically and slowly, indicating that my little collection of bits was making progress. Several minutes later, a similar greeting appeared from the system operator on the other end. I leaned back in my chair, dumbfounded with what had just happened. And yet, a few days ago I was on a video call with colleagues from several different time zones and countries. Everyone came through with little to no lag, in full color and resolution, and we went about our business. But in the back of my head, I was still as amazed as I was several decades ago. Tech is so metal. [^1]: It might have been [USENET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet) instead ∎