> P.S. A Cray-2 is about 50% faster than the fastest Pentium-Pro computer available today. Again, keep in mind that the message above dates from 1989!

I'm thinking the dates on this are off a bit, as the Pentium Pro came out in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro

The first PC I ever built was in 1997, and had a dual socket Pentium Pro logic board which was great for Linux, not so great for non-NT Windows.

I was going to post the same thing...

I like stuff like this. Watching Downton Abbey I wondered what the CW was at the start of the first episode: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/downton-abbey-series-1-episode-1...

Ah, Phil Karn, who had TCP/IP running on ham radio in the early 1980s.

Bob McGwier is an interesting fellow. I met him at Dayton many years back when TAPR was just getting into DSP devices: http://www.arrl.org/news/tom-clark-k3io-to-speak-at-amsat-ta.... I think he was doing work for a defense research outfit at the time.

Getting way off the topic, some of the events at Dayton are quite interesting. At one dinner, I got to hear Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor,_Jr speak about his work on pulsars. He brought some audio clips of pulsars, the first gave a "click" about once a second. The second clip was at ten per second, and the final one produced a tone of 600 clicks per second. He credits his interest in physics (along with his brother) to amateur radio as a young boy.

Also , the ARRL is one of the organizations that lobby for spectrum to be publicly available.

As a note on how computing power has improved since 1989, we can now remove impairments and decode optical nPSK at 32Gbd/s ~155k Symbols (2-4 bits per symbol in 2 polarizations) in about 8s using offline processing (data captured from a device like high sample rate sampling scope).

> A few years later when half the bad guys in the world seemed to be using AX.25 and cheap ham gear

Also, note that this awesome research was paid for by the NSA via their sponsorship of the lab and Cray machine. I assume because FSK decoding is useful for SIGINT...

EDIT: see quote above

but what was the content of the packets?

RR is Receive Ready in the HAM world, so I suppose he was indicating that he was ready to receive comms from someone else.

It is part of the AX.25 data protocol, not meaningful communication between humans.

Thanks. It can be seen here, it's just 8 bits, highest three are there called NR, so they were 011, lowest 4 were 0001 which means RR receive ready.

https://www.tapr.org/pub_ax25.html

Fig. 7 -- S frame control fields

Receive Ready for block number three.