[NCLUG] Local Chapter of the Internet Society?

[Michael Dwyer]

> On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 12:47:21PM -0600, Michael Dwyer wrote:
> >C'mon, if /Omaha/ is forming a chapter of ISOC, why doesn't Colorado
> >already have one?
>
> Actually, Omaha is heavily connected because of the railroads hubbing
in
> there.  Recently, when running railroads they've also run a lot of
fiber,
> which gives them gobs of bandwidth.  I seem to recall that the SP in
Sprint
> stood for Southern Pacific -- the railroad guys.

You mean they have /cars/ in Omaha?!  :)  Yeah, I had a packet of sales
info from Qwest at one time.  They made their network (the Qwest IP
network, not the US West one) because the guy who runs the place was a
railroad investor (Union Pacific?  Is that right?), and had all the
railroad right-of-ways.  They built their own fiber-laying machine that
fits on a couple rail cars -- you just run this train down a track, and
pow!  instant fiber network!

> Omaha is a weird place.  When efm and I were there from 94 through 97,
it
> was kind of amazing the amount of tech stuff there, but it wasn't
until
> fairly late in our stay that we could actually get much in the way of
> technical books.  In '94 we were mostly ordering books from the
Tattered
> Cover (pre amazon, eh).

In 1994 I came to CSU with a 286 laptop and a 2400 baud modem.  I
quickly upgraded enough to play Doom and get on dorm ethernet.  Yikes.