The story would be better, if they had kept the real numbers, and not added fake numbers afterwards (maybe they didn't keep notes, and forgot the real numbers).
At the end of the story, that 3 millilightseconds is the one-way distance, and that can't be correct.
Yes, that part doesn't add up. The time from sending SYN to receiving SYN+ACK would be six milliseconds assuming lightspeed between the source and a destination 500 miles away.
That said: I know the ending, and by now the details about SunOS and sendmail aren't too interesting, but the "This is the chairman of statistics" line always gets me laughing out loud.
why would anybody want to do that? I thought karma points above a certain low number don't offer benefits and the number is not visible to anybody but you.
EDIT: I just realized it's visible in profiles :facepalm:
Every September (in the 90s) a new cohort of University students would start and gain access to the internet, such as it was. Hence the reference to timing
As the Wikipedia article states, it's more about the specific period of late 1993–early 1994 when some large online service providers in the US started providing access to the greater internet, the USENET in particular, and masses of new (and usually clueless wrt established norms and netiquette) internet users flooded newsgroups and forever changed and disrupted their character and culture.
Yeah, but that was given the name 'Eternal September' as a reference to the literal Septembers of the preceding years, when there would be a regular influx of newbies.
I'm pretty new to this community and this was my first exposure to this story. It's definitely going into my "anecdotes from the internet" mental repository.
