sneakernet

sneakernet: /snee·ker·net/, n. Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.” Also called ‘Tennis-Net’, ‘Armpit-Net’, ‘Floppy-Net’ or ‘Shoenet’; in the 1990s, ‘Nike network’ after a well-known sneaker brand. – Eric S. Raymond ¹

There was a brief period, in the early 90s, when personal computers began appearing in homes but were not yet connected to the Internet. We used them for spreadsheets, drawing, single-player games, word processing. Most people thought of them as better typewriters.

And yet they were still, in some sense, connected. Even these remote islands were visited by the occasional boat.

Floppy disks and CDs were sold in stores, shrink-wrapped, shipped by truck or plane, unpacked and stocked on shelves. Then purchased, unboxed, installed. When Windows 95 launched, millions of people waited in line to buy it, buffered like packets in a router.

Books and magazines were typeset and printed digitally. Some of the symbols represented computer code, which could be retyped manually and compiled. These were information signals, broadcast from one computer to many others through paper, ink, fingers, keys. People shared photocopies of photocopies of the UNIX source code.

Routes could be traced in marker through the roads of a Thomas Brothers map. Freeways were network links, high in both bandwidth and latency. My dad once drove all the way to Santa Cruz for a version of BSD UNIX someone had modified to run on a PDP-11. There was no other way to get it.

I like to think of sneakernet as one of the first overlay networks. Vehicles and people established connectivity at the lower layer. Above flowed the data between machines, encoded on magnetic storage, encapsulated in plastic and boxes, shuttled by human drivers, loaded and unloaded by human hands.

In an overlay network, the upper layer must be made legible to the lower layer. So transmission of binary data became physical, expressed in terms of SKUs, street addresses, shelf space. Software could be touched, packaged, carried. The lower layer continued operating as it always had, mostly unaware that it had become the substrate of a computer network. Sneakernet was built on the infrastructure of a pre-digital world.

It was a transitory state. Almost immediately, sneakernet began to obsolete itself by distributing software to bootstrap the consumer Internet. Windows 95 included a TCP/IP stack, the first to be widely deployed on home computers. Dial-up Internet providers like America Online and Earthlink mailed millions of CDs through the US Postal Service. Households began connecting to the Internet over phone lines. Fast, high-capacity Internet access became available to more and more people, and the need for sneakernet gradually declined.

Thinking about the broader history of computer networking, it can be easy to forget the importance of sneakernet in the early 90s. ARPANET had been invented decades before, connecting universities and research labs over thousands of miles. Then the creation of personal computers and Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the 70s, the standardization and adoption of TCP/IP in the 80s. Fast-forward to the interconnected world that emerged in the 2000s, the exponential growth of the Internet, mobile, cloud computing. A straight line interpolated between these eras would exclude the home PCs of the 90s – islands, connected only through sneakernet.