Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:
>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey
mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first
ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.
>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing
up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned
out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on
relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of
Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all
pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying
to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before
giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection
timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.
Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well
> Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages
for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down.
Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94
> We, ngrok, have sponsored Mac to write this post because we think it’s an underexplored perspective on the topic of reliability.
Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.
History is important and interesting to some of us. Just because it's not a direct 1:1 mapping of computer problems today doesn't make it any less intellectually stimulating to read about
Its 1996 - AOHell is loading, Aphex Twin blasts over 28.8, cordless phones hidden, a pizza is on the way…
AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.
I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.
Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:
>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM
Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E
Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3
>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.
nanog on seclists was an interesting read too https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51
Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well > Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down. Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94
> We, ngrok, have sponsored Mac to write this post because we think it’s an underexplored perspective on the topic of reliability.
Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.
History is important and interesting to some of us. Just because it's not a direct 1:1 mapping of computer problems today doesn't make it any less intellectually stimulating to read about