Sneakernet
[5] In 2021 Taliban-governed Afghanistan, "computer kars" distribute Internet-derived content by hand: "Movies, music, mobile applications, iOS updates, and naughty videos.
[6] When Australia joined Usenet in 1983, it received articles via tapes sent from the United States to the University of Sydney, which disseminated data to dozens of other computers on the country's Unix network.
El Paquete Semanal is a roughly 1TB compilation of media, distributed weekly throughout Cuba via portable hard drives and USB memory sticks.
[12][13][14][15][16] The May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, revealed that he used a series of USB thumb drives to store his email drafts.
The experiment had the team transfer a 700 MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest; A carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a Telstra ADSL line.
[22] Wizzy Digital Courier provided Internet access to schools in South Africa with poor or no network connectivity by implementing UUCP on USB memory sticks.
[27] The SETI@home project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico was stored on magnetic tapes which were then shipped to Berkeley, California, for processing.
In 2005, Jim Gray reported sending hard drives and even "metal boxes with processors" to transport large amounts of data by postal mail.
[clarification needed] Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield.
Although the station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is generally considered the canonical version, variants using trucks or Boeing 747s or C-5s and later storage technologies such as CD-ROMs, DVDs, Blu-rays, or SD Cards[37] have frequently appeared.
The very first problem in Andrew S. Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks asks the student to calculate the bandwidth of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks.
