Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol

onlineonly.christies.com · 2026-10-02 · by Long Nguyen ·generic
[WAITZMAN, David and the BERGEN LINUX USER GROUP.] One printed IP/ICMP "ping" packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149. Small scroll of paper, 41 x 210 mm. Rolling creases visible from when attached to pigeon's leg. Framed. Inscribed and signed on the verso of backing board: " Property of David Waitzman ". A surviving packet from the first and most famous implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol. In 1990, the American network engineer David Waitzman authored RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers , on April Fools' Day. It describes, in deadpan technical language, the transmission of Internet packets by carrier pigeon. Although written as a joke, RFC 1149 became one of the best-known pieces of Internet folklore and remains widely cited more than three decades later. On 28 April 2001, members of the Bergen Linux User Group in Norway (BLUG) carried out a full-scale implementation of the protocol. Using printers, scanners, and racing pigeons, they printed individual IP packets as hexadecimal strings, attached them to birds' legs, and transmitted them between two lofts separated by approximately three miles. Nine packets were dispatched and four successful replies were returned. The present scroll is one of those transmitted packets: a physical Internet datagram that actually traveled by carrier pigeon during the experiment. It was presented to Waitzman, the original author of RFC 1149, the following year. Appropriately, BLUG sent the packet in a physical frame just as IP packets are sent within coded frames. The RFC 1149 implementation has been described as a quintessential example of the Internet's tradition of the "artful hack," embodying the playfulness, technical ingenuity, and collaborative spirit that characterized the early Internet community.

Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol

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\[WAITZMAN, David and the BERGEN LINUX USER GROUP.\] One printed IP/ICMP "ping" packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149. Small scroll of paper, 41 x 210 mm. Rolling creases visible from when attached to pigeon's leg. Framed. Inscribed and signed on the verso of backing board: "Property of David Waitzman". A surviving packet from the first and most famous implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol. In 1990, the American network engineer David Waitzman authored RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, on April Fools' Day. It describes, in deadpan technical language, the transmission of Internet packets by carrier pigeon. Although written as a joke, RFC 1149 became one of the best-known pieces of Internet folklore and remains widely cited more than three decades later. On 28 April 2001, members of the Bergen Linux User Group in Norway (BLUG) carried out a full-scale implementation of the protocol. Using printers, scanners, and racing pigeons, they printed individual IP packets as hexadecimal strings, attached them to birds' legs, and transmitted them between two lofts separated by approximately three miles. Nine packets were dispatched and four successful replies were returned. The present scroll is one of those transmitted packets: a physical Internet datagram that actually traveled by carrier pigeon during the experiment. It was presented to Waitzman, the original author of RFC 1149, the following year. Appropriately, BLUG sent the packet in a physical frame just as IP packets are sent within coded frames. The RFC 1149 implementation has been described as a quintessential example of the Internet's tradition of the "artful hack," embodying the playfulness, technical ingenuity, and collaborative spirit that characterized the early Internet community.

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