[ih] "Toasternet Part I and II"

[Karl Auerbach]

I don't know about "Toasternet" but I do know about the original 
Internet toasters (both of 'em.)  Circa 1988 or 1989.

I integrated my (Epilogue) SNMP agent code into the larger code base of 
each.

I believe both used Sunbeam "Radiant" toasters - those would lower the 
bread into the toaster when the power was applied and eject the bread 
when the power was removed.  So the job of the controlling code was 
largely to control the timing and duration of the power.

Back in those days we didn't have convenient power controllers driven by 
computers, so these things weren't going to get UL approval.

The first was John Romkey's.  He used a laptop in which he had split the 
case and wired in electronics to control a rather large external power 
relay.  The OS was probably MS DOS or early Windows, probably with 
either PC/IP or PC/TCP stacks.  I think John did this when he was living 
in the Belmont, California hills and working for Epilogue.

The second was Simon Hackett's.  Simon used an M68xxxxx box, again with 
relays to control the power mains.  Much of the work was done in the 
carriage house at TGV in Santa Cruz where Simon was also doing the 
original Etherphones and remote controlled 100 CD jukebox (along with 
remote controlled stereo system - We would be working in the carriage 
house, listening to Adelaide radio over the net and Simon would [from 
Adelaide] mess with the controls.)

I think the two toasters used the same SNMP "toaster MIB" for control.  
It had items such as one/two slices, type of bread (including 
pop-tarts), darkness, etc.

The toasters were calibrated on that most uniform of "bread" - Wonder Bread.

John's toaster was displayed at Interop.  I can't remember whether it 
was in the Epilogue Technologies booth.  But I do remember that in the 
chaos we all forgot to bring the critical ingredient - bread.  So we had 
to toast and re-toast the one slice. we had  That is until disaster 
struck - Ole J. came along, picked up a knife, and tried to apply butter 
to the already extremely brittle slice.  It shattered.

Later generations of the toaster involved a Lego robot to manage bread 
delivery and removal, weather stations with talking bears, etc.

(My favorite Interop hack was when we built an iSCSI RAID-5 unit using 
all the least appropriate technologies ranging from wi-fi to USB flash 
drives.  That was the year when I was trying to do a VoIP 
man-in-the-middle implementation that would detect the words "no" and 
"not" and drop the packets containing that word from the RTP stream - I 
never got it to work, but I could insert words into VoIP calls.)

Microsoft has since then used "Toaster MIB" in its documentation and 
such, leading to a belief that the Internet toasters were mere apocrypha.

         --karl--


On 7/16/21 11:51 PM, Bill Woodcock via Internet-history wrote:
> I’ve often seen reference to:
>
> "informal notes on IP addressing, ("Toasternet Part I and II"), circulated on the IETF mailing list during November 1991 and March 1992.”
>
> …authored, presumably, by Robert Ullmann, since they led to RFCs 1475 and 1476 in the following year.
>
> But I can’t find the actual documents.  Does anyone have them still in their mailbox?
>
>                                  -Bill
>
>