[ih] Internet Talk Radio

[John Romkey]

I do still have the toaster. It spends most of its time on a shelf in our storage room. It still work though it has a slightly concerning aroma when it toasts.

The controller was basically just a relay controlled from a parallel port on a computer and who has parallel ports anymore?

(Hi Karl :))
	- john

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> On Jul 23, 2026, at 1:06?AM, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Ah I have not seen that video before.  (I missed most of the Paris shows because I was busy trying to figure out how to redeploy an existing constellation of Russian low earth orbit satellites with newer satellites with on-board, hardened Sun SPARC processors routing IP packets between the satellites. I can't say whether I was bothered or whether I was pleased by not going to a launch in the middle of the desert in Kazakhstan.)
> 
> About all I remember about the Paris shows that I did go to were that the convention space had really low ceilings and that we bought a hundred kilos of really high end chocolates - it was something like $10,000 - in 1990's dollars - of magnificent chocolate.)
> 
> I notice Simon Hackett in the video with the internet juke box - we had that thing in the carriage house of the Victorian house occupied by TGV in Santa Cruz (and later my company's office spaces.)  It was very annoying when Simon, in Adelaide, changed what we were listening to in Santa Cruz as well as the sound level.
> 
> I think we used that carriage house to do some testing of Simon's Internet toaster.
> 
> Here's a link to a photo of Simon from that era... https://www.cavebear.com/archive/interop/simon.gif
> 
> (My SNMP code was used in both the John Romkey and the Hackett Internet toasters.  By-the-way, John R. mentioned that he still has that toaster [but not the control unit].)  Both Internet toasters used Sunbeam Radiant toasters (because they would lower the bread into the slots when power was applied and lift the bread out when power was discontinued.)
> 
> By-the-way, Simon (and I think perhaps Stuart Vance) built the first portable Internet telephones in that same carriage house in Santa Cruz.  We called 'em Etherphones and they made it onto one of Epilogue Technology's cool T-shirts, I'll have to take a photograph and post it.
> 
> Simon had a story of how he got into the telco business.....  He was running a radio based ISP service from the top of the highest building in Adelaide.  But he wanted to run a cable across the city street at the base of the building.  The authorities said "no, you must be a telco to have the right to rip up streets and run cables."  So Simon went through the paperwork to become an official, government recognized telco - so he could run some cable under the street.  Thus the start, I believe, of Internode.
> 
>         --karl--
> 
> On 7/22/26 11:17 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> On 7/22/26 18:10, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>>> I'm not sure which "Interop Movie" you mean.
>> This one:
>> 
>> https://archive.org/details/interop_france_1992
>> 
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