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Aucbvax.1992 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!dlw@MIT-AI Tue Jun 30 01:15:53 1981 frisbees and floppies... You asked, "The instantaneous bandwidth of such a transmission system is very high. So who needs a Chaosnet?" This was presumably in reference to the use of floppy disks for inter-workstation file transfer.

While the instantaneous bandwidth may be the same, the overall bandwidth, counting the playing with the physical disks, is much lower.

Furthermore, the net is superior because (1) you can't do remote login over floppy disks, nor asking what time it is, nor asking who is logged in, nor anything else besides file transfer, and (2) it is very clumsy, especially if the other machine is across the street or down the block. Direct and easy access to a shared file server is important.

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