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I've been on a bit of a kick to try and understand how we could re-build the Internet and computing based on what could be pulled from the scrap heap, which lead me to cross paths with AMPRNet. Nifty idea, though with its limited bit rates, information dissemination would only be for those with long attention spans :)

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Information density increases as bandwidth decreases. When all else fails there is morse, and you can be damn sure nobody is going to send any markup using morse, just the cold hard data.

There's also the restriction of no encryption or commercial traffic. Still pretty nifty though.

The 'no encryption' rule is there to make sure amateur radio can not be (easily) used for nefarious purposes. Of course two people with Yagi's, very low power transmitters and a couple of very low bandwidth modems could still use the amateur bands (or any other frequency, really) to exchange information without anybody being the wiser. If they manage to be on the hoof while transmitting and are on the air for a very short time only then they could probably keep such a scheme alive for a really long time before being detected.

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