AN EXPERIMENT IN REMOTE PRINTING

The Phone Company (tpc.int) was an "experiment in remote printing" (a euphemism for "bypass") that greatly alarmed the founding fathers of the Internet for it's potential to bring the net to the attention of the FCC (or worse yet, the telephone company). Under the direction of the legendary Arlington Hewes, the project allowed people to send fax messages for "free" over the Internet. The fax travelled as email to a server, which designated it's willingness to place a local call and deliver your fax by registering the area it served in the DNS.

The system had two hacks that we were fairly proud of. The first was the reversed phone number hack. A system that was willing to place calls on your behalf registered it's service area by using a reversed phone number with a dot between each number (see RFC 1528 for how we did it and, for amusing contrast, the ENUM effort). Our second hack was our "business model," which allowed the server operator to place an ad on the bottom third of the cover sheet. These were the first banner ads on the Internet, though Prodigy did beat us (or more accurately, their long-suffering user base) to the punch in the not-Internet (see RFC 1529 and the discussion of the "Local Newspaper Model" for how we tossed a business model into the standards process).

URL: http://tpc.int