ABSTRACT
One winter morning, just like every morning for 10 years, my daughter and I took our dog Max out for a walk around Yale’s sport fields. (By the way, isn’t it amusing that dog owners walk their dogs in the same pattern, in the same area, same streets, day after day, for years, without ever noticing it?) Well, as usual, the dog was doing his doggy things, while we had our father-to-daughter (or vice versa?) conversation about her school, her friends, my work, and other topics cut out for the leisurely morning walk with Max.
The conversation turned to my work. I was talking about different ideas for the most suitable real-time network for the University. After a while, I noticed her puzzled look and I knew I had lost her in the conversation. Upon asking her where I had lost her, she replied without hesitation that she had never heard a more messed-up naming convention, what with all those BACnets, Ethernets, ARCNETs, and whatnot “nets” — how could anyone tell the difference? How could anyone understand what the Yale network will be, out of all those “nets?” We got into a long conversation on how the Yale network would be a combination of several types of networks. That cleared up the situation! After some more discussion she told me, “Dad, from now on, whenever you refer to the future Yale network, call it simply Maxnet, after our dog, and I will know what you mean.” And that was the birth of Maxnet.
So, now you know why you can’t find a “maxnet” in any professional or scientific publication (not even at Yale). Nevertheless, the name stuck to the Yale facilities real-time network. You can find it on the web (with Max’s picture), showing the systems connected to the real-time network at Yale, in the name of the room with the network servers (Max room), and in conversations and correspondence referring to the “Yale real-time network.”
Epitaph: Max passed away in 1998 at the ripe age of 16; we don’t know if he went to the doggy or people’s heaven, since we always suspected he thought of himself as human.
