Did they somehow find a way to make a long tap (e.g. slide something against the radiator for a continuous signal) or did they agree on two different kinds of short taps? (Or do the pipes resonate for long but can be dampened by hand to produce a short tap?)
I believe the usual thing is to essentially encode it by the spaces between the taps, rather than the taps themselves.
But then how does one distinguish between letters? Something like "ETA" would be difficult to tell apart from "II".
Re:In 1844, Chess Was Online
by qingcharles on Friday December 19, 2025 @01:18PM
(#46329030)
I used this:
My father went to a boarding school. In defiance of his housemaster’s nightly curfew, he and his friend would play cross-dormitory chess using the heating pipes as a medium for Morse code tapped out on the radiators.
It was just the two of them playing through a wall. It would be a fun exercise to implement a fully manual pipe tapping protocol that implements addressing, collision avoidance, retransmission, and distributed consensus. So much fun in fact — and I think this site is definitely a safe space to admit one’s sense of “fun” being quite niche — that it surely must have been done already. TCP/IP/Ethernet: The board game (?)