Walter Williams - Deep State

“But the radars could be controlled through TCP/IP,” Richard said. “The controllers might not be able to read their screens right now.”

Dagmar paused for a moment of horror at the thought of aircraft wandering lost across the skies.

Ismet walked to his desk and sat. He connected his satellite phone to his computer and tilted the phone antenna toward the windows so that it got better reception. As the discussion developed, Dagmar saw him leaning toward the screen, heard him tapping away on his keyboard

“Look,” Helmuth said. “Either we go back to Stone Age fossilware or we try to out-evolve the Zap. I say we go forward-there’s got to be a way to put a quick and dirty IP together that will keep this thing out.”

They discussed this for the next quarter hour and eventually decided that this wasn’t their best allocation of resources.

“There must be thousands of people in the Greater D.C. area working on this problem right now,” Dagmar said. “They’ll do that job much better than we can. We can’t save the Internet, not from here. What we need to do is save the revolution.”

The faces that turned to her were bleak.

“Look,” she said. “If we find a solution, it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to work reasonably well most of the time.”

Lola rose from her desk and walked to stand in the doorway.

“There was an ARPANET back before there was TCI/IP,” she said. “It must have used a packet switching system. What was it?”

Dagmar reached for her sat phone, called up its browser, and called up Wikipedia.

“Network Control Program,” she said. “NCP. Last used in 1983.”

“Over thirty years ago,” Helmuth said. “There’s no hardware for it now.”

Lincoln returned to the ops center at sunset. He walked with a kind of plodding deliberation, as if he were carefully choosing exactly where to place his feet. When he came into the room, he sat on a corner of Byron’s desk and looked at the others.

“Byron and Magnus,” he said, “have confessed to informing the Turkish government of our projects and our whereabouts. They were responsible for Judy’s death.”

Helmuth and Richard looked at him in shock. “Why?” Richard demanded.

“We’re in the process of finding that out. Interrogations are proceeding.” He looked down at Dagmar. “Any developments here?”

Dagmar offered him a summary of their discussion.

“Oh lord,” he said. “Next you’ll be wanting to go back to DOS.”

“DOS?” Dagmar asked. “Which DOS?”

“MS-DOS,” Lincoln said. “Pre-Windows Microsoft operating system. There’s no TCP/IP stack in there anywhere.”

Dagmar’s first computer had run Windows, and MS-DOS was as foreign to her as, say, Plankalkul.

“So,” she said. “Why can’t we use it?”

“Because-” A slow light seemed to kindle in Lincoln’s eyes. “Because it’s awkward and horrible and slow and primitive. Because you’ll have to type orders onto a command line instead of just clicking on something. It’s not flexible and will only perform limited tasks. And you might end up trying to communicate over a 300bps acoustic coupler, assuming you could steal one from a museum.”

“And it bypasses the Zap, right?”

“Yes,” Lincoln said. “When you’re running DOS, you don’t even have an IP address.”

“And will it run on our computers?”

“I…” He hesitated. “I don’t know why not. You might have to do some special formatting or boot from disks.”

“We can create a virtual machine that runs DOS,” Richard said. “DOS will see the processor as an-” He looked at Lincoln. “Intel 8086?” he asked. “Eight-oh-eight-eight? Whatever.”

Dagmar turned to Helmuth and Richard. “See if you can download a copy over a cell modem. Set it up on a computer and see what we can do.”

“Modems are going to be a problem,” Lincoln said. “Modem command strings have evolved in the last few decades. I doubt that any of our modems will be able to communicate using DOS.”

“We’ll find some,” Dagmar said. “And when we find them online, there is UPS. There is FedEx. We will prevail.”

Richard looked with some amusement at his display.

“Did you know,” he said, “that there’s a Usenet topic called alt.comp.DOSRULES?”

“There’s still Usenet?” Lola asked. Lincoln looked at her.

“Sometimes,” he said, “people actually go online to exchange information, instead of to look stuff up, play games, or to advertise themselves.”

Lola took a step back.

“Okay,” she said.

“And furthermore,” Lincoln insisted, “Usenet isn’t a damned dinosaur; it’s extremely robust. It’s not on a single computer somewhere; it’s on millions of computers throughout the world. Just try knocking that out.”

“Okay!” Lola said, more brightly, and made a patting gesture, as if she were calming an agitated but senile patient.

Dagmar smiled. “Will I find posts from Chatsworth on Usenet?” she asked.

“May not be the same Chatsworth,” Lincoln said.

“Do you know what I’m picturing?” Dagmar asked. “I’m picturing old alt-dot-DOS geezer-geeks rocking on their front porches and stamping their canes and talking about the days when bulletin board systems roamed the world.”

She heard the room’s printer start, and then Ismet rose slowly to his feet and walked to where the printer sat on its table.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Just taking care of business,” he said.

He took some papers out of the printer, then took scissors and carefully trimmed them. He limped to the wall beneath Ataturk’s portrait and picked up the hammer and tacks that waited there.

Below Ataturk’s blue-eyed glare, below the trophies from earlier demonstrations, Ismet nailed a pashmina scarf, a greeting card, and photographs of Judy and Tuna. Judy’s picture had been taken from her own Web site, and Tuna’s image had been pulled from one of the team’s unedited videos, and it showed him in Istanbul at the first demo, with a shopping bag and a bouquet of brilliant flowers.

Dagmar’s heart rose into her throat as she saw Ismet’s dogged act of devotion, as she saw the photos of the two lost members of the Lincoln Brigade. She remembered with a stab of guilt that she had planned a memorial for Judy and Tuna for that afternoon, but that the events of the day had been allowed to overtake it.

She rose from her chair.

“We’ll get on with our experiments in a minute,” she said. “But right now, I think we should take a few minutes to remember our lost friends.”

Dan the DOS Man says:

The best place to find a dos-compatible modem is in an antique store. Not necessarily a store that sells antiques, though you can find them there, but a genuinely old shop with a modem they’ve had no reason to change in years. Say the store sends a few credit card checks every day, you don’t need an up-to-date modem for that.

You can offer them a free new modem. They may be agreeable to the swap. Of course you can always give them money.

Briana says:

How do I configure a modem for DOS?

Dan the DOS Man says:

What program are you using the modem for in dos? That program should have a setup program for the modem. If it is an internal modem, you may have to go into BIOS and disable the com port that you will be using for the modem.

Dos-capable modems DO NOT USE DRIVERS. If you have a Winmodem you’re out of luck. To test: if the modem is on com2, go to dos and type atdt5551212›com2. You might get lucky and hear the modem dial.

Use a hayes compatible modem if you can. Do not use a usb cable as dos doesn’t have that many drivers available. Like, none.