[lycos]

Unrelated but made me think of this anecdote; Many years ago I met a tech-savy captain who did have satellite internet on his ship, but it was incredibly expensive (not sure about current pricing), so he only used it briefly every now and then. To receive e-mails (and some other things) he had a server somewhere which fetches everything and then zips it up as compressed as possible and when online synced it to a local computer/server that's onboard.

It was pretty fun/interesting to see creative solutions like that to deal with very limited bandwidth in practice.

[smitty1e]

Some 20+ years ago I was a frigate Commo on the great circle route from Pearl Harbor to San Diego.

We'd pull email down over Inmarsat, but the geometry was such that the ship literally had to come to a different course and speed to keep a lock on the bird.

Physics matter sometimes.

[benguild]

yeah, cruise ships with bad internet were a great use case for Basic HTML Gmail