"Riverside!" announced the conductor through the PA system, "Riverside!"

No one in the sleeping car moved to get off. Through the windows of his roomette Homer could see the lights of Riverside across the other track and the platform. Only the brightest of stars managed to penetrate the blazing city lights on the ground. Against the almost uniformly dark purple of the sky, majestic Mount Rubidoux stood as a black mass. If this was in the daytime, he would be able to see the great white cross at the top if he squinted; but now he could only see black. "Sleeping car passengers please move to the Dining Car for dinner, thank you."

The train was air-conditioned and so they didn't need to get dressed as they walked to the dining car. As they were walking, they all felt a lurch as the train sped away from Riverside. Each steadied his balance as the train achieved a uniform speed of 79 miles per hour.

"Good evening, gentlemen," greeted the waiter as they walked into the dining car, "please have a seat here." He pointed at a nearby table. "How would you like your steaks?"

"Medium," customized Homer.

"Medium rare," said Steve.

"Medium well," ordered Vint.

"Very well," the waiter helped them get settled in their seats and collected their coats. "Sirs, would you like anything to drink?"

"Water, please," requested Steve, "I don't drink and we're on business," he reminded.

"Same, please," moved the two others, thoroughly shamed.

"I'll be with your drinks in a moment," the waiter excused himself.

The train moved on. The waiter returned with a tray loaded with three glasses of iced water and went away quickly to serve some other guests who had arrived in the meantime.

"San Bernardino!" The announcement came over the PA system. From the second-story window of their dining car, they were not too high to miss seeing the platform but high enough to get a full view of it. Homer saw a girl pace up and down the platform nervously, the train's light making her cast a long shadow stretching away from the train, and only step into the train when "All aboard" was called.

The dining car was beginning to fill up with passengers and little beads of sweat began to form on the brows of the two assigned waiters as they moved to take everyone's order.

As the girl stepped in, the waiter asked her "Do you mind sitting here?" and pointed at Homer's table. "Tell me if there's any trouble," he whispered discreetly as she went to the only vacant seat in it, next to Homer. "How would you like your steak?"

"Medium rare, please," she said. "It's so beautiful. It's like we're on the inside of a grape."

As the train cleared San Bernardino the lights thinned out; and more and more stars revealed themselves to the earthbound observer. Here the realm of the heavens impressed upon all who looked upon it a sense of how great it was and how little they were. A waning crescent moon hung in the eastern sky. "Well, we've got that one now!" Homer said as he pointed to it.

The train headed deeper and deeper into the forbidding Mojave Desert. By the time their steaks were served, not a sign of habitation was to be seen, the houses having ceased ten minutes ago.

The girl began to break the ice. "Hello--where are you going?"

"Salt Lake," replied Homer, "on business."

"Oh," she affected interest, "what do you do?"

"Do you know what a computer is?" Steve asked her.

"I do," she replied.

"Well, not all computers work the same way. They speak different languages, just like people," explained Vint, "what we're doing is linking all the computers of the country together, so that anybody who's working on one of them can work on any other."

"Is that useful?" She looked puzzled under the lighting of the dining car.

"Yes," asserted Homer, "right now we have to ride from LA to Salt Lake on the train for nearly a day just to see a new program on the computer of the University of Utah. With the link--the network, ARPANET,--we won't have to."

"And what sort of program would that be? And how will the computers be linked together?"

"Therein lies the problem," Steve accepted the challenge. "Through telephone lines."

"Telephone lines?" her expression was overcome by disbelief, "how would that work?"

"Instead of having a private line just for two people to communicate--we break up every message into little 'packets', and these packets are routed to their destination by every node of the network they pass through."

"I see," she nodded.

"But there's always a delay of about half a second," Steve said, "Half a second to send a message, half for the response. And so what we're doing is the Decode-Encode Language--the DEL. The remote program--the program we want to run at the computer far away--has a front-end, which the user--we--see. The front-end will be written in DEL and our own computer will do the work before sending the results over."

"You lost me," she confessed.

"Well, imagine an example." Vint jumped in to the rescue, with a pen and a napkin, "you're trying to send a message. You type HELLO. Without the DEL, each letter will take a half a second to get over there. Suppose after you type these five letters you want to type HELP instead. So you delete the last two letters. Without the DEL, each deletion will take half a second to communicate and possibly longer as the remote computer tries to figure out which letter was last and therefore should be deleted. With the DEL, we have a carriage-return key. Only with the carriage-return key does what we type get communicated to the remote program."

"That's very interesting," she said. Homer looked into her eyes. They had understood. "I work with phone lines as well. I'm a phone phreak," she leaned close, "I'm a telephone enthusiast. My name is Ada McLaughlin," she introduced herself.

"Steve." "Vint." "Homer." Each reached out his hand for her to shake, and she shook all of them.

"Don't worry, we hate the Bell System as well." The whole table laughed. "They wouldn't fund the ARPANET. Well, guess who's laughing, now?"

Everyone chortled as they dug into their now-cold steaks.