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From: sma@smokey.rocksanne.uucp (Susie Armstrong)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Temperature Quote Protocol
Message-ID: <465@spot.wbst128.xerox.com>
Date: 26 Jul 90 20:59:11 GMT
Sender: news@spot.wbst128.xerox.com
Organization: Xerox Corporation, Webster Research Center
Lines: 30

Here at WRC we've built a networked weather service which has been extremely
popular.  It consists of a weather station on the roof with a thermometer,
windcups, tipping bucket for rainfall, etc.  The station continuously feeds
information down a coax cable to a PC which exports the "weather service".
We have a couple of clients tools for various platforms (Xerox workstations
and Suns), which use a simple datagram-based protocol to periodically query
the PC "weather server".

Turns out there are lots of interesting things you can do with a packet worth
of snapshot data from such a weather server.  Client tools report obvious
things like current temperature, windspeed, etc and can also be smart enough
to manipulate the data to draw conclusions like how hard it is raining, wind
gusts, etc. (especially important to lunchtime runners in Rochester).

We have weather stations (and their corresponding PC servers) currently in
Webster and Tarrytown NY, Pasadena, Toronto, Dallas, and Atlanta, with El
Segundo and Cambridge, England in the process of installing one.  The project
originally started primarily because of one (JWright.wbst128@xerox.com)
person's interest in weather and remote instrumentation - it is now so popular
within Xerox that we've had to work hard with backoff algorithms and ways
of limiting the traffic.  Monitoring the traffic indicates the weather service
has at least 1000 users (most continuously polling the server).

There's a lot of weather junkies out there!

Cheers,
    Susie Armstrong
    System Sciences Lab
    Xerox Webster Research Center
    armstrong.wbst128@xerox.com