By the way, I should note that I, at least, have zero interest in starting my own prime-time clone of SAFE, running off with the ideas, making money from stealing the ideas (I have plenty of my own, thanks). My interest in alternate SAFE nets is for testing, experimentation, and as a platform for app development where it doesn’t matter if one crashes and burns the whole thing down. That’s certainly how I taught myself networking, back in the day (Netware, if anyone remembers that, amongst other things, built at home).
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Sounds like a reasonable plan and I am sure we will have that. Our upcoming community network is one such example
Oh and there were ones before that. Serial networks before 2 MBit/sec ethernet.
My first networks were over 300 Baud (4 wire) fixed link modems. Then writing protocols for 9600 4 wire modem networks over 2000 miles (polled and async)
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This! I want to run it on my own local network for application testing.
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Yeah, I had modems and can still hear their musical connection yodel, then twanging, then loud hissing followed by silence, and using a patch board to jumper the wires.
The Netware network was on coaxial cable in a topology like a set of Christmas tree lights: one bad connection and the whole thing would go down.
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Ever see the original ethernet cable (around the 70’s) thicker than your thumb.
Yea coax networking was the old linking one tee to the next. Oh and make sure you had the 50Ohm terminator on each end.
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That’s a bit before my time; I worked with the thinner kind.
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I used to debug those with a “time domain reflectometer” Basically an oscilloscope and a pulse generator to work out where the cable was damaged 
Ah it was easy then. I worked on Thorn computers (Called future) where a new version of wordperfect would come out and we would take our soldering irons and go and jump some cpu pins
Also worked on some FM networks where the network stopped working when automatic gates opened to let lorries out and such like. I was all interesting. We used radios to track packets through those 
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Also good for finding faults in telephone copper when there is a couple of miles underground. Especially the fixed line modem links.
They were fun days, very much hands on engineering.
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