How can we appreciate bullet-quick SSDs and fiber networks without pausing -- at the year's end -- to appreciate where it all came from? We should think back to before the birth of modern computing , even before the telegraph , to a time when bits of data were forced to travel everywhere by train. A hacker named Maximilien has now recreated that locomotive golden era using Lego, Arduino and Linux, and what his system lacks in bandwidth it more than makes up for in historical relevance. A USB flash key is borne by miniature railway carriage from station to station, stopping at each one to unload or pickup information and thus creating its own barebones networking protocol. Click the source link to appreciate the full museum piece.