"If [engineers] had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds"

--- Vint Cerf speaking at OpenMobile Summit, San Francisco November 2009; quoted by The Register, "Vint Cerf mods Android for interplanetary interwebs", 5th November 2009

Quote in context:

So, Cerf and team booted TCP/IP from the heavens and build an interplanetary replacement they called the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol. Cerf admits this isn't the most attractive moniker.

"Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things," said his sarcasm. "If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds."

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous connection. When there are delays in interplanetary transmission, the new protocol forces each node to hang onto its packets until they can be safely transmitted. It's now under test with platforms speeding away from earth towards objeccts 80 or 90 light-seconds away.

Update 23 November, 2009: Mark Gordon at Microsoft notes the old ISDN joke: "If AT&T had named Sushi, it would have been CDF (Cold Dead Fish)."