Notacon was a hack-tech-art-music-demoscene conference in Cleveland, Ohio that ran from 2003 to 2014. I knew some of the organizers and got heavily involved in volunteering and setup for the event.

The drive from my home north of Detroit to Cleveland is a couple hours, so I carpooled with another Michigander making the trip, a guy who ran large parts of the campus network at MSU. I was in telecom, mostly slinging SONET networks at the time, he was mostly Ethernet, but adjacent to a lot of other technologies. We spoke just enough of each other's language to have a lot to learn from each other.

One year (I think it was 2005) in the car, we got to talking about transport networks, and lamenting the fact that "traceroute hides all the fun stuff"; it only shows IP-aware hops that decrement the TTL, and there could be thousands of miles of glass and hundreds of pieces of equipment, which considered the IP traffic to be "payload" and thus would never dare to alter it, between two hops that show up in a traceroute. (Plenty of otherwise-bright LAN engineers might naïvely assume that a packet leaves their router in Chicago and just arrives at another router in Denver because there was just a long, long piece of glass between them -- I think a lot of people have inflated ideas of fiber's capabilities because they're ignorant of the dozens of payload-transparent transport nodes and repeaters handling their circuit between the hops they see.)

"Wouldn't it be fun", we mused, "to somehow shine some light on all those other networks that aren't IP, aren't ethernet, aren't visible to the normal user?" And as the miles ticked by, Anything but Ethernet was born. We proposed it to Notacon's organizers, who gleefully encouraged us to take it and run with it. I'm not sure how it ended up being mostly my baby, but I ran around and found sponsors for prizes, spent the year needling potential contestants into actually building the crazy stuff they verbalized while couched in hypotheticals, and then emceed the chaos when the conference weekend and judging time came around.

This was pre-hackerspace, when all our nerd energy for the year was focused on one or two insane weekends (many of us also attended Penguicon or Defcon). So, extra cycles were less likely to be otherwise spoken for, and a few folks were highly motivated by the contest's appreciation of perverse, obscure, flashy, and MacGuyvered hacks.

My greatest regret looking back on the whole thing is that I didn't put more emphasis on recording and documenting the insanity. That wasn't valuable at the time -- it existed in and for a short-duration event -- but it would be amazing to look back on more of it now.