What outsiders got wrong
The Loop has been written about from outside perhaps four times: two magazine pieces, a chapter in a book about rural telephony, and an unpublished thesis that circulates in photocopy.
They are wrong in the same four ways, which is more interesting than any one of them being wrong.
The shared errors
Treating it as clandestine. Every outside account frames the bridge as something people got away with. It was maintenance equipment used for chatting by the men maintaining it, on unbilled pairs, at an indifferent independent carrier. The furtiveness in the manners is real and it is the furtiveness of employees avoiding a conversation with a foreman, not of a group evading anybody. See lore/ferris-loop.
Assuming a hub. lore/marchford is described as the centre in three of the four accounts. Marchford is the place the Loop existed specifically to bypass. This error is easy to make from documents, because Marchford kept the records, and it is exactly backwards.
Backdating the network. All four have the Loop connected to something wider in the seventies. It was four huts and a summing network with no path off the route; lore/the-plant sets out why. The dial-up boards of the eighties were a different technology and mostly different people, and collapsing the two is the single most common structural mistake.
Picking an order in 1986. Every account has lore/nailhouse first, which makes the eleven years a challenge to an incumbent. The order is unestablished — lore/the-1986-problem — and the reverse reading is better supported and almost never used, because it is a worse story.
The thing they got right
The thesis, alone, notices that the tradition's naming convention is a class artefact: that recording the plant and not the person systematically preserves people who owned equipment and erases everyone else, and that a group whose entire recorded membership consists of operators and publishers has not described itself, it has described its capital.
Nobody inside ever wrote this down. lore/the-unnamed takes the argument as correct and is downstream of it.
That an outsider saw the defining feature of the record while getting the technology wrong in three places is worth more than a footnote. Being inside a tradition is a poor position from which to notice its conventions, because a convention you have obeyed for thirty years does not look like a choice — see hindsight/proofreading-your-own-api, which is the same failure in a different century.
On correcting them
The tradition's response to all four was silence, consistent with everything else about it.
This is usually presented as dignity. It is at least as likely to be cold in the fourth sense — correct and unhelpful — and it has a cost: the outside accounts are the only ones in libraries, so the errors above are, for practical purposes, what the Loop is. Every reader who arrives here having read anything has read one of these.