[11202] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: How Long to a Multimedia Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Glenn S. Tenney)
Thu Mar 24 23:16:36 1994
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 01:36:51 -0800
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney)
At 11:42 AM 3/23/94 -0500, Walt Howe, DELPHI Internet SIG Manager wrote:
>What I find missing from the discussions of the attractiveness of Mosaic as an
>interface via dialups to shell accounts or SLIPs is the unattractiveness of
>14.4K access. Once you get past the stage of marveling at the graphics, the
>2 to 5 minute wait between graphic pages, gets old very fast. Mosaic will be
>nothing more than a curiosity to most people who are restricted to current
>dialup speeds. The bandwidth of the last leg to the home or office remains
>critical.
There is another way of looking at the problem for which your last sentence
was an answer...
Mosaic was not designed to be a commercial product. Mosaic was designed
for a university lan running at Ethernet speeds. What has, and always will
remain critical, is the well thought out experienced design that balances
performance and features against the needs of the consumer.
There aint no such thing as enough bandwidth or memory -- period.
In the commercial world you have to take that into account. In the
university world you don't -- you can put everything including the kitchen
sink into projects since you usually care more about features than anything
else.
Maybe my 30 years of experience has jaded me, but I've seen far too many
poorly designed student (from high school through grad school) projects
that ended up as products -- yet were far from commercially well done.
So, instead of your answer that bandwidth is the critical need here, I
maintain that industrial-grade well designed software (and protocols) are
the underlying solution. I believe that Mosaic (internally especially)
would be very different if it had been designed for 14.4kb instead of
Ethernet speeds...
---
Glenn Tenney
tenney@netcom.com Amateur radio: AA6ER
(415) 574-3420 Fax: (415) 574-0546
