[11266] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: How Long to a Multimedia Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Sun Mar 27 19:18:07 1994
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 94 20:01:43 EST
From: stpeters@swan-song.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: tenney@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
>From: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney)
>At 9:39 AM 3/25/94 -0800, Kent W. England wrote:
>>But Mosaic is a critical successful experiment that will possibly lead to
>>those improved protocols and software. Many are calling Mosaic the
>>long-awaited Internet killer app. It just might be the first (second after
>>email).
>
>Yes to all of the above -- however, it doesn't mean that it's either well
>written or well designed, nor that its protocol is well designed for other
>than Ethernet speeds. It may be... but it does not give the appearance of
>being so.
Which particular protocol did you have in mind, Glenn? Mosaic speaks
several of them, http, gopher, and ftp for starters.
Mosaic benefits from bandwidth when transferring a lot of data. Its
multimedia capabilities encourage people to transfer a lot of image,
sound, and video data, but as someone previously mentioned, people
running at the end of a small pipe soon learn not to do that; you learn
to run with the automatic image downloading turned off.
If the snazzy multimedia capabilities are what you're after, you need a
lot of data, and Mosaic sucks data with plain ol' tcp/ip. No
hyper-efficient connection-brokering protocol is going to solve your
problem. You get a bigger pipe or lead a slow life.
The subject of this thread, from some distant-past posting, asks how
long to a multimedia Internet. The answer is we already have one.
There's nothing like Mosaic to turn Internet skeptics into believers
lusting after more bandwidth.
--
Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, The Pearly Gateway; currently at:
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
