[11698] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Internet -The Band-Aid Network
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (The future Ross Stapleton-Gray)
Thu Apr 14 10:19:41 1994
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 3:56:31 -0700 (MST)
From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: kgibbs@world.std.com
> I feel the Intenet is temporary until someone realizes that its
> inefficient!
Kelly's partly right--and totally wrong.
Kelly, your mistake is in thinking of the Internet as something that
any one somebody (a Compuserve, an AOL, or even a Bill Gates) could
develop an alternative to. But the Internet, given that it's both
an extant thing (but a pretty fuzzy one--a loose collaboration of
well over a million computers, and many thousands of separately
conceived, implemented and administered networks) and an *idea* (the
TCP/IP protocols, and the spirit of interconnecting that which the
protocols allow to be interconnected), is no such service. Until
you understand why Internet isn't Compuserve, you'll not understand
why it can be godawful inefficient and still the greatest social
miracle of the last decade.
Ross
