[1394] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: SIMTEL20 task terminated
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Keith Petersen)
Sun Sep 22 19:46:44 1991
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 91 19:44:18 -0400
From: w8sdz@rigel.acs.oakland.edu (Keith Petersen)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: STGEORGE@bootes.unm.edu, GRANOFF@technet.nm.org
Reply-To: w8sdz@vela.acs.oakland.edu
donm@pnet07.cts.com (Don Maslin) writes:
>Are we really sure that SIMTEL20 is going away? Or is it Keith's function?
>If I recall correctly, a month or so prior to the end of the last fiscal year,
>funds ran out and Keith's function was discontinued until the beginning of
>this fiscal year, when it resumed.
Actually it was on or about May 20th of last year that my task was
halted due to no funds. I wasn't called back until the new fiscal
year started on October 1. That's SIX MONTHS. I have no reason to
believe that this time it won't be the same. I have a family to
support, so I can't wait around for up to six months to see if it
will be resumed.
>I infer from all of this that Keith is an
>employee of some outfit that contracts services to WSMR, as opposed to a
>government employee.
That's true, and they have no other work to tide me over.
>It would be most unusual for the government to accept 'donations' to maintain
>a function, contracted or not.
There is no mechanism for them to accept money from non-military
sources, as far as I know. At least that's what I was told when
I passed along requests from people who wanted 9-track tapes of the
collection and were willing to pay for them.
>It is indeed unfortunate that Keith has apparently become an early victim of
>the so called 'peace dividend'!
This is not the result of the peace dividend. It's the result of poor
planning. This project should have been funded at a national level,
not from the local budget.
I'm not happy about Elwood Baas's message which discredited my
original posting about the task termination. I never said that
SIMTEL20 was shutting down. I only said that my task was terminated
due to lack of funding. I will be happy to send a copy of that
posting to anyone who asks.
You may find it of interest to know that the programmer who maintains
the TOPS20 operating system and utilities at SIMTEL20 received his
layoff notice the same day that I did.
>Thanks Keith for a job very well done!
Thank you.
Keith
--
Keith Petersen
Internet: w8sdz@rigel.acs.oakland.edu or w8sdz@vela.acs.oakland.edu
Uucp: uunet!umich!vela!w8sdz BITNET: w8sdz@OAKLAND
