[1944] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Summarizing the Situation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Wolff)
Fri Jan 10 09:41:38 1992
To: cook@tmn.com (Gordon Cook)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 92 09:38:11 EST
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@ncri.cise.nsf.gov>
-> Whatever became of the vision of that little girl from Tennessee dialing
-> up the Library of Congress to study dinosaurs?
WHen that vision was first enunciated, LoC wasn't on the 'net. It is now.
It's not possible to study dinosaurs that way yet, but it'll come. And any
sufficiently determined little girl in Tennessee (or anywhere else, for that
matter) can get on the 'net right now; as time goes by, the determination
level needed will also diminish.
-> What happened to the NREN vision?
It's alive and well. Look at the 1987 and 1989 FCCSET documents, then look
at the Little Blue Book and at the legislation; I think you'll find a fairly
consistent vision that perhaps has evolved and matured a bit but has
suffered no gross wrenching changes.
What's new, of course, is the public discovery of an underlying vision of a
ubiquitous, national, public data network. Everyone wants it. And I think
that if you examine the activities of the Federal agencies in working toward
the NREN, you will find that - within what they believe to be their
authority and limitations on what they are by law permitted to do with the
public funds entrusted to them - they have been encouraging and facilitating
the wider vision in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
I assert, for example, that the DoE program that trains faculty of small and
isolated historically black/female colleges in high performance computing,
then gives them access to reasonable computers over the Internet - access
provided in many cases through the NSFNET Connections program - has more to
do with the larger vision than with high performance computing per se.
-> And where is the NSF?
Working.
-> Things seem to me to be in disarray and I am surprised that we haven't
-> got Steve Wolff patching them back together!?
Lots of folks would say Steve Wolff ain't too credible just now. I don't
believe that ;-)
-s
