[919] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: internet consumer reports on state-wide IP networks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Mandelbaum)
Mon Jul 8 10:47:02 1991
To: Steven.Grimm@eng.sun.com (Steven Grimm)
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 03 Jul 91 15:47:11 -0700.
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 91 10:45:05 -0400
From: Richard Mandelbaum <rma@tsar.cc.rochester.edu>
I couldn't agree more. What you want are information and people indices
Who is on the net?
What kind of information is on the net/
Where is information on subject Z
Knowing how the packets go from a to b is somewhat irrelevant1
____________________
>Absolutely right! I find it almost impossible to use the phone system
>because the carriers refuse to tell me how they are routing my
>phone calls.
That's not what people (well, I, at least) mean by network maps. I
don't care if my packets have to go around the world eight times to ge
t
to point B, but if I don't know where point B is, I'm not going to sen
d
any packets in the first place. For instance, can you name an archive
site for comp.sources.3b1 off the top of your head? As a new Internet
user, would you know by instinct where to look to find that
information? Probably not (and if so, just replace that example with
something else.) The point isn't to have a physical map of the
infrastructure -- after all, once that's installed and working, it
should be invisible to end-users. The point is to compile a list of
what's where on the net, so that people can get to all the wonderful
resources that are out there.
-Steve
