[2263] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Low end users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU)
Mon Feb 3 14:26:15 1992
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 92 13:03:13 EST
From: drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9201302230.AA00461@world.std.com> "bzs@world.std.com"
In among a whole bunch of good points:
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
A good example of this: Right now a 1GB disk is under $2k.
Go survey centralized academic systems and ask what it would
take to get 1GB of disk, for your personal use, on their
centralized system.
I think you're being a bit unfair here. A disk may cost $2k to buy,
but it costs a lot more to operate. Even customerization can't fix
that -- If I remember correctly, if I used 1GB on World, I'd have to
pay $5k per *month* to rent the space. That's not unreasonable,
because most of that cost goes into system management services that
are invisible (until I want to use them and don't get them). A
centralized academic system can't do any better.
On a more general note, it seems that the biggest barrier to
networking the world is all of the support that the present systems
need. Like autos in the 1920's, you have to be a part-time specialist
(or hire one) to be able to use a network. The auto industry has
managed to make nearly maintenance-free cars, and PCs are nearly
maintenance-free computers. In both cases, the number of users went
up by an order of magnitude once ordinary people could use them, and
didn't have to hire a specialist to operate them. The next step is
maintenance-free networking.
Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw@math.mit.edu
--
Lisp in action is like a finely choreographed ballet.
Ada in action is like a waltz of drugged elephants.
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