[2330] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Hughes)
Fri Feb 14 13:55:44 1992
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1992 11:54:40 -0700
From: Dave Hughes <daveh@csn.org>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Bob Horvitz is in Prague, and announced the opening of the Internet
by telneting into the Well. Then left a later message summing up
what was told to the packed-auditorium audience, in English. This
is just an extract
----------------
Anyway...
The US National Science Foundation is making it possible for
Czechoslovakia to offer free Internet access to any college student or
faculty member who wants one, by covering the cost of a leased line
connecting Prague to Linz, Austria. The French informatics center
called INRIA helped with the hardware and software setup, though the
small hard-working group running CSEARN did most of the work and the
universities provide the terminals.
NSF's Steve Goldstein gave an excellent summary of the Internet's past,
present and future. His viewgraphs showed its exponential growth -
literally exponential, as demonstrated in one of the charts. Some
datapoints:
Date Connected hosts
8/81 213
10/85 1,961
12/87 28,174
1/89 80,000
1/91 376,000
1/92 727,000
Thirty-eight countries are now reachable with interactive services like
telnet and anon-ftp, 50+ countries are reachable by email.
---------
Who is Steve Goldstein?
And can I quote that 727,000 host number as the official count by the
NSF? After all the press keeps asking me lots of questions these days
and I wouldn't want to misquote anyone who is so sensitive about their
institutional image. :-)
In another comment a Dutchman pointed out 130,000 of those hosts
are in Europe, 30,000 in Germany, growing the fastest, 4,000
new hosts in the last 3 months.
And of course there are 'dial up' ports in Prague, one of which Bob
tried to use from his apartment. Only problem was that shareware
Procomm terminal program from his laptop needed some VT100 codes
re-mapped to interface with the node correctly and he is not
programmer enough to correct it. But some Czech kid probably will -
or has - while I am typing this.
All I would have to do is to netmail direct dialup one of those six
Fidos (running 9600 baud V32 modems) in a Musicians net in Prague,
running on Atari's (so they use MIDI), and transfer a copy of freeware
Ufgate to make a bridge between any low end Fido in Czechoslovakia, the
Internet, and the rest of the world - and every Czech kid could get on
the net and learn the things that might save the world from the
old-minded farts that run it now.
Maybe I should go to Europe and get all their K-12 kids hooked up,
courtesy of the international arm of the NSF, and when some US
Policy maker sees how fast, easy, cooperatively, and cheap that is, that
he says on the floor of Congress "Gee, if Czechoslovakia can do it,
why can't we?"
Mao was right. Start revolutions in the countryside...
