[555] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Schools, et al
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Lloyd)
Fri Apr 5 13:44:15 1991
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 91 10:40:16 PST
From: Brian Lloyd <brian@napa.telebit.COM>
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Dan Schlitt's message of Fri, 5 Apr 91 09:25:16 -0500 <9104051425.AA15698@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
Reply-To: brian@napa.telebit.COM
Here at Telebit I have been doing what I can to support
telecommunications to the primary and secondary schools. I have
managed to get hardware donated to some schools for special projects.
Unfortunately I cannot provide free hardware to all the worthy schools
(as much as I would like to). I have done what I can to provide less
expensive tools to provide access into whatever network comes along
(connecting the primary and secondary schools to the Internet is one
of the prime applications I had in mind when I set out to design the
NetBlazer).
I think that this discussion is getting a bit out of hand for this
mailing list. Providing network services to educational facilities is
probably more in line with a discussion of the public sector rather
than this group which is oriented to commercialization and
privatization of internetworking.
Hey folks, most schools can't afford networking right now. The point
made in a previous posting about necessary infrastructure was well
taken. Most schools do not have the resources, neither money nor
people with the requisite knowledge, to administer a network. These
are not problems that we can solve with our discussion here.
Now there is something that people can do at a grass roots level.
Donate time and discarded hardware to the school of your choice (the
hardware doesn't cut it if you can't spend the time to help someone in
the school learn how to use it). A PC running KA9Q with SLIP can
serve as a dirt-cheap router if you can talk someone into letting you
have SLIP access to their POP. A bunch of PCs may be chained together
with SLIP links using one PC as a central router. This is something
that can be done at a price that the schools can afford but they can't
do it by themselves.
Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN Telebit Corporation
Network Systems Architect 1315 Chesapeake Terrace
brian@napa.telebit.com Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1100
voice (408) 745-3103 FAX (408) 734-3333
