[8308] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A reply to Steve Wolff re innuendo and policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hans-Werner Braun)
Sat Nov 13 12:10:23 1993
From: hwb@upeksa.sdsc.edu (Hans-Werner Braun)
To: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 93 9:08:35 PST
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9311130637.aa25685@pandora.sf.ca.us>; from "Gordon Cook" at Nov 13, 93 6:37 am
>PS. I know very well that mike nelson is with jack gibbons at ostp. I knew
>Mike in his capacity on the senate commerce committee. I don't know who his
>replacement is. But I do know that he shares the mind set that I am critcizing
>here. Why? one indication - after I had turned in my keys at OTA on feb 28,
>1992, I went to see Mike and told him that I had serious concerns about the
>direction of IBM and ANS and pointed out in particular that the backbone had
>serious problems. He was offended and said he didn't think it fair for me to be
>critical of IBM when that company's cost sharing had saved the US taxpayer 10s
>of millions of dollars on the NSFnet. I didn't have a good answer for him then.
>But as you know I went looking for the cost sharing and found virtually
>NONE....unless you are to count the money spent by IBM to develop routers that
>they had to develop anyway for reasons other than the MERIT CA - routers that
>have been poor performers, and under a **contract** could presumably have been
>replaced by boxes that *do* perform.
Gordon:
As a fair person I assume you meant to be expliticit about this, but
just forgot to say that you are only talking about the post-T1
services. For the T1 backbone network between 1988 and when it got
dismantled in late 1992 (actually, since 1987, if you include proposal
writing and planning and development), to the best of my knowledge IBM
had not received any money out of the NSF cooperative agreement for the
tremendous amount of resources (certainly relative to the backbone
project) they made available. Including staff, all the routers, two
mainframes for NOC and Information Services, maintenance, continued
development, and everything else it took them to participate in the
project partnership. They deserve alot of credit. IBM also did an
industry survey for T3 nodes back before the RS6k based solution was
put in place, with a stong consideration for rather using outside
products, had they been available and performed in a rather complex
environment (including advanced routing functionality at the packet
level, not just T3 switching). IBM, even within the project
partnership, did not make the RS6k decision lightly.
They also do not defend themselves lightly, particularly on some
mailing lists where it is so easy to jump on them, based on a view
from late-1993.
In my experience, certainly when I was working on that stuff, IBM
consistently had the best in mind for the NSFNET and the community, as
long as it was doable. They contributed many more things than initially
planned for, as they became needed to the project, and were a pleasure
to work with, and totally integral to the partnership. I was impressed
and surprised, as I had not expected that, particularly from such big
industry as IBM. Please give them a little more credit.
Hans-Werner
