[8688] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: future needs of the internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Tue Nov 30 16:53:58 1993
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1993 15:51:55 -0600 (CST)
From: Sean Donelan <SEAN@sdg.dra.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
> My question is - How many terminals do you all think will be needed at
> next year's meeting, taking into account growth of the net use by
> private and academic physicians and by the pending boom in
> teleradiology. I'm betting forty.
At last summer's American Library Assocation summer convention, the
Internet room had about 30 terminals (23 PC's and 7 Mac's I believe).
It was open 24-hours a day, although only staffed during the daytime
hours.
On the show floor we had about 9 different vendors (several of which are
"competitors") sharing DRA's T-1 line back to the Internet. There were
also a couple of other vendors that had SLIP connections back to their home
offices. It was more a less a success. For example, one of the regionals
decided to do a little maintenance on Saturday afternoon wiping out
Library of Congress's connection. And we had a repeater problem on the
local ethernet (just your standard 1,600 foot convention hall). But most
of the folks seemed happy most of the time. Since we didn't want there
to even be an appearance of us looking at other vendors' network traffic,
we didn't bring any sniffers or the like to the show. You try debugging
a network without any monitoring equipment.
The New Orleans convention center and local phone company seemed positively
blaise about it. They got the T-1 in on Thursday, and the convention center
ethernet was wired and running by about noon on Friday. The convention
center staff did a good job of wiring and terminating all the cable to the
various booths. All we had to do was plug it in.
A few years ago in San Antonio, it was a completely different story. Back
then it seemed to be a rather novel concept to AT&T and Southwestern Bell
that anyone would even want a T-1 connection in the San Antonio convention
center for 5 days. And when the convention center asked where we wanted
our "cable-tv" wire (aka thinwire ethernet) I knew we were in trouble.
For the mid-winter meeting in L.A., ALA want's us to do the same thing.
Does anyone have a good pair of rollerblades, or maybe SPRINT would
like to show-off that new 45mb network with a donation to ALA :-).
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Domain: sean@dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100
