[94] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
An anecdote, possibly telling...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Nov 11 12:43:35 1990
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 12:31:02 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: com-priv@psi.com
When I was at Boston University a BU faculty member asked me if I
could meet with himself and another researcher at MIT about a grant
proposal (an extension of an active, federal grant) they were working
on jointly.
The issue was that they were analyzing LANDSAT data. Raw data was
being massaged at MIT and further processing was being done at BU (and
possibly Harvard, if memory serves me, but they weren't at the
meeting.)
They had developed an X-windows based interface to do the graphical
editing at BU against the data at MIT. What they wanted to know was
"could they actually propose to do this?" Would it work (apparently
they hadn't yet ever tried to run X across the net, I guess they were
FTP'ing the data files back to BU and this was tedious and caused
extra work ensuring their local copies of these files were in sync.)
I told them that to try this was trivial, I asked them to login from
my workstation in my office, I set the DISPLAY variable and fired up
their X-based editor. Oooh/Ahhh, etc. Response was more than
acceptable in their view. The problem was solved, they just never knew
how to do this to try it out themselves. They'd go write their
proposal (this was the operational structure they had wanted to be
able to describe for their research, it affected specifics like how
much disk etc they would need at each location.)
I related the story (I saw it as one of those nice no-brainer
successes with the technology) to a few other managers in the
Information Technology group in a meeting. To my surprise, I was met
with a fair amount of anger.
"That will *kill* our network thruput", "You go back and tell them to
put a private link into that proposal", etc. I asked if anyone in the
room could identify, other than perhaps general e-mail between
colleagues, another use of the research internet from this campus
which was legitimately competing for bandwidth? Something else
bona-fide which could be used as an example of where the competition
for resources lie?
Frankly, I was personally aware of most everything in computing and
networking which was going on on the campus, that was my job. I was
fairly sure this was quite unique (without stretching examples). The
question was more or less loaded, although I felt if some other group
could be identified perhaps some cost-sharing could be proposed.
"That isn't the point!", etc. I went and suggested they consider
writing in a private network link and worked up prices for them.
Needless to say, they seemed confused.
So what's the problem here?
The problem was that the first person who came along with a bona-fide
use of the network's research potential had to be shot.
That same group has just recently ordered a private (to the dept)
network link elsewhere for similar purposes (imaging data.) So the
govt gets to pay for it twice.
What's wrong with this picture?
-Barry Shein
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