Linux and growth of Internet

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Fri Jan 14 17:06:42 2005

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> Yep. Once TCP/IP really took off, the rest, as they say, was history.

But the precursor to all of that was the fact that it stopped
being government funded; only non-commercial uses were allowed.

(In 1992, you had to have some awareness of what was allowed;
.com could use .edu (as an example) network resources IFF
it was directly related to .edu work; .com could do anything with
.com, and .edu anything with .edu. The .edu::.com relationship
was what required finesse.

By removing all gov't money sources and releasing from contracts
etc it was commercializable. A few were there from the start and
knew it, Alternet/UUnet, PSI, and others. A few, like Stanford's
BARRnet, had no clue of their own and resisted it when he tripped
over it.

It's also simply *NOT TRUE* that industry created the internet,
like many of them fabricate; it was quite well developed loooong
before business got there. As aDARPA project, funded off to one
side, it was allowed to develop technically and, it turns out
critically, culturally.

My friend Paulina Borsook wrote about this in her excellent but
bit-the-hand-that-fed book CYBERSELFISH. Industry doesn't like
social or cultural critique, turns out.

(I'm just being an asshole, Paulina knew precisely what she was
doing.)
Received on Fri Jan 14 2005 - 17:06:42 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:37:44 BST