[ih] Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan

[galmes at tamu.edu (Guy Almes)]

Alex,
   I was UW Computer Science during the time period he writes of and I 
was not aware of him.  But, myopia aside, his story rings true with me 
for several reasons.
   First, whatever the reason was, the fact that NSF funded and (more or 
less) organized an effort to connect all the US universities to the 
(NSFnet) Internet was clearly of huge importance to the growth of the 
Internet.
   Second, the specific driver, enabling effective remote access to the 
five or so centers from the 200 or so research universities, was both a 
demanding application and one that gave the NSF a defensible reason for 
funding and organizing the NSFnet effort.
   Third, that remote supercomputer application presented a clear 
motivation for much higher end-to-end capacity that the ARPAnet-based 
Internet that existed in 1984.  In short, moving gigabyte files 
motivated T1 performance levels.
   Fourth, this story helps one understand the substantive ways in which 
Sen. Gore's efforts made a difference.

   	-- Guy

On 1/5/13 5:38 PM, Alex McKenzie wrote:
> http://www.analogsf.com/2013_03/altview.shtml