gwion
wild colonial boy
Premium,ExMod 2001-08
join:2000-12-28
Pittsburgh, PA
| ... welcome to DARPAnet II ? - a reprise:
... ca. 1963 or 4, height of the cold war, a group of academics was discussing a very similar idea with DARPA, the defense advanced research projects agency... a few years later, BBNplanet installed the very first router on the "internet", and made a computer talk to another computer... but for a project that sounded virtually identical to this, we wouldn't be holding this discussion, right now... Funny... 
In a serious vein, why should sensitive channels of communication be placed in an inherently insecure, shared public network, anyway? We don't have an extranet, yet? That's what surprises me.... and look what that seed planted in the late sixties became? Who believed, then, that it would follow the direction it has, and become what it's become? Heck, the top people in the industry thought the idea of even a basic computer in the home would be exhorbitantly expensive, useless and the stuff of Sci-Fi ... much less that connection to the internet would ever be a realistic practical option...
No, the internet, itself, wasn't designed "for us." Let's never, ever make that mistake. It was designed for the "military industrial complex", and for academia, as a redundant, durable network to provide dependable real time computing collaboration and communications... that we found it so useful is just a happy coincidence. Nobody ever believed it would happen, back then...
You never know where the next gold strike might be.
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Well, if I knew it wasn't going to work, I would have tested it sooner. |
