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"old" because it's trite and wrong, just like Al Gore's claim to fathering the internet.
Building networks among computers is intuitively obvious shortly after computers came into being. Even the punch-card computers of the 1930's had their own information exchange networks. Licklider's time-sharing computer network idea is actually the exact opposite of the distributed computing model that has made Internet (and APARNET before it) such a success. Licklider's time-sharing computer network was meant for centralized processing power to be shared among various terminals, not the distributed computing model. Internet (and APARNET) was made possible by the invention of packet-switching network, which enables the massive exponential scaling of the network carried out without any interruption to existing users. Packet switching was first developed at the RAND Corporation, by Paul Baran.
Just because the government put up the money to build a large network based on Baran's idea, doesn't mean government men like Licklider were the inventors. They were scalers based on other people's innovation. Due to their government monopoly nature, they were not particularly efficient scalers either (although being DARPA, probably more efficient than most other government agencies). To start off, they put up gobs of money to build the initial network before technology was mature enough to enable the network building on a commercially viable setting. Then, what you call "efficient" was actually 30 years of little change, from the early 60's to the early 90's, as ARPANET stayed in the 8-bit address space serving a few dozen government-sponsored institutions. The internet did not reach the masses until 30+ years after ARPANET went live. By contrast, both landline telephone and cell phone technologies reached the consumers and were made available to the millions in much much shorter time frame . . . on the order of 10 years instead of 30-40 years.
Competing standards / conventions is simply indicative of how fast the technology was/is being developed. If telephone industry had been left in government hands, indeed you wouldn't have firehouse needing multiple phone lines, the firehouse would be the only place in the neighborhood that has a phone! just like how land-line phone was like in countries like India and other 3rd world countries where red-tapes curtailed development before the cellphone revolution. Government regulations on landlines was actually what enabled the AT&T monopoly then land line stagnation (high price and low service quality) for decades.
posted by 24.91.39...
, Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:20:06
, Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:33:51
, Sat, 9 Jul 2011 13:06:57
, Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:40:16, Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:27:51, Fri, 8 Jul 2011 14:20:12
, Fri, 8 Jul 2011 09:26:41
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