Nortel: Where the trouble began

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Michael Slavitch <slavitch () gmail com>
Date: January 15, 2009 10:39:05 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Nortel: Where the trouble began

Dave;

For IP, if you wish.

I can now feel free to say that the company in question in this past
thread was Nortel's research arm Bell-Northern Research.

BNR not only ignored the Internet, their leadership was actively
hostile towards it as it was a threat to OSI.

Regards

Michael

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Michael Slavitch" <slavitch () gmail com>
Date: August 19, 2008 10:20:21 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet

I was at a seminar in the early 1990's put on by a CERN researcher
named Tim Berners-Lee. HTTP was at such an early stage that the
demonstration required someone's borrowed NeXT workstation and the
core group that remained could sit at a table for eight at a Malaysian
restaurant.  The original group was somewhat larger. Sadly a C level
of a then major telecoms vendor was there and demanded to know if http
was an ISO standard.  Tim Berners-Lee of course said "no" in the
rather obvious and dismissive tone.

That C-level then stood up and angrily said "well, in that case I am
most definitely not interested!" and stormed out. Considering that
2/3rds of the people there either worked for him (or as grad students,
wanted to) the audience became quite small, and that major vendor
became wilfully obstinate as a matter of policy.  It blocked http
access for its employees.    It ignored the impact and the potential
for the rest of the decade until that C was fired along with nearly
all the staff that attended and left that seminar. It remains a hollow
shell.

TBL indeed considered HTTP an open standards based response to the
atrocious and restrictive Gopher protocol.  He did what so many people
at CERN do, when confronted with a restrictive inferior particle
annihilate it with the biggest blast possible.   As a consequence he
also destroyed several  companies who were so intent on comfortably
fighting their well ordered 100 year war that they refused to even
consider a sliver of change.

Michael Slavitch
Ottawa Ontario Canada




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