John Gilmore on -- CSNET receives 2009 ISOC POSTEL AWARD

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
Date: August 1, 2009 9:23:17 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>

Congratulations, Dave!  It's not too often that the CSNET piece of
history gets publicly remembered.  Indeed I learned more about it from
your email than I knew at the time.  Being a non-academic, it never
really touched me; I went straight from mainframe APL time-sharing, to
a Tourist account at MIT-AI (accessed via a secret hookup at BBN
between Telenet and ARPAnet), to microcomputer BBS's, to workstation
Ethernets at Sun with UUCP/Usenet wide area connectivity, to UUNET's
uucp service and then to Alternet and building my own regional
cooperative ISP.  From that perspective, CSNET seemed like a niche,
sort of like BITnet; one of those odd kinds of addresses you'd
sometimes see in emails, but not something you'd ever want to (or be
allowed to) join.

It's kind of a backhanded compliment to say that CSNET was influential
because it convinced a government agency to fund NSFNET.  Kinda puts
it on par with those railroad moguls who spent $75,000 in the 1800's
to convince Congress to give them millions in free rights-of-way.
More to the point, the social and economic and technical process of
making CSNET educated a lot of people in the traditional Computer
Science community (1) what value peer to peer networks created, (2)
why that value made it worth paying for it yourself, and (3) how to  
create
such a network yourself.  And THAT would have led to the Internet,
whether or not NSF ever bought T1 lines to enable teenage hackers to
explore.




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