[e2e] It's all my fault

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Vadim Antonov <avg at kotovnik.com>

    > the division between engineers who design and build things which make
    > economic sense and academics who think of pure Platonic technology
    > existing in economic vacuum. ... network engineers do have to deal with
    > the spillover of bad ideas from academia
    > ...
    > *Build* something. To do that you need way more than a neat idea - you
    > need capital, you need business plan, you need customers who actually
    > wish to buy the product.
    > ...
    > Or you may convince some bureaucrats in DC to give you lots of money
    > they have taken from us under the threat of jailtime and violence so
    > you can play with your pet idea. A lot of people resent that, you know?

Vadim, you ought to consider that all this neat packet networking stuff only
exists now because for many years (during Baran's first RAND work ca. 1960-64,
then during the ARPANet development in the late 60's-early-70's, and then the
early internetwork work in the 1975-1982 time-frame) this stuff was all funded
by "bureaucrats in DC".

There was *no* commercial market for any of this stuff back then, so there
was no other way to make it happen. (A fact of which I am well aware, because
I was one of the first people - maybe the first, actually - to make money
selling IP routers commercially - and that was in 1984 or so, almost 10 years
after the bureacrats starting putting money into TCP/IP.)


In fact, to add a nice topping of irony, many commercial communications people
of the day (circa 1980) said much the same things about TCP/IP (which you seem
to like) that you are now saying about other efforts: I distinctly recall the
TCP/IP people being told to "roll up our toy academic network" (and yes, they
explicitly and definitely used the work "academic") and go home.

So you might want to remember that when you dump on these new "academic"
ideas.

	Noel