[asterisk-users] "Happy Birthday Asterisk"

[Philip Prindeville]

Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Friday 07 December 2007 09:56:56 Bill Andersen wrote:
>   
>> Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>     
>>> So I'd venture to say that by August, the Internet will really be *30*
>>> years old.
>>>       
>> As Al Gore was born in 1948, I can see that the Internet could be as old
>> as 30, but not much more.  35 years ago would put him at 25 years old.
>> And inventing the whole Internet at 25 is pretty ambicious, even for Al!
>>     
>
> In actuality, most people produce all of the great inventions of their life by
> the time they hit 30.  Einstein, for one, produced his great theory of
> relativity at the ripe old age of 26.  Mark Spencer came up with Asterisk at
> age 22.  So this idea that 25 is too young to produce a great achievement
> is baloney.
>
> BTW, Al Gore was credited with introducing the legislation that permitted
> commercial organizations onto the network that would become known as
> the Internet.  So in a way, he did create the Internet, by changing the
> circumstances you would have to have in order to access this decentralized
> computer network.  If you doubt the importance of having commercial
> organizations on the network, consider where the Internet would be, if
> Amazon, eBay, and Linux Support Services (d/b/a Digium) had never been
> allowed onto the network.
>   

Let's give credit where it's due:  a lot of people in Washington were 
being lobbied by
Bill Shrader, Vint Cerf, and Dave Van Bellengem (sp?) to be honest.  All 
people
like Senator Gore did was carry their water.

The argument being put forward was that various groups (like SRI, Rand, 
Mitre,
etc) would get onto ARPAnet because they had been awarded a DARPA or
DISA or DMA contract...  as would other vendors (like Boeing or Wellfleet or
Raytheon...).

Since SRI, Rand, Mitre, etc. would have a constant stream of contracts in
progress, their ARPAnet access never went away.

Others, like the latter group, would get their access yanked when their 
contracts
ended (or got suspended while DoD budgets languished in Congress).

Their argument was that such collaboration with other companies and 
universities
would continue after contracts were completed, and that the Internet was a
powerful collaboration tool (duh!)... ergo a permanent Internet was 
needed, even
if the users had to pay for it themselves (rather than it being a perk 
of getting a
DARPA contract).

Even small companies (like FTP Software, who I was working for at the time),
could benefit from being able to ship new binaries to government agencies or
other partners on government contract (like HP, who we were writing a DOS
TCP/IP stack for with a Sockets API...  sound familiar?).

In some ways, these were dark days:  the future was very uncertain.

On the other hand, we didn't have spam.  ;-)

-Philip