Abstract
The year 1995 was the start of miraculous growth for the Internet. At one point, the UUNET network reported that its traffic was doubling every 3 months; it was in part foolish extrapolation from this that led to the speculative bubble known as dot.com and, eventually, to the collapse of Worldcom and others. In September 1995, the Cook Report on the Internet, the original online tech journal, wrote that ‘Some of the top tier providers of the Internet have become very interested in business models’. What an extraordinary statement that seems today! Previously, they simply hadn’t seen the Internet as a place for doing business – it existed only to assist the academic and research community.
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Notes
- 1.
A neologism that I cannot defend, referring to a layer of software between the applications and the operating system.
- 2.
Baran’s death was announced during the IETF’s 25th anniversary meeting in March 2011. His design principles were even more spectacularly vindicated by the Internet’s rapid recovery after the disastrous Japanese earthquake and tsunami a few days later.
- 3.
I was once on an IETF-related conference call where one participant told another to ‘f*** off and die’ but this really was exceptional.
- 4.
He uses text-to-speech software and an earpiece plugged into his laptop computer.
- 5.
By the way, what are you supposed to do with a heavy wood-framed engraved crystal plaque when your baggage is already stuffed full?
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag London
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Carpenter, B.E. (2013). The Years of Miraculous Growth. In: Network Geeks. Copernicus, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5025-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5025-1_10
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