Arpa address 3480

The decade of the ARPAnet was nothing short of amazing. IMPs meant a lot. They were coveted. After 6-7 years, UCSB administration dropped our connection. They have been paying for that mistake for decades. I wonder who got our IMP? Well I know who to ask but its water under the bridge. $100K-year was seen as too much. Thats brick and mortar scientists and liberal artists. A couple of fine firms came out of it.

I need to find another IMP for the Smithsonian. So anyone reading, the Nation will give your old hardware a good home.

He means the IBM VNET.

In some ways I have seen some impressive VNET demos at the old IBM-SJ, but the old punch card mainframe business mentality still cripples IBM (I have seen recent IBM documents admitting late mistakes like Linux). You can see this in Lynn, and they way he can't understand that communication take 2 to communicate (a phone company attribute) for security.

I think the hardware company which deserves credit for putting us where we are was DEC.

Lynn's problem in this is that he had access to fairly good resources in his part of IBM. Other friends in IBM had to weigh net access for what they did and didn't see the value of access.

IBM placed more value in cute demos and Lotus notes than what the outside world which pbutted some of it away. Microsoft has learned from some of this; some other firms have benefitted from IBM's bureaucracy.

But the future belongs to small nimble companies. The big firms will only continue to "validate."

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