[ih] FTP Design

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com>

    > to explain *why* someone came up with an idea or why a particular idea
    > was adopted -- when, as Paul points out, the idea was so obviously
    > right that, once found, voila!

Not really your point (if I understand it correctly), but an observation:
many brilliant ideas are obvious in retrospect - so if they were so obviously
right, why did it take so long to come up with them?

Good examples: Newton's Laws of Motion, or the WWW. (I look back on all the
work on Archie, Gopher, WAIS, etc, etc and think 'Goodness gracious, how was
it not obvious to us that we needed the WWW (with explicit links in
documentation)?' There were a lot of smart people working on the Internet at
that stage, but nobody saw it.) There's another Internet-related example I've
thought about before, but I can't remember it right now.

	Noel