[ih] FTP Design

[John Day]

>
>
>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.

Well, partially agree.  www and Englebart had done a full hypertext 
system 20 years before and it was very neat.

Newton.  Parts of Newton are very counter-intuitive.  Aristotle said 
that when you quit pushing on something it stopped.  Galileo said, no 
it will continue on forever unless acted on. (Newton's first law). 
To people at the time it sounded ludicrous.  It was obvious that when 
you stopped pushing something it stopped.  Of course, it is a change 
of perspective of what is pushing.

That we find it obvious is just our brain-washing.  ;-)  A study 
reported in Scientific American many years ago found that most people 
were still working with Aristotelean physics.  Intuition dies hard. 
In fact, I would contend that the reason we have science is that 
human intuition is not that good! ;-)  We are wrong more often than 
not!  ;-)