[ih] XEROX/PUP and Commercialization (was Re: FYI - Gordon Crovitz/WSJ on "Who Really Invented the Internet?")

[John Day]

O, gawd, yes.  On the day that contract was awarded, I predicted 
Western Union would crash and burn.

It did, but sooner would have been better.

Those were the days, when CSC produced a copy of the ARPANET that was 
7 times slower.  Given a working example, I still don't understand 
how they accomplished that!

And they thought that opening a connection to send mail was too much 
trouble.  They would just end it on the NCP control link!   Arrrgh! 
It was hard to imagine how much dumber it could have been.  Jack 
Benoit from MITRE said he held his breath and stamped his feet on 
that one so they changed the title of the document to Functional 
Specification of NCP to Non-Functional Specification of NCP.  I kid 
you not!

At 7:20 -0700 2012/07/30, Dave Crocker wrote:
>On 7/30/2012 6:51 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:
>>Actually, wasn't it less than that: if I remember correctly AutoDIN-II
>>was first awarded to Western Union.  BBN's proposal [for an ARPAnet-like
>>network] lost.  I wasn't involved with what happened, but that all fell
>>apart or never worked or something and they ended up re-awarding the
>>contract.
>
>
>As I recall, Western Union did a fresh, cumbersome system that would 
>have had relatively few super-nodes around the country and the 
>design was so bad it needed to be kills.  The decision was to 
>'accept' the work, declare it done, and then drop it in favor of a 
>replicated Arpanet technology from BBN.
>
>d/
>
>--
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net