[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 48, Issue 13

[Dave Crocker]

On 11/28/2023 2:20 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> Agreed. I've often wondered what the ratio is between "inventions" 
> which introduced new concepts and those which just applied old 
> concepts using a new technology.

I'll take exception to the 'just'.  Sometimes the use of a new tech 
warrants the 'just'.  Others are hugely innovative.

Also, I now realize I earlier left off a distinction I usually promote, 
between creation of component technology and integration of components 
into a new service.  Anonymous FTP was operationally the start of the 
distributed web, albeit with impressively bad UX design.  And the WWW is 
claimed to have created no component functionality (or, I've heard, 
maybe only one), but as systems design innovation, it got a wonderful 
balance between functionality and usability.  There should be no 'just' 
about such achievements.

(I'm harping on the just not as a criticism of your use, but of that use 
being quite common.)


> Another interesting comparison over a timeline would be the economics 
> aspects of communications.  Every mechanism I know about over history 
> has had some incremental "cost" to the sender of data. It cost you 
> something to communicate.  Telegrams cost money to send.  Scrolls 
> consumed the time of your ships and couriers, and your slaves to do 
> the copying, instead of tending the herds and crops.

As I recall, when I was growing up, local phone calls in US urban 
environs carried no incremental charge.


> Until the Internet... where I can send as much data as I want, at no 
> additional cost to me.   Or as many emails as I like, with no 
> difference in my communications bill.  Maybe we missed an important 
> part of the concept? 

Scale and scope of the all-you-can-eat benefit certainly was/is unique.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social