[GreenKeys] Re: The Internet and the Information Age

[Phil Schelinski]

One of the companies I had invested in that became a victim of the DOT COM bust was led by Engineer Lawrence Roberts --one of the fathers of peer to peer networking.
This was in the days when IBM's SNA was considered the leader in business and government computing.
When Mainframes began to lose favor IBM pushed Token Ring and did everything they could to stop Ethernet from growing.
I recall an internal fight in Illinois Bell over the use of UNIX for business applications since IBM was offering great deals on SNA hardware and software.
(remember the DUMB TERMINAL ?)
Then IBM started to cave in, offering AIX in North America, but not until they had no choice as their AIX products were doing great business in Europe and Asia.
 
Remember the CEO from DEC that led his company into bankruptcy over a patent fight ?
DEC owned the phone companies and universities .
I believe the world famous use of the Spanning Tree protocol was developed by a young female DEC software engineer.
 
Next up is the acceptance of Voice over IP --who will survive the next paradigm shift ?
 
phil 

Don Robert House <drhouse at mchsi.com> wrote:
The Internet was first deployed as a way for academics and government 
researchers to communicate. I imagine Tim Berners-Lee had little 
idea what a colossus it would become.

Any of you interested in those responsible for our "Information Age", 
you should read "Leaders of the Information Age", edited by David 
Weil (our esteemed director) and published by the H.W. Wilson 
Company. It is available direct from H.W. Wilson, or on Amazon.Com, 
as well as your library. I have enjoyed my copy very much.

http://www.hwwilson.com/print/leaders_info.cfm

Best regards,
Don
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