When I contemplate “how do we get to the best possible future of the Internet,” I am thinking more in terms of inaction than action. I would like to encourage deliberate inaction in the form of keeping hands-off. I would like large companies or national governments to look at the Internet and say “This is pretty cool, and if we put our hands on it and try to make it what is gonna be best for us in our lifetimes, it’s going to cause everyone else to do likewise.”
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Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. This is Geek of the Week and we’re talking today with Bob Hinton, who’s manager of Internet engineering at Sun Microsystems. That’s the group that comes up with the TCP/IP code that’s in your SPARCstation. He’s also the Area Director of routing for the Internet Engineering …read the full transcript.
The hard part was that everything was new at the same time. There was new hardware. There were new protocols. There was a new implementation of protocols in the operating system. It was actually difficult to figure out how to build protocol software in the operating systems. We had new applications. Things that…you have to understand at the time people didn’t use networks. So everything was being done at the same time.
Part of my networking experience as I grew as a networking person, and Internet person, people would come up and say, “Well what was it like to be a woman in a men’s field?” And I’ve gotta compliment the Merit folks who hired the NSFNET staff. They were gender-blind.
The people that invented Ethernet did a real good thing. Ethernet is good technology. But they did a really bad thing because they called it a net. And they shouldn’t have called it Ethernet, they should’ve called it “Etherlink.”