Re: cause for concern... Good Weekend letter

Roland John Turner (rjturner@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au)
Wed, 20 Dec 1995 09:59:40 +1100 (EST)

Joshua Graham Pitcher wrote:

> Something just occurred to me. Why does (virtually) every piece of useful
> computer technology inverted over the last 20 years get used for
> something other that what it was intended for?

Boffins and entrepreneurs (sp?) have rather different world views...

> The IBM PC: A quick hack for IBM employees now the mainstream architecture in
> home computing.

Ahh, not exactly. IBM saw lots of money starting to flow into home PCs and saw
them as a marketing foothold. Admittedly, it is unlikely that IBM's wildest
dreams came close to matching what actually occurred.

> The Internet: Designed to withstand nuclear strikes, but will it withstand
> Bill Gates , every family in the world and a finite
> time-to-live (TTL) field??

Sorry to get my back up here, but the net was NOT designed to withstand nuclear
strikes. This is an absurd rationilisation that some idiot journo came up with
years ago because of the Internet's beginnings in DARPA and DARPA's military
affiliation. TCP/IP was NOT designed to be a military grade data delivery
protocol, it was intended to be a means for researchers (i.e. NOT soldiers)
to talk to each other. X.25 is (perhaps) a little closer to military thinking.

> JOSH'S POSTULATE (TM):
>
> "That all computing technology will eventually be used for a purpose other
> than what it was origionally intended for."

In fact, all technology?

- Raz