Carl Malamud

“ I gently tried to make the point that there were positive aspects to this project that should not be overlooked, such as increasing the public awareness of the vital work that groups like ISO were undertaking by making primary resource documents available to a wider audience.
Once again, my diplomatic efforts seemed less than successful. "People don't need to read the standards," Dr. Zakharov snapped. Indeed, he felt that ISO standards were basically unreadable and that normal people shouldn't even bother to try. ”

“ My only hope was that I might be able to use this data to justify an increase in my consulting rates.
As I was going to sleep, I tried to figure out how bad a case of bureausclerosis one would have to have to in order to turn a 20 day (40 to make it perfect) conversion effort into 10 years of agony. Over the next few months, as I visited Geneva again and saw the experiment run into the famed international bureaucracy, I was to learn how it could easily take 10 years, or, more likely, never get done at all. ”

“ One of the original marketing managers for the French Minitel system, he is active in efforts to spread this underrated technology into the U.S.
When you get a telephone, France Telecom gives you the choice of a phonebook or a computer terminal. As a result, over 3 million people have, free of charge, one of the squat brown Minitel terminals in their home. Of these 3 million terminals, France Telecom estimates 80 percent are actually used. Even if the number is inflated, this was still, until very recently, the largest single network in the world. ”

“ This lack of computer literacy at the ITU was what made Tony Rutkowski such an odd duck. When he came to Geneva he saw that none of the international bureaucracies had Internet hookups. So, Tony did what any self respecting technocrat would do and called up the nearest Internet provider, in this case the CERN physics laboratory, and asked for a guest account. Several years later, Tony was still the only ITU employee with access to the Internet. ”

“ You can't publish a newspaper and then unpublish it. Once you give something away, it stays given away.
The lack of valid copyright protection is one argument for making standards more widely available, but there is a much more important one. ”

“ Modern documents, such as the new X.800 recommendations, were being produced in Microsoft Word for Windows. My second batch of tapes had all the files that were available in the Word for Windows format, the new ITU publishing standard.
To do the conversion, I was quite lucky to be working with Sun Microsystems on a research grant. They had sent over two large servers for a research program I was participating in and graciously agreed to allow us to use one server to post standards on the network. Without their help, we wouldn't have had the resources to do anything. ”

“ A service like Minitel does no good if there is no access path to it. Likewise, an X.25 network is a road to nowhere without useful services on it.
Minitel was a case study in providing useful information services. By the beginning of 1990, Minitel had over 12,000 service providers. Even intra-company transactions, incuding banking, insurance, and order processing, occurred on the network. The directory service alone received well over 10 million calls per day and train reservations received over 1.5 million calls per day. ”

“ Do the people in charge of the Internet know about your efforts?"
He seemed convinced that when some appropriate official learned that I would be distributing documents—"with graphics, no less"—on the network, my renegade activities would be quickly stopped.
(Let's put this into perspective. The NSFNET backbone transfers well over 14 billion packets per month. Even if my server was wildly popular, the backbone could handle it. Just to be sure, I was going to send the big computer companies archive tapes so they didn't need to FTP the entire file store into their internal networks.) ”

“ Poirot had a formidable memory, rattling over a dozen phone numbers off the tip of his tongue. When his memory failed, however, he reached over to his Minitel terminal and tapped the two digits to connect him to directory assistance. He typed in the last name and the city, and the fax, voice, and audiotext numbers all appeared on the screen. (Audiotext is the French word for phone-based services like stock reports or voice mail.) Gerard picked the menu item for the voice line, and the number was automatically dialed for him.
Minitel is much more than just directory assistance. ”

“ Idle threat or no, this message caught the ITU's attention. One year later, in June of 1991, after endless messages back and forth to Tony, I had received a fax from the Secretary-General asking me to post all ITU standards on the Internet on an "experimental" basis. I promptly booked a plane ticket to Geneva for August to pry the data out of the cold, clammy hands of the bureaucracy. Next thing I knew, I was in Geneva, ready to go to work. ”

“ I'm all in favor of promoting book sales, but there is still no substitute for the original documents. A programmer working on an implementation should be required to RTFM ("Read the F***ing Manual" or, in the staid company of standards potatoes, "Read the FTAM Manual") . There is no excuse for second-hand knowledge of something as vital as international standards. ”

“ CERN is one of the major centers for the study of high-energy physics in the world. The laboratory has over 5,000 visiting scientists, plus another 3,000 permanent staff members. CERN is funded by 17 European countries, including a substantial East European membership. The laboratory is mission oriented, a place to do serious, world-class research. It has, as have many other physics laboratories such as Fermilab in Chicago, been on the forefront of networking as a way of allowing physicists to exchange data. ”

“ The chairman of the Internet Activities Board (IAB) , for example, had offered to be one of the anonymous FTP sites for the standards. I didn't tell Zakharov that the incoming chair of the IAB, who had also chaired several ISO committees, had on his home computer many ISO documents and had half-seriously offered them to be posted along with the Blue Book.
"It's not that we're against the Internet," Zakharov explained. "We just want to make sure that all the issues are properly considered. ”

“ Many of the engineers at the school were quite sophisticated. Unfortunately, however, the operating system had never quite run right and the users never had enough confidence to invest their time learning to do useful work.
In 1989, with the revolution, things changed dramatically. Czechoslovakia was able to put in a 9,600 bps leased line to Linz in Austria and join the European Academic Research Network (EARN) , the European BITNET. In Bratislava, another school started using UUCP links over dial-up lines to Vienna and became part of EUnet. ”

“ Tony brought in his AT&T phone from home just so he could have a few stored numbers.
Until recently, in fact, the entire ITU had one fax machine for over 900 employees. A single fax machine was more the result of bureaucratic desire to limit outside communications than a cost factor. The fax machine was in the Secretary-General's office. This meant that sending a fax could require approval right up to the Secretary-General. ”

“ Why should I care about scanners and TIFF files when I had the diagrams in the original formats?
Turned out that AUTOCAD was indeed used for the diagrams, with the exception of any text in the illustrations. The textless diagrams were sent over to the typing pool, where people typed on little pieces of paper ribbon and pasted the itsy-bitsy fragments onto the illustrations. Come publication time, the whole process would be repeated, substituting typeset ribbons for typed ribbons. A nice production technique, but the AUTOCAD files were useless. ”

“ This perk is meant to allow easy communication to the 160 member countries, and even goes so far as to allow the ITU to set up terminal clusters at off-site meetings with X.25-based links back to Geneva.
I'm not quite sure what I expected at the ITU, but I kind of figured a modicum of computer literacy. Nothing fancy, mind you, but at least things like basic phone tricks, fax machines, and maybe even electronic mail. After all, this is the home of X.400, the message handling system to end all message handling systems. Was the ITU using X.400, though? Not a chance! ”

“ Tony and I exchanged a few e-mail messages and found we were in violent agreement: standards have to be widely available or the standards are irrelevant. We started trying to figure out what could be done about it. ”

“ From zero users in 1989, the system grew to over 1,500 users by the summer of 1991.
Gruntorad is much more than just the BITNET manager, however. He was leading the effort to install a national networking infrastructure. He wanted to see UUCP, NJE (for BITNET) , and TCP/IP protocols all sharing an infrastructure of leased lines.
Leased lines, as in many European countries, are quite expensive in Czechoslovakia. A 9,600 bps line from Prague to Brno, for example, costs 36,000 crowns per month (U.S. $1,242/ month) . ”