Editor note: following is a GREAT expose by PJ Herrington on
the state of the Internet.  For those of us who traveled it 
before the techie picture "nuts" took over will appreciate
PJ's article.......and this from one who is not "on" the net! 


#: 51702 S9/ADAMania
    20-Oct-97  22:27:22
Sb: #51693-#CHANGES
Fm: Sysop/*PJ (ADAM) 76537,1271
To: Lee Lightfoot/Apricot  72730,1006 (X)

Does your machine do CP/M?  I believe that Lynx is a CP/M
program.  It's not the only one available but it's the one I've
most recently seen.
  Internet was originally a government project, initiated I
think during the early years of the Cold War, in order to insure
that messages of importance could be received by various
stations even if one or more of those stations had been wiped
out by a bomb.
  That's a kind of nutshell thingie there.  But soon scientists
discovered its usefulness, and multiply redundancy insured that
their messages would arrive eventually despite any downtime from
any of the intermediate stations.
  Soon colleges and libraries and special interest groups became
users of the system.
  Early messages from small computers included such gems as
"what kind equpmt u use?"  and I'm pretty sure that's where many
BBS acronyms got started.  It all sounded like a bunch of
telegrams written by people trying to get the most out of ten
words.
  Anyway, over the past few years, everybody and his Uncle
George has jumped onto the net and practically ruined it for the
people who had been using it for decades.  And then the Web
came out and got really commercial.  Now we get junk mail we
hate, and that's progress.
  I tell people that I remember fondly the time when I could
invariably choose how much water I did or did not want in the
tub, simply by inserting a rubber stopper in the drain which
cost maybe a dime and did not require the services of a plumber
to install. I feel much the same way about the fancy, fallible,
and infuriating abundance of fancy drain gimmicks as I do about
the f,f, & i innovation (s) that plague a sweet and simple
system which everybody wants to make cute and complicated... and
EXPENSIVE.  I still prefer my own software for conferencing, and
can do things that the fancy new stuff won't do.  If it ain't
broke, for crissake don't fix it. I can see using the new stuff
for new applications, but for the stuff that worked perfectly
fine as it was and took less time and space, I really like the
tried and true and simple and effective and cheap.
  PJ
 <soapbox mode OFF> :D :D :D :D


