From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Fri Dec 08 2000 - 13:56:00 MST
Harvey:
You appear to be arguing something different from me. I spoke
specifically of "the Xanies", those involved with Project Xanadu. I
don't see how you could factually disagree that the people working on
Xanadu through at least 1990, all of whom I know personally, would not
have had the reaction I suggest, more or less.
How familiar are you with those people and the Xanadu code? The Xanadu
architecture provided for "indexing" at the time of entry of data. It
provided for royalty at byte granularity. Linear time indexing after the
fact is *expensive*, and all of the Xanadu people I know would have
expected any such substantial effort to have been recouped somehow.
The universe can surprise you.
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> At 12:07am -0800 12/7/00, Michael M. Butler wrote:
> >On the other side of the fence: none of the Xanies would have predicted
> >the widespread implementation and immense success and popularity of
> >*free* search engines. Free? Are you *nuts*? :)
>
> I disagree. The Internet was not originally a commercial venture.
> It started as a free service to connect researchers with Arpanet in
> 1969. Military personnel got free access, as did graduate students
> in the computer departments. The first search engines started
> appearing in 1990. Archie, Veronica, WAIS, VSL, and the like, were
> all free. The concept of paying for access or information didn't
> really become common until 1995 with the advent of AOL. For decades,
> free access to information was the default. It is the concept of
> paying for information that would have been zany or unforeseen by the
> early adopters.
> --
> Harvey Newstrom <HarveyNewstrom.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:16 MST