Fiber cut in SF area

Sun Apr 12 03:08:58 UTC 2009

Jorge Amodio wrote:
> s/DARPA/ARPA/; s/BBM/BBN/; s/Internet/ARPAnet/.

/DARPA/ARPA/ may be splitting hairs.  According to

   http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_roberts.htm

"DARPA head Charlie Hertzfeld promised IPTO Director Bob Taylor a million
dollars to build a distributed communications network".

And apologies WRT /BBM/BBN/.  Guess it was really has been a while now
(given the 4 and 5 figure checks to BBN I signed back in the day).

Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Apr 2009, Roger Marquis wrote:
>> The real problem is route redundancy.  This is what the original contract
>> from DARPA to BBM, to create the Internet, was about!  "The net" was
>> created to enable communications bttn point A and point B in this exact
>> scenario.
>
> Uh, not exactly.  There was diversity in this case, but there was also
> N+1 breaks.  Outside of a few counties in the Bay Area, the rest of the
> country's telecommunication system was unaffected.  So in that sense the
> system worked as designed.
>
> Read the original DARPA papers, they were not about making sure grandma
> could still make a phone call.

Apparently even some network operators don't yet grasp the significance of
this event.

> Why didn't the "man in the street" pharmacy have its own backup plans?

I assume they, as most of us, believed the government was taking care of
the country's critical infrastructure.  Interesting how well this
illustrates the growing importance of the Internet vis-a-vis other
communications channels.

Roger Marquis