Paul Kapustka's Blog
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February 26, 2006
The Ghost of Novell appears in AT&T's 'Tiered Internet' plan
Are there any other old-timers out there who start getting twitches, like I do, when you hear service providers talk about creating something better than the plain ol' Internet? Y'know, something that will make business easier because it will be faster and tuned to work well? Like that great service we all know and love, the AT&T NetWare Connect Services?
The history lesson for today, kiddies, is never to believe big companies simply because they are big companies -- and never bet against innovation and openness. Here's a quote from a Feb. 1995 Byte Magazine article about ANCS (as we all lovingly knew it), and how it was just gosh-so-much-better than that annoying TCP/IP stuff:
It's hard to exaggerate the potential importance of such a business Internet. The TCP/IP Internet now being pressed into the service of business-to-business networking is a horse of an entirely different color. True, companies are eagerly creating their own WWW (World Wide Web) home pages and deploying Mosaic as a business application. However, the Internet lacks a coherent directory, and the so-called Internet discovery tools (e.g., netfind, archie, and WebCrawler), are, while ingenious, a poor substitute for a real directory. Companies that engage in network-based commerce will expect to be able to find each other on the network in the same way that they now find each other in the phone book. They'll expect to be able to contact each other whenever they want, not just when an intervening name server happens to cooperate. And they'll want to be able to bill for services rendered through the network. Clearly AT&T's infrastructure is tuned to satisfy just these kinds of expectations.
Clearly!
Now, supposing the AT&T lobbyists get their way -- betcha can't wait for those new, super-fast video services from Ed's house o' big pipes, can ya? I'm sure they'll deliver, just like they did with ANCS. Which we all still use today, right?
Posted by paul at February 26, 2006 11:25 PM