Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed:

– the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO;

– they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office;

– then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;

– then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")...

...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over.

(It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)

Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.

Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money.

That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.

Every time I have a meeting with government, especially regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy because these words have very different meanings, which can lead you into bad places quickly:

support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause"

business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law

If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.

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