Commercialization of assets off the planet would mutually reinforce the growth of interplanetary communication.
We all know the Internet didn’t explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.
You should know that I’ve been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I’ve been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I’m very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.
Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in ’71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard-of-hearing community as well.
When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.
I’m projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.
I just am a huge cheerleader for getting kids interested in science and technology.
At some point, you can’t lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.
The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.
There was something amazingly enticing about programming.
The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.
In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.
The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That’s why we have laws… The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.