History [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Mouse wrote: Heh, I'm guessing you've been doing something like that for a very long time. I remember "Der Mouse" the Sun god from very early days of the net, and I suspect you are one in the same. As far as CIDR goes, I agree. I'm glad CIDR exists but sad that it needs to be this way "normally". What I've often wondered is why there are so many IT people with the same sort of laments and we haven't all collectively built our own networks over wireless ? I remember when a friend of mine who was a HAM showed me his 1200 BPS packet radio setup. I was blown away and I could envision an army of radio geeks interfacing together to form a civilian Internet (and this was before the Internet caught on). I had the same thought when Lucent Wavelan cards and subsequent wireless devices caught on. I figured we could network an entire city together using a mix of directional antennae for the long runs, and omnis for the distribution layers. Then inter-city traffic could be done with either long range elevated yagis or land lines paid for by the "collectives" in each city. Perhaps Karl Marx might have shared my vision, but the "real world" didn't. I wonder why... FCC rules too strict? The tech isn't as robust as I thought? Hidden operating costs I'm not thinking of? I'm naive, I guess. I thought we'd all be running our own little "cells" right now, not fighting for scraps of bandwidth from *horrified gasp* the dirty monopolistic cable companies and lyin' cheatin' phone companies. Meanwhile folks in places like Korea are laughing and using Fiber or Ethernet and paying pennies on the dollar compared to options we've got in the USA. -Swift