> I never would have > thought in my younger days that I could even really afford the speed > of ethernet I have at home, much less run a distributed OS like I can.
it takes the children of one revolution to start another revolution. if you tried to keep to last generation's expectations, you get something like gopher; but when you ignore those limitations you'd get something like www and mosaic. gopher died of (licensing aside), keeping to old assumptions: it was bandwidth efficient and didn't have frivolous things like images. to paraphrase a friend of mine, metcalf's and moore's law are on our side. start building distributed systems now.
