What was it that caused Packet networks in the United States to decline over the course of a decade that saw astounding growth and advancement of the Packet network in Europe? ( 19.2 access, 78.2 fulldup backbone )
Was it - the internet? - Well, yes and no. Remember that Europeans had cable access to the internet long before we ever got past dialup here in the US, and it had no negative affect there at all. What was different here in the US that caused us to regress and degenerate while the Europeans moved ahead and progressed? Well, the internet was involved allright, but only as a tool. - Not as a first cause. In the late 80's, I attended a Packet get together in Austin, Texas, hosted by the Texas Packet Radio Society. Later I would edit TPRS's "Quarterly Report" - But I was new to TPRS at that point and Greg Jones WD5IVD had no idea who I was. I got to Austin a day early so I could tour the state capital. I remembered somebody mentioning an early get-together the night before the conference at a German-style beer hall ( Beer and sausage - Mmmmmm ) there in Austin. ( Note: The "Dallas group takeover" of TAPR in the early 90's by the TPRS crew included Greg Jones WD5IVD and most of the TPRS BoD. Jones would later go on to be president of TAPR. ) So I walked into the outdoor beer hall, looked around and found a group who were obviously hams. Almost everybody else there were college kids, so the hams stood out. I sat down and said howdy, but Greg was talking so I didn't get to go much past " Hi, I'm Charles, N5PVL". Greg was talking about what a shame it was that hams were too stupid to go for amateur tcpip, and how retarded anybody who was involved in Packet networking must be, in light of the internet. I was not used to hearing such a cynical attitude about the great majority of amateurs. - I decided to find out more, so I smiled and nodded at the right times and places, joining the laughter about how stupid hams in general really are, and it paid off. I had gained this geekoid group's confidence. It turned out that the other hams in the group were proponents of NOS. One of the fellows asked Greg, "How can we ever hope to get 'progress' while AX25 Packet is so popular and doing so well? ( Remember at that time, QST used to give hams the impression that if you didn't have a Packet setup, you were missing out on the best part of Ham Radio. ) Greg smiled because he had an answer. He explained that very soon, internet access would be available to everyone, not just government facilities and universities and that NOS stations could then link up together on the internet instead of Packet Radio. Then he explained how to undermine and destroy the AX25 Packet net by means of a hostile takeover. - Something that immediately appealed to this group of fellows who looked down upon thier fellow hams with scorn. "All we have to do", he explained, "is to join them in order to beat them. We will set up Packet BBS stations and do all of our message forwarding over internet links, much much faster than ham radio." To grasp what Greg was saying, imagine for a moment that you have invested big bucks on a dedicated, computer-controlled HF digital station in the late 1980's in order to provide your fellow hams with access to an independent, all-ham Packet radio network. - But when you receive a Packet message or bulletin and try to forward to to a distant location, it is already there because you have been "routed around" by faster non-ham internet links. Greg explained that only a few Packet/internet gateways could thus undermine the entire AX25 network by depriving key servers ( BBS stations in major cities ) of traffic so that the operators lose heart and give up on trying to provide that service to thier fellow hams. At the same time, Packet bulletins intended for the European network could be re-routed as @WW and injected into the US Packet network with internet links, thus serving to abruptly double the network's loading with inappropriate traffic, thus making it very, very slow. - So that amateurs would stop having fun with it and be ready to look for something else. ( NOS, in theory ) I guess Greg and his NOS friends had never heard about the Amateurs Code, where you are supposed to avoid doing anything that would lessen the enjoyment of your fellow hams, and how we are supposed to look out for each other's interests. They were too busy giggling at the prospect of all those disheartened Packet BBS operators, and the thousands of Packet users in that era who would then be "forced" to go over to amateur tcpip when AX25 Packet had been vandalized sufficiently so that it was undermined. Unfortunately, as we all know, Greg Jones was a lot better at figuring out how to vandalize the hobby than he ever was a building anything. The gateway stations did a great job of undermining AX25 Packet just as he said - but hams still didn't like NOS, never did and so we ended up with - nothing. Meanwhile, in Europe, high-speed backbone links and VOP ( Voice over Packet ) were being developed on the excellent AX25 net there. Here's the ironic part: Amateur tcpip never went anywhere in the US, but it caught on big in Europe where they had a great AX25 network to run that IP over. Greg Jones and his NOS buddies cut thier own noses off to spite thier face. - If they had read and understood a copy of The Amateurs Code and went by its tenets, they would be enjoying high-speed amateur tcpip this very day - just as hams in Europe have been doing for decades. If they had respected and worked with thier fellow hams instead of denigrating them, and working against them. That's what happened to the US Packet net, boys and girls. I was there, and I saw it from start to finish. Use of internet gateways was regulated in Europe, so that it was illegal to transport one networks traffic over the other. It's a shame, and I mean a real shame that we never had that protection here in the US. 73 DE Charles, N5PVL
