Last summer, there was an interesting article in Le Monde about yet another bizare quirk in that strange French technoligico-political nexus. State-financed and state-directed tech R&D did give the French the Minitel, Concorde, and the TGV, all of them a bit old-fashioned or altogether outdated by now, but which were precursors in their time. But it also scuttled great ideas and inventions, when they failed to resonate with the tech-burocrats' agenda - or understanding.
Louis Pouzin, an engineer and product of the Ecole Polytechnique, that ueber-elite institution, developed the 'Cyclades' network between 1971 and 1975, after having been sent to the USA to sniff at Arpanet. He invented there the concept of 'datagrams', packets actually - the core of a decentralised network. Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf used his ideas when developing 'their' Internet and especially TCP/IP, but the telecom-dominated French tech-establishment was extremely hostile to it. Cyclades linked a few research institutions and died out in 1978 due to lack of political support. Le Monde assigns the blame to Valery Giscard d'Estaing (easily France's most blamed president) who inaugurated a research policy away from state-run projects and entireley geared towards the wishes and requirements of the major (private) industrial lobbies. However, Louis Pouzin, bearing remarkably little grudge for what other would have taken for a major slight, has now embarked on a new scheme: multilingualism in network management, which he calls the Trojan Horse to end the domination of the English language - think especially of the DNS system. China, India and Brazil have already lend a favourable ear... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin two earlier posts by Ronda Hauben where Louis Pouzin's under-aknowledged contribution to the development of Internet is mentionned: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9909/msg00111.html http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0102/msg00100.html A transcript of the full Le Monde article (in French) is here: http://lists.parinux.org/pipermail/linux/2006-August/001962.html (major lay-out hick-up however, easiest to copy-paste in a txt docu) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
