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From: dormer@cs.purdue.EDU (John Dormer)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: New Internet Management Company.
Message-ID: <11871@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 1 Oct 90 06:05:30 GMT
References: <2221@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca>
Reply-To: dormer@cs.purdue.edu (John Dormer)
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Organization: occasional on alternate Tuesdays
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  As a friend of mine was telling me the other day, when they
told people on DARAPANet to stop doing non-research related
things, network traffic dropped off a lot. I guess it was a large
percentage change, or it wouldn't be worth remembering. All of a
sudden there were no more personal messages, and the fact that it
was not used by many for pure research became evident. People also
moved to other channels (read "paper mail") to do real work because
it may have been hard not to say "Tell your family 'hi' for me" etc
inbetween pages of research.
  The lesson is that if you don't let people do what they want with
a thing like this, they probably won't use it, or at best will only
use it when they have to.
  IMHO, I don't think the people in the government realize what a
powerful tool for me to learn new things the USENET groups which ride
on the Internet have been. There are many thousands of people who will
come through this university after me. I hope they will have the
access to the land of the Net as I do. Only hope and time will tell.


	John Dormer
	dormer@medusa.cs.purdue.edu