Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!A.ISI.EDU!LYNCH
From: LYNCH@A.ISI.EDU (Dan Lynch)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Help...looking for network anecdotes
Message-ID: <12371378481.22.LYNCH@A.ISI.EDU>
Date: 2 Feb 88 01:31:41 GMT
References: <8802011651.AA13576@PTT.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22

Rick,  I have to add in a story about the benefits of e-mail.  A few years
ago I was talking to a random seatmate on the Washington-to-San Francisco
milk run and got around to asking her what she did.  She was a geologist.
She was on a post doc at Stanford.  I asked how the field was progressing
from her perspective.  She said that the field was making dramatic advances
in the past few years because so many geologists were using this new thing
called electronic mail all over the world and they were using it to find out
what others already knew!  They used the mechanisms of e-mail to raise the
level of common knowledge on the leading edge of the field.  No one wants
to spend years doing research in some part that has already been worked
over and the usual method of writing/reading journals was too slow.

I find that dramatic.  And I find that they were mostly using the Arpanet
without "full permission" to be a sad commentary on those of us who know
how valuable this all is to humanity, because we have not found a way
to fund the intellectual interconnection of all researchers in a straight
forward manner yet.  So, please thke this kind of "evidence" and build
te case.

Thanks,
Dan
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