Interoperable Systems and the Government
Why are Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf considered the “inventors of the Internet”? Long, long ago, as computer networks started to get created, they were initially limited to universities and military installations in the US, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine . Further, two different networks could not communicate with each other. Why not? Because they worked on different hardware, had computers that ran different OS’s, application software was written in different programming languages, and most importantly the protocol used for communication within a network was not standardized – each network followed its own method to communicate, so no two networks could communicate with each other. In such a setup, vendors had no incentive to make things compatible with each other. In fact, corporations (who were major customers) considered the lack of compatibility a feature , not a bug! Why? Because they feared security leaks and industrial espionage. Thus, if a rival corporate n