Re: Mandarins, Lifers, and Talents

[anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com]

On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, Lou Poppler wrote:

> Mandarins were involved in the genesis, certainly, both of our little 
> college network, and of the military's arpanet.  The mandarins provided
> our subsidies, and some of them found ways to use the net in doing their
> academic work.  Very many of them ignored us.  

Or tried their uptmost best to ... until we came a knocking.

> Among us paid computer staff,
> the mandarins held occasional blue-sky meetings to plot the future and
> standards for the future; the lifers went about their business of feeding
> hollerith cards to the mainframes; and the talents immediately set about
> exploring this orthogonal new quirk of their machine.  All the edges were
> rough in the beginning, and for a long time after the beginning.  

Gee, I thought, err ... uhhm, shoot, aren't we still at the beginning??

Not the very beginning, but the beginning.

Wasn't all of the NII stuff simply a true mandarin plot^H^H^H^H
scheme^H^H^H^H^H^H contingency to get enough money to continue
"The Project" during some very lean budgetary years? 

Or am I behind in my reading again ...

> Network
> code arrived in huge inspired chunks from our eccentric talents.  Other
> talents, staff and user alike, would go out to play on the network and
> find little suggestions for the eccentric talents responsible.

All talents are by definition _irresponsible_.  They have to be in order
to take the risks, sometimes some very silly risks in hindsight. 

> I think the early networks were less than satisfying for the mandarins.

A satisfied mandarin??  Hmmm.  That'll take a couple of cycles to 
compute. ;-)

> It required arcane mandarin accounting schemes to rationalize our
> perpetual defecits, even in a 'funny money' accounting world.

Well, they've saved my butt (I think) when someone hung up the phone on
me. 

And for this, they've certainly got *some* of my allegiance.  ;-)

And they have my gratitude.

> Policies and standards were strained by the sudden accessibility of 
> the foreign operations, under alien chains of command.  The networks
> were immediately untidy and required compromise from the user.
> 
> The biggest contribution from the mandarins, and I mean this with 
> all gratitude, is that they chose, again and again, not to shut us down.

Chin. chin.

> ObCrypto: we were still getting the bugs out of rot13 back then.

Ahh, before they broke the code on what a baker's dozen REALLY was all
about.  Way back in the days when one-half was still working on rot12.



Alice de 'nonymous ...

                                  ...just another one of those...


P.S.  This post is in the public domain.
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