(((Presumably, there's an alternate-history world someplace where the
French invented, developed and spread the Internet worldwide, while established interests in the USA balked at doing so, so that we all use "Geugle" and the net's lingua franca is, uh, French.)))
From: [email protected]
Subject: Louis Pouzin, "the (French)man who did not invent the Internet" ...
Date: December 7, 2006 11:28:40 AM PST
Last summer, there was an interesting article in Le Monde about yet another bizare quirk in that strange French technologico-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Minitel, Concorde, and the TGV, all of them a bit old-fashioned or altogether outdated by now, but which were precursors in their time.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 entirely 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 mentioned:
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 hiccup however, easiest to copy-paste in a txt docu)
