User talk:Albert.clark

I read the article on the history of the internet and found it interesting although not truly correct. As someone that lived through this period and was responsible for portions of it, I found the mis-directions rather interesting. It is amazing who gets the credit after the fact. It's not the people that do the work or have the ideas. I would say the article has smatterings of truth and a lot of confusion. I never heard of some people that got credit, some were figureheads that simply took credit for others’ work. Some I knew and worked with, but they got the credit. As a government employee at that time working on the government payroll, I could not copyright or patent so someone had to take credit.

Why IBM PCs? Because I had to standardize because I could not help all my users across the country in how to use their brand X.  If you had never seen an Atari 800 computer what do you do when a valued user calls up and asks you how to turn it on. I did not have to justify why Apple or Commodore or Radio Shack or Texas Instruments, or Atari, or brand X. IBM allowed anyone to build an IBM compatible computer meaning it could be a competitive contract going to the lowest bidder. It is very hard to justify going to one vendor to purchase 100,000 anythings. In addition, IBM would be an acceptable name to the so called computer professionals that I had to sneak around. Can you imagine going to the mainframe guru that only recognizes punch cards and explaining why you want to purchase one of the other brands for everyone to use? Can you imagine explaining to him how he is going to lose control of his empire due to distributed processing? Therefore, IBM became the name to go with. Okay, so it was one of the most crude machines out there. There was almost no software. Filenames were limited to 8 characters with a three letter suffix. They were not friendly. With the DOD and many government contractors standardizing on IBM PCs I figured 10-20 manufacturers of IBM PCs would grow into it and they did.

At any rate, about 50% of the article is fact, 20% is just mistaken, and 20% gives credit to the wrong people and offices and 10% was news to me that I can neither confirm nor deny.

Thank you Allynnc for the nice article about me.

In 1989, I moved on to other DOD systems that involve computers, but declared office automation and ARPANET or the internet a success. I have two retirement checks but am working on my third retirement check and still work with systems requiring software to do unique jobs for the DOD.