I the walked Gettysburg battlefield on the morning of the 150th anniversary of Pickets charge
(which was actually an orderly march across an open field into direct fire).
Big Roundtop, Gettysburg
It seems that 30 or 40 years on, a generation that fought a great battle feels the need
to erect monuments to their heroic efforts, lest succeeding generations forget their deeds.
This IEEE article is a sort of digital monument to the OSI wars:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
Maybe it's the failed history major in me. Maybe it's the fact that my first job was
working for a company (CompuServe) that was doing commercial packet switching
in 1972. Maybe its the fact that I lived through the last half of the war and have met
some of principals (Vint Cerf), but I found this interesting.
There may be no imposing garnet Pennsylvania monument looming over the digital battlefield, but I somehow thing the legacy of "rough consensus and running code" will be far greater and longer lasting.
