At 11:17 AM 9/7/96 -0400, perry@piermont.com wrote:

<snip discussion of internet collapse>

I'm "involved with the problems" too, you know. Don't teach granpaw to suck eggs. OF COURSE there are problems. None of them, however, are signs of "collapse".

This whole thing makes me ill - maybe I'm just an idiot. What could possibly cause a collapse? More usage?? No - that would just mean that everyone's access would be slower. Do routers fail because they can't talk to other routers? no - they route around it. I consider myself reasonably educated when it comes to the layout of the internet, and I have never heard _anyone_ ever say what constitutes a collapse, and, if it means 'catastrophic permanent failure of the Internet', what could possibly cause that. These people are acting like one day, something is going to blow up, and the entire internet will follow, and stay down for a long long time. If all the DNS servers died, the internet would stop working for non-local access until they recovered. If there was a bug in Cisco routers that was set to go off on Thursday, September 12th, that would render them inoperable until power cycled, that would cause a major failure. If every building in MCI and Sprint's data network blew up, that would cause a major failure. If the usage increased so that the Internet was 'saturated', that doesn't qualify as a collapse. It qualifies as 'rush hour'. If the internet was in 'rush hour' 24 hours a day, it would be unfun to use, but unlike the highway system, we can add more lanes pretty much at will. (within reason). Will someone please explain to me what I'm missing? Thanks John --- John Brothers Do you have a right not to be offended?