Years ago (1989?) there was a push for a "data super-highway" (pushed mainly by Al Gore, leading to the myth that he said he invented the internet). I was at a

Years ago (1989?) there was a push for a "data super-highway" (pushed mainly by Al Gore, leading to the myth that he said he invented the internet). I was at a conference on the subject. There were a lot of talks on possible alternatives. The audience had a lot of telco people, who assumed it would be based on the phone infrastructure. To make a long story shorter, at one point a neckbeard stood up and said "we already have it. It's called the internet". Most of the audience laughed and the speaker pointed out that something so fragile and unreliable could never scale out.