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One interesting aside is you can see from that even this early in the evolution of what's still a very sparse network, how dense the resources are in California
by CPLX 10y ago
One interesting aside is you can see from that even this early in the evolution of what's still a very sparse network, how dense the resources are in California, presaging the eventual concentration of the "internet business" there. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and such.
It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that community is now to what we'd consider the tech sector. That was a slow process of course, given that at one point AOL dominated the consumer internet from its offices near Tysons Corner.
- camiller 10y ago"It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that community is now to what we'd consider the tech sector." Remember, back then it was ARPAnet. ARPA was/is the Defense Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency. If you think the defence department then or now as not part of the tech sector you would be underestimating the investment in technology research made by the DOD.
- swiley 10y agoIf you look at maps of the modern internnet, DC has an extremely large collection of international cable terminals. a lot of traffic goes throught it.
- CPLX 10y agoBut of course. California's nascent technology industry was also created by Federal dollars, just look at Ames, Rand, etc, on the left side of the map. The interesting question I was pondering is why the transition from public to private/consumer sector happened in one place but not nearly so much in the other.
- user837387 10y agoI think at a certain point the question becomes very similar as asking why you got a 6 in a dice roll instead of a 3. You can definitely explain it using Newtonian physics but at a high enough level I'm not sure it really matters.
- jhbadger 10y agoThat was because Tysons Corner was (and still is) a major hub of the Internet. Initially because of the DOD and military contractors, but a big chunk of Amazon's cloud is located in data centers there and nearby.
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoThis is the area in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor
- rootbear 10y agoSeveral of my professors at the University of Maryland, in the late 70s, had connections to the institutions that had IMPs, like NBS (now NIST), the Pentagon, Mitre, etc. If you asked nicely, they would give you the dialup numbers for the IMP/TIP so you could play on the ARPANET. I had an account at MIT-AI that I accessed that way.