> Did things actually happen that way historically? That is, did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shan

> Did things actually happen that way historically? That is, did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shannon's ideas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiplexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiplexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching Shannon's paper was 1948. TDM was in commercial use in the 1950s. Even ARPANET was in the design phase by the 1960s. The thing about information theory is that you can use it in practice without understanding all the math. TDM existed in the 19th century. You can even study human language in terms of information theory, but that predates 1948 by a million some odd years. And we still don't understand all the math -- information theory is related to complexity theory and P vs. NP and all of that. As to whether heterogeneous networks would have dethroned AT&T, we don't know because the government broke them up just as packet switched networks were becoming mainstream. Moreover, the telecommunications market even now is not a model for how market forces work. You still can't just go to Home Depot, pick up some fiber optic cable, connect up your whole neighborhood and then go collectively negotiate for transit. It's a lot easier, regulation wise, to go into competition with AWS than Comcast. And AWS correspondingly has a lot more real competitors. > Static content isn't really distributed computing; it's more like networking. It's distributed data storage, but yes, the solutions there are very similar to the known ones for networking. > The thing that jumps out at me is that most of these technologies are fantastically expensive computationally. The solutions we use for networking and data storage trade off between computation (compression, encryption) and something else (network capacity, storage capacity, locality), which are good trades because computation is cheap relative to those things. It's much cheaper computationally to send plaintext data than encrypted data, by a factor of a hundred or more. But the comparison isn't between encryption and plaintext, it's between encryption and plaintext that still has to be secured somehow, e.g. by physically securing every wire between every endpoint. By comparison the computational cost of encryption is a bargain. But if you have to use computation to secure computation itself, the economics are not on your side. Processor speed improvements confer no relative advantage and even reduce demand for remote computation as local computation becomes less expensive. Where those technologies tend to get used is as an end run around an artificial obstacle, where the intrinsic inefficiency of the technology is overcome by some political interference weighing down the natural competitor. The obvious example is blockchain, which would be insurmountably less efficient than banks if not for the fact that banks are so bureaucratic, heavily regulated and risk averse. But if banks start losing real customers to blockchain they'll respond. Hopefully by addressing their own failings rather than having blockchain regulated out of existence, but either way the result will be for blockchain to fade after they do.