Perhaps the most surprising thing about most of us who grew up with the ARPAnet then Internet was just how much we took it for granted, never thinking a thing a

Perhaps the most surprising thing about most of us who grew up with the ARPAnet then Internet was just how much we took it for granted, never thinking a thing about it, especially not its commercial potential. It was just the air one breathed with mail, ftp, etc. (this is all pre-web), part of the fabric of life. (I think Gates admitted to the same problem in his famous "we've gotta catch up with the Internet" memo.) I remember doing some Lisp Machine consulting at HP Labs in the early 80's (I had become an idiot savant about MIT Chaosnet integration with DEC-20's while working for the MIT EECS dept), bumping into Len Bosak (then of Stanford) and hearing about his plans to start up a router company (Cisco), and being honestly baffled as to who (outside of a few military/industrial complex companies like HP) would buy a router? (I think it surprised Bosak as well.)