Exactly. I was at school with Gates (used to see him hunched over the PDP-10 TTYs late at night writing his Basic), and we all used the ARPAnet for mail, ftp, e

Exactly. I was at school with Gates (used to see him hunched over the PDP-10 TTYs late at night writing his Basic), and we all used the ARPAnet for mail, ftp, etc (though it was pretty new in '73), but we didn't think it was anything that would affect our entire lives much later. I also remember working with Len Bosack later (1980-ish) on a consulting project at HP and hearing about Cisco, and wondering who in the world would buy IP routers? It just wasn't obvious back then. It was simply "part of the air", as Gates has said in interviews.