<nettime> Louis Pouzin, "the (French)man who did not invent the Internet" ...

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Last summer, there was an interesting article in Le Monde about yet
another bizare quirk in that strange French technoligico-political nexus.
State-financed and state-directed tech R&D did give the French the
Minitel, Concorde, and the TGV, all of them a bit old-fashioned or
altogether outdated by now, but which were precursors in their time. But
it also scuttled great ideas and inventions, when they failed to resonate
with the tech-burocrats' agenda - or understanding.

Louis Pouzin, an engineer and product of the Ecole Polytechnique, that
ueber-elite institution, developed the 'Cyclades' network between 1971 and
1975, after having been sent to the USA to sniff at Arpanet. He invented
there the concept of 'datagrams', packets actually - the core of a
decentralised network. Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf used his ideas when
developing 'their' Internet and especially TCP/IP, but the
telecom-dominated French tech-establishment was extremely hostile to it.
Cyclades linked a few research institutions and died out in 1978 due to
lack of political support. Le Monde assigns the blame to Valery Giscard
d'Estaing (easily France's most blamed president) who inaugurated a
research policy away from state-run  projects and entireley geared towards
the wishes and requirements of the major (private) industrial lobbies.

However, Louis Pouzin, bearing remarkably little grudge for what other
would have taken for a major slight, has now embarked on a new scheme:
multilingualism in network management, which he calls the Trojan Horse to
end the domination of the English language - think especially of the DNS
system. China, India and Brazil have already lend a favourable ear...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin

two earlier posts by Ronda Hauben where Louis Pouzin's under-aknowledged
contribution to the development of Internet is mentionned:
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9909/msg00111.html
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0102/msg00100.html

A transcript of the full Le Monde article (in French) is here:
http://lists.parinux.org/pipermail/linux/2006-August/001962.html
(major lay-out hick-up however, easiest to copy-paste in a txt docu)


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