he also said something on the order of "let's not bother to discuss using home appliances to build a global network."
Hmm actually I'm not so sure, the trend has been the opposite .. lots of PCs instead of mainframes and dumb terminals and the Internet itself has been about spreading out the networking rather than centralizing it. Todays 'home appliances' have computing power in excess of that of todays routing equipment, the shortcoming is only the implementation and I think that is getting pretty close now to doing what we require at the low and medium end, and I dont see that high end is that difficult.. if the implementation works its just a matter of scaling, can you buy linecards with their own backplane yet..? if not I cant see it being hard and if the demand arises... Steve