At 16:33 04-09-98 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:

Hey, now that you are at Cisco, rather than NSF, maybe you can tell us how a "competitive procurement" or "peer reviewed" panels could have possibly chosen a group with no Internet experience and only a single 56Kbps line over the other bids from well-known, well-connected (bandwidth-wise) organizations?

Well, actually, they **had** experience: they'd been doing it (adequately) for DISA for months. And they were clever enough to have reverse-engineered the raw data they got from SRI - who were under neither contract, obligation, nor inclination to lend much help - and turn it into a workable db. And the whole operation was still pretty small beans then; the 56 kb/s link may have lacked redundancy, but it was plenty of bandwidth at the time.

Well-connected politically?

Actually, no. Nobody'd ever heard of them, except in the DISA award context. Of the three awardees resulting from the NSF solicitation, NSI was hands down the least known of the lot. And yet, of the other two, one crashed and burned and the second sputtered along never achieving the greatness of which it was clearly capable. -s