7 Tales of Bureaucracy
I suggested that perhaps we could try an experiment—and this is my first rule for radicals: call everything you do an experiment—and the experiment I proposed was that perhaps the ITU could furnish a set of tapes for the Blue Book and the Internet would try its hand at reverse-engineering the system. If we succeeded, we'd give the ITU back their Blue Book in some coherent ultra-modern format like TROFF.
Since Dr. Tarjanne knew the Internet had only a few users, none of them serious people of means who buy standards, he'd be able to shut up the critics by saying he had cooperated, but the Internet had not been up to the task.
He said we could have a set of tapes.
I went to Boulder, Colorado and enlisted the help of Mike Schwartz, a professor of computer science and the creator of the original search engine, netfind. After a few false starts, we managed to mount the tapes and read the raw data into a series of octal dumps hundreds of pages long, which we spread on the floor next to a printed copy of the Blue Book.
By comparing the octal dump to the final form, we were able to confirm that the Secretary-General was correct—this system was a total mess—but after a lot of head-scratching and a few surprises, we managed to turn their system into TROFF and then into NROFFed ASCII and PostScript, posted the tarballs on an FTP server, and sent a note to the IETF list.
The next day, the National Science Foundation called, complaining that the Blue Book release was using up all
