Exploring the Internet
for me, simultaneously repeating my new rationale for his existence to his mates scattered a few rows up. The flight attendent was treating this crew quite gingerly lest they mistake the plane for one of their hotel rooms, and promptly brought the drinks.
Before landing, Würzel handed me his business card and invited me to the big show at some location he couldn't remember. Alas, I was still reading my mail by that evening and let this opportunity for cultural enrichment pass me by.
Although I got back in late August, it was into the second week of September before my tapes from the ITU finally arrived, leaving us about 20 days to convert the tapes before the hooptedoodle began.
At INTEROP 91 Fall, on October 11, a live video link to Geneva had been arranged. Pekka Tarjanne and Tony Rutkowski would make the big announcement about the newly freed Blue Book to a packed and hushed audience in San Jose.
My job was to get the standards converted and on the network before the announcement so there would be no turning back. Until we actually let the documents loose on the Internet, there was always the possibility that the bureaucrats would somehow gain the upper hand and stop the experiment.
A week spent trolling the halls of the ITU had produced documentation on about half of the proprietary, in-house text formatting system they had developed many years ago on a Siemens mainframe. The computer division had given me nine magnetic tapes, containing the Blue Book in all three languages. Despite repeated tries, we had gotten nowhere on trying to also get the CCIR radio recommendations and reports, even though the Secretary-General and the head of the CCIR had both appeared anxious to see this data online.
Along with the magnetic tapes, we had half a dozen TK50 and TK70 cartridges from the ITU VAXen. The cartridges contained PC files that were stored on a VAX using DEC's PC networking products. We had two types of files, one of which was known to be totally useless.
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