John McCarthy, who worked at Stanford's AI lab, was among those most offended by Quasar's claims. He told the group that he would not be deterred by speculation that Quasar might sue. "I think someone seems to be frightened of his shadow," McCarthy said. "It has never been the custom of carnival snake-oil salesmen to sue their critics." Minsky and Reid also made it clear that they would tell any reporter who asked that they believed the robot was a joke, and they'd already expressed that opinion to more than a dozen journalists.
"I have no fear of being sued," replied Farber. "However, we are using a public vehicle called the ARPANET. We thereby expose ARPA, DOD and our future access and use of the network to certain dangers when we use that vehicle for potentially libelous material." Farber again urged restraint.
Reid took a different tack, saying that the "MsgGroup is the closest that we have to a nationwide computer science community forum." Reid had begun to notice that the MsgGroup was like a social club. Members had argued with one another so much that they had become friends. To restrict discussion would be unnatural. Besides, Reid took a more liberal view of free speech, reasoning that the experiment in communications would suffer if topics were restricted. "Until such time as people start suggesting the overthrow of our government," he said, "I don't think any sensible topic should be off limits."
Someone suggested attaching a disclaimer to personal communications on the ARPANET so that personal opinions wouldn't be mistaken for official business. Admitted someone else, "Who hasn't used Net mail for personal communication? Who hasn't spent time playing some new game over the Net? Be honest." The passion in defense of free speech was matched by an equally strong instinct for self-protection; the way to protect the network itself was to not attract unwanted supervision by the government. After a few days the argument wore itself out without resolution and the MsgGroup carried on with business as usual.
What emerged from the debate was strong evidence that the networking community felt a deep stake in the creation of the Net, ARPA funding or no ARPA funding, and was trying jealously to guard its right to determine its future. In a realm where, in a sense, personal identity is defined entirely by the words people choose, free speech seemed second only to concern for the survival of the realm itself.
BREAK For the first quarter of 1976, traffic reports showed that the volume of ARPANET mail, compared with the volume of regular U.S. mail, was a mere ant trail in the tracks of an elephant herd. MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for example, passed some 9,925 messages during the period. MIT was a typical site, and by extrapolation, if one machine processed about a hundred pieces of e-mail a day, multiplied by a factor of 98 or so (the number of hosts then on the Net), electronic mail didn't yet appear to pose a threat to the U.S. postal system. The post office handled more than 50 billion pieces of first-class mail a year. But e-mail's steep growth curve wasn't going unnoticed.
In the private sector, companies were poised for the concept of electronic-mail service to take off. The Computer Corporation of America soon began selling one of the first commercially available e-mail software packages, a $40,000 product called COMET, designed for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Another program called MESSENGER, developed for IBM 360 and 370 computers, was soon available from a company called On-Line Software International, for $18,000. Costs were heading down, and some analysts projected a "devastating" impact on the Postal Service's first-class business.
"We are being bypassed technologically," reported an assistant U.S. postmaster general at the beginning of 1976. The new technology's growth trend and obvious potential were indeed quite dramatic. A few versions of the more sophisticated ARPANET mail programs were coming into the hands of nonresearchers. Several large organizations, including the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Commerce, National Security Agency and Gulf Oil, had all started using e-mail over local area networks.
The government was looking closely at the future of e-mail service. A report for the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little estimated that 30 percent of all first-class mail was likely to be sent electronically within a few years. The Postal Service reacted to that prediction by awarding RCA a $2.2 million contract to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of providing e-mail service. In its report, RCA argued for adding e-mail to the post office's services. A Postal Service advisory panel also took a close look. It recommended making a "firm and continuing commitment" to electronic mail, on a par with NASA's manned space program.
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