Punch cards and Circult Switches

Bravo! (via Interesing-People)

From: Randall <4whp@insightbb.com>
Date: July 12, 2004 10:23:08 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] The Great IP Debate

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 07:41, David Farber wrote:
> In addition, carriers have invested so much in their legacy voice
> networks that many hesitate to move voice traffic from the legacy
> network to an IP platform. “Circuit switched is not going away. It’s a
> legacy system that will be with us for a long time,” says John Marinho,
> vice president of marketing and offer management at Lucent’s Mobility
> Group. “But VoIP is the cornerstone that will enable a lot of things to
> be possible in the next several decades.”

In 1979, Dr. Jerry Maren stood in front of my CIS 100 class and said “Punch cards are Yesterday’s News, but if any of you hope to get jobs working with computers, you will be working for banks, governments or insurance companies, because that’s where the computers are. Those people have invested millions of dollars in punch card technology, and they’re not going to just throw those card readers away – so you’re going to learn how to use punch cards, even though they will be gone in twenty years or so.”

ps: The original mail is not written by Dave: he just forward it.