Page:10 Rules for Radicals.djvu/11

 device was carefully secured in a deputy secretary-general's office and required a special form with many signatures before a document was considered fax-worthy.

Tony Rutkowski read my columns flaming about the ITU and he got me a meeting with Dr. Tarjanne. I flew to Geneva and soon found myself in the rather spectacular Secretary-General's suite on the top floor of the ITU tower.

After a few pleasantries about Finland—Reindeer, saunas—we got down to business. I stated my case: the Blue Book ought to be available for free on the Internet.

Dr. Tarjanne smiled the smile of a patient father and told me that in his ideal world, the Blue Book and indeed the Entrecôte and maybe even the Beaujolais would all be free, but this was of course impossible, as much as we both might share this dream of an ideal world.

You see, it really wasn't about the money, Tarjanne explained, there was a technical obstacle. The Blue Book was being produced on an ancient mainframe using an ancient program, a program so old that they had lost the source code and nobody was quite sure exactly how it worked.

They were developing a new typesetting system, but that was several years away, and for now they were stuck with only one output device, and that was their printing press.

Dr. Tarjanne was sure I could see, while he'd love to give me the source to the Blue Book, it wouldn't do me any good, even his own expert technical staff didn't know quite how this black box worked.