Page:10 Rules for Radicals.djvu/9

 These institutions were based in Geneva and their work product was meant for grownups, grownups of sufficient means that the cost of a few thousand dollars to buy standards documents was considered not only eminently reasonable, but absolutely necessary to the functioning of our standards-making organizations. These grownups worked for telephone companies like AT&T and their PTT peers around the world, and for a few industrial concerns like IBM and Siemens.

Asking the International Organization for Standardization—asking ISO to give away technical standards would be as silly as asking the restaurant to give away the Entrecôte and the Beaujolais. In this world of many fine lunches and dinners, there was no free lunch.

In those days, I couldn't afford the Entrecôte and certainly not the Beaujolais. I was a hack, a hack in the traditional sense of the word making my living as a writer, a hack with a strong interest in the Internet, a network based on open standards, a network with no kings, a network built on the then-radical notion that standards should be based on decision by rough consensus and rule by working code.

While this loose-knit band of anarchists that were defining an Internet based on open standards were free to ignore most of the nonsense coming out of the "standards professionals" and their "Open Systems Interconnection" effort—there was one thing we couldn't ignore and that was the telephone network on which we built our unreliable, best-effort datagram service.