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 or third-generation digested versions of standards were more appropriate for the general public. Turns out that Zakharov had himself written such a book ("a monograph, actually") on some long-forgotten CAD standard.

I'm all in favor of promoting book sales, but there is still no substitute for the original documents. A programmer working on an implementation should be required to RTFM ("Read the F***ing Manual" or, in the staid company of standards potatoes, "Read the FTAM Manual"). There is no excuse for second-hand knowledge of something as vital as international standards.

So far, we had spent 45 minutes of a one-hour meeting about databases, and the subject of databases still had not come up. It didn't look like it was going to. McKenzie still hadn't said anything and didn't appear to be about to burst into action.

As I paused to gather my forces, Zakharov jumped in. "Another thing, young man. Do the people in charge of the Internet know about your efforts?"

He seemed convinced that when some appropriate official learned that I would be distributing documents—"with graphics, no less"—on the network, my renegade activities would be quickly stopped.

(Let's put this into perspective. The NSFNET backbone transfers well over 14 billion packets per month. Even if my server was wildly popular, the backbone could handle it. Just to be sure, I was going to send the big computer companies archive tapes so they didn't need to FTP the entire file store into their internal networks.)

I told him that indeed my activities were supported by appropriate officials. The chairman of the Internet Activities Board (IAB), for example, had offered to be one of the anonymous FTP sites for the standards. I didn't tell Zakharov that the incoming chair of the IAB, who had also chaired several ISO committees, had on his home computer many ISO documents and had half-seriously offered them to be posted along with the Blue Book.

"It's not that we're against the Internet," Zakharov explained. "We just want to make sure that all the issues are properly considered. In fact, we are using the TCP/IP protocols here at ISO." ISO