Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/41

 and ASCII, and all four file formats were sent back up to the Sun.

All told, it wasn't unusual to be downloading and then uploading 10 to 20 megabytes per day, all using a 9,600 bps modern. Still, this was the easy part. It was TPS that almost killed us.

Finally, after pages and pages of PERL code, we had the beginnings of a conversion program. We had tried to use the software developed at the ITU to convert from TPS into RTF, but the code had been worse than useless.

The day before leaving for INTEROP, I was still working desperately away on the conversion program. Tables and equations were still not coming out the way I had wanted them to, but finally, it came time to start hand editing. Any tables that couldn't convert properly were thrown out. Same with equations.

At 2, with the SuperShuttle coming at 6 , it was finally time to pack for INTEROP (and the six weeks of travel that would immediately follow INTEROP). The data wasn't perfect, by any means, but the Blue Book was on the Internet ready to be distributed. The Bruno project was ready to roll.

As I packed, I reflected on what had been an awful 20 days, programming like a madman to do the conversion. It was amazing how the ITU had been doing a conversion, with lots of people available, but had reportedly estimated that it would take a total of 10 years, and roughly U.S. $3.2 million, to complete the job. By my calculations, if it would have taken 40 days to make the conversion perfect, my time would have been worth, on the ITU scale of reality, U.S. $10,000 per hour. My only hope was that I might be able to use this data to justify an increase in my consulting rates.

As I was going to sleep, I tried to figure out how bad a case of bureausclerosis one would have to have to in order to turn a 20 day (40 to make it perfect) conversion effort into 10 years of agony. Over the next few months, as I visited Geneva again and saw the experiment run into the famed international bureaucracy, I was to learn how it could easily take 10 years, or, more likely, never get done at all.