On 10/14/22 04:08, Colin Perkins wrote:
The fraction of attendees coming from academia has actually increased over time, at least by some metrics. Looking at the breakdown of draft authors, it increased from 8% of authors being from academica in 2001 to around 14% in 2020, having peaked at 17% in 2009.
Thank you very much for providing those plots. For clarification, I seem to recall that participation by academics in the mid-late 1990s was around one third of the total, but I think that was based on meeting attendance rather than internet-drafts published. I remember thinking that it was approximately at parity with participation by corporations. But the specific year probably matters a lot, because things really took off after 1995 probably due to Windows 95 shipping a built-in TCP stack, along with growing public awareness of the World Wide Web.
I also recall, for what it's worth, that circa 1996 the US agency DARPA (or at least the programs I was getting funding from) told its principal investigators that projects researching using the Internet for some purpose were "not sufficiently forward looking" to be considered for funding. One program manager told me personally that DARPA (or perhaps the White House) did not want the Internet to become the global communications network, because it didn't have built-in support for protection of intellectual property.
Of course it's possible that my memory is unreliable after so much time. Keith
