On Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:42:15 +0100, Arjan van der Oest said:
(considering the fact that governments themselves are not capable of running anything but a gray-cheese-with-a-dial telephone network
Hm, I was under the impression that ARPANET was a government run network...
I would not be surprised if some of the bigger providers now have bigger networks in their test labs than the ARPANET/MILNET combo was - ISTR it was on the order of 4,000 total nodes in the 1984 era. I remember being surprised when my then-current employer joined both networks that the 3,000+ nodes on Bitnet and the size of the Arpa/Mil aggregate being comparable (and Bitnet may have been even bigger at some points). And let's face it - the Arpa/Milnet was a test network, not a production network.