The ever prolific Bob Frankston has written an interesting screed on his blog with the above title that talks about how messed up our telecom networks are. Remember when you wanted to connect to a particular mainframe how you needed to buy that particular vendor’s terminal? Then came along software that would emulate 3270, DEC VT220s, and HP 3000s.
With our current crop of cell phones, we are still in the lock-it-down, use-their-particular-handset era. As Bob says,
“The Internet is not the wires (or non-wires) but simply a way to use them. The bits can travel over any transport.”