His argument was that while assembly allowed for more optimized local routines, they've lost the perspective on how the system should behave at large (the handling of window drawing routines, etc.)
It seems that no real intelligence is required to keep telemarketers busy. A simple loop of generic answers can keep them occupied for >5min conversations.
It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?
I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.
Looking at how simple the protocol actually is, I find it hard to believe this protocol actually died because of copyright claims. The structured menu system is certainly something the modern web could use, especially now more and more people are relying on mobile devices. But I could do without the 3270 support :)
Also funny to note we can find discussions dating back to pre-2000 where people rant over how “bloated” the web has become and how we should go back to gopher.
The “lack of loosely coupled components” argument is kind of sad considering that some
unnamed network equipment vendor initially started off with QNX based firmware, which inherently enforces such a model.
But IPv4 headers could have a variable length too, it's just that we don't encounter that much in the wild. And what about the AH header, GRE and IPIP tunnel headers, 6rd/6in4 tunnel headers, etc. Filtering at fixed offsets sounds very brittle to me.
Isn't the real problem here that network providers and administrators appropriate the right to filter on OSI layers they shouldn't be touching? This problem sounds like the exact reason why Google insisted on having its QUIC headers ciphered: so network equipment can't pull of this kind of misbehaviour.
But there are some benefits which you didn't mention, such as including text & images in the broadcast for people without internet access, kind of like what Microsoft attempted a decade ago with FM subcarriers. There isn't that much bandwidth available for analogue AM radio either; using DRM would at least double that. And then there's the claim that switching to DAB allows for decreasing the output power, but I don't know if that really holds true in practice.
Until a few years ago, a lot of freenets (like the 'AzTec' one) were still online and publicly accessible. It was always fun to roam those in search of some forgotten gems.
https://youtu.be/tz-Bb-D6teE?t=2161
His argument was that while assembly allowed for more optimized local routines, they've lost the perspective on how the system should behave at large (the handling of window drawing routines, etc.)