<nettime> Michel Elie and l'Observatoire des usages de l'Internet

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

There were very French people, or for that matter, Europeans, involved in
the Internet's very first pioneering years of existence. But Michel Elie
was one of them. In an article 'L'heritage des pionniers de l'Internet' Le
Monde's 'Interactif' supplement of wednesday March 14, 2001 details his
rather adventurous and intellectually challenging 'parcours' since he was
a young bursary at UCBerkeley in 1969 and joined the Network Working Group
which was busy setting up the university net project of ARPA. This was at
the height of the Vietnam war, when Berkeley's campus was one of the focal
point of the anti-war movement. Michel Elie recalls now that "(he) never
had the impression of participating in a military project. If that had
been the case, how could I have been admitted in the developpers team
without signing a non-disclosure agreement? And how would have it been
acceptable that a number of participants in that project were in effect
Vietnam draft dodgers?".

Michel Elie has many more interesting things to say about these, and
later, years, which you might care to read on Le Monde's site
(http://interactif.lemonde.fr) - IF it does not crash yr browser! (those
damned frogs...;-). Now he's somewhat retired, but he's leading the
intriguing "Observatoire des usages de l'Internet' at the Montpellier
University campus: http://www.oui.net




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