>only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological.
I don't understand what you mean.
If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
I don't know how the contrast with cryptocurrency could be clearer.
> If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
Those are very small parts of the value proposition of networking today. Similarly, cryptocurrency delivered a feature on its first day: decentralized digital scarcity. You may not find this feature useful today, but some people do, and most people did not find remote login useful for quite a while after networking was invented.
The fact that the utility of decentralized digital scarcity is not world changing yet is not surprising. Remote login wasn't world changing in 1979 (10 years after ARPANet launched) either. It took quite a while for these things to find their modern use cases, and permeate the culture.
I don't understand what you mean.
If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
I don't know how the contrast with cryptocurrency could be clearer.