Web Myst, the following is the famous Dueling Banjoes excerpt from Po Bronson's lengthy article about George Gilder in Wired Magazine.
Read and enjoy.
Binx.
"Gilder drives into Contra Costa County, a maze of look-alike office parks and anonymous brown foothills. He gets lost for a while and has to call ahead to get directions. Eventually he pulls into the parking lot of Livingston Enterprises Inc., a little 90-person company that has gained a huge share of the market for Internet servers and routers. Importantly to George, these guys have grabbed that market merely by having the best products - they have no well-known figurehead, they haven't accepted any outside investment, and they don't even have a public relations department. Gilder doesn't normally care to hobnob with CEOs, since they're usually too high up in a company to really know what's going on, but Livingston's CEO, Steve Willens, still has a hand in product development.
Steve greets George in the lobby and takes him into a conference room.
Every time Gilder meets an engineer, they go through this sort of cascade of language syntax, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most efficient level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the dueling banjo scene from Deliverance:
George: "Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, that's a sweet access router over there. Wow, both Ethernet and asynchronous ports?"
Steve: "Yeah, check this baby out - the Ethernet port has AUI, BNC, and RJ-45 connectors."
George: "So for packet filtering you went with TCP, UDP, and ICMP."
Steve: "Of course. To support dial-up SLIP and PPP."
George: "Set user User_Name ifilter Filter _Name."
Steve: "Set filter s1.out 8 permit 192.9.200.2/32 0.0.0.0/0 tcp src eq 20."
George: "00101101100010111001001 110110000101010100011111001."
Steve: ". .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .. .. .... .. .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .."
George: "Really? Wait, you lost me there."
Web Myst, here is the beginning of the Po Bronson article about George Gilder in Wired Magazine.
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