[chapter-delegates] How about a World Internet Day?

[Fred Baker]

On May 20, 2005, at 1:48 PM, Marie-Anne Delahaut wrote:
> It is a good idea and this dialogue is wonderful... But what is the 
> date indeed ?

Good question. Sometime in 1968 or 1969. Bob Braden, and probably Vint 
Cerf or Bob Kahn, might remember.

> Everybody came around the computer and ... me. I sent a request to 
> *the* other computer in Charleroi about *the* file chosen by the 
> assembly and... it worked...

That is a great story.

I think we all have stories like this, both of the days things worked 
and the days they didn't. Here's another one.

You might know of a show called Network World+InterOp. That all started 
with a meeting of about 300 engineers in August 1986 in Monterey 
California. I happened to think of this a couple of days ago when I was 
in the DoubleTree hotel there, where the meeting occurred (except that 
it is now called the Portola Plaza Hotel). I told the bellman the 
story, and his eyes went like saucers. I don't think the Doubletree 
even knows about this...

Folks we considered luminaries - Dave Mills among others - gave talks 
about various parts of what we now call "Internet Architecture" and 
tried to tell us how they intended for this ARPANET stuff to work. Dave 
made an interesting comment - he worried that Security might be an 
issue, and he was worried about scaling problems in routing as they now 
had almost 170 IP routes in the backbone and over a thousand computers 
attached to the research network. At the end of the meeting (which if I 
recall was two or three days), Dan asked whether we thought it had been 
useful, and would we like to have another one? After that, we had 
bi-annual week-long meetings to discuss issues and figure out how to 
solve them. There was this new vendor called Network General that had a 
bit of PC software they called a "sniffer". They had one sales guy, and 
he showed the thing off in the hallway to anyone who would listen. FTP 
Software was there, Wellfleet, and a list of others.

In 1988, Dan convinced us to let the marketing people run a small trade 
show, a few stands really, for one day. We stopped the engineering 
meeting, stacked newly-almost-interoperable equipment and software 
around like a house of cards, and held our collective breath. The good 
news was - it worked. The bad news was - I think we were all blue in 
the face at the end of the day...

By 1990, of course, the engineers had left InterOp. It had become a 
marketing show, and the technical work moved to the newly-formed IETF. 
Nowadays, InterOp doesn't even pretend to run a ShowNet or demonstrate 
anything that interoperates with anything else. IMHO, it is now among 
the more useless shows in the world. I think about this every time 
someone suggests to me that IETF should run "just a small trade show" 
in parallel to drum up money. But now you know InterOp's origins... A 
house of cards that worked.