[ih] Cluster Addressing and CIDR

[Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan]

	I absolutely agree with this thread (Rahmat/David/Simone's comments)
	on preserving IDs to record the evolution of design, i.e. our
	history.  The "path" can be more interesting than the "end result". 

	Since my focus (this last year ) has been on the early Arpanet 
	design issues, I have been aided by the abundance of RFCs which discuss
	a specific design.  (of course, I still wish that more minutes of the
	design meetings were preserved   -- if anyone has any non-published
	minutes 1969-1974 please let me know ....;-) 

------>	It's important to note that the early RFCs functioned in the role 
	of both of the following: 
		* today's Internet Drafts, and 
		* email: some of the early RFCs would today just have been
		  in today's email archives of the working groups. 

	While current IETF working groups seem to be great about archiving
	email, a similar issue of lost resources seems to be occurring when 
	working groups conclude.   At this point, no email archive is linked 
	into the IETF web pages that describe the work of the concluded 
	groups...   http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/OLD/index.html

	So, I suggest that the IETF web masters should archive
	the concluded email as well. 

	Thanks, Chris

>The long-term history of ideas is hurt by the non-preservation of ID's, 
>etc.   The ideas had influence, almost certainly, even if they turned out 
>to be weak or "wrong".
>
>One of the problems with scientific progress is the lack of documentation 
>of experiments that didn't pan out, because the authors are presumed to 
>have "failed" and want to avoid embarrassment.
>
>Most of us, if we are honest, have learned far more from making mistakes 
>and debugging them.  Why then, do we refuse to pass on our hard-won 
>knowledge?   This is not because of science, but because of ego-driven fear.
>

-- 
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