[ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 14, Issue 5

[Mike Padlipsky]

At 12:59 PM 4/14/2006, John Day wrote:
>Certain sites were referred to as the big bad neighbor, but that was 
>only in the ritual for catharsis#1.

Actually, as you probably know and were just trying to force me to 
stop sulking in my tent by appearing not to, only one site was the 
Big Bad Neighbor in the privately-circulated Ritual for Catharsis 
#1.  Its identity ought to be downright obvious, and when the fact 
that "RFC #1" was written by the then-Multics Network Technical 
Liaison is taken into account the _non_-existence of a Cambridge axis 
ought to be at least quite evident.

Indeed, to gloss your earlier message some, it was the tediously 
lengthy argument between one of Big Bad Neighbor's representatives 
and the representative from a West Coast place over whether a file 
transfered from TENEX to TSO (I guess it was) and back again under a 
particular BYTE and STRU combination would lead to one or two 
"incorrect" and/or redundant trailing zero-bytes (owing to the 
vagaries of the filesystems in play) that led me to remark, on the 
way out of the room for a self-declared personal coffeebreak, "Come 
on, you guys, sometimes when you try to turn an apple into an orange 
you get back a lemon".

(As to my own recollections of the origins of netmail, as we called 
it when we were inventing it, and FTP, if I were to cite the article 
I wrote on the topic this message would almost certainly get censored 
for [mis]perceived ad homineminity.)

And just to save doing a separate message, note for Craig: Tom Van 
Vleck's article[s] on the history of mail on Multics are readily 
findable....  What, me make any cracks about whether coffee's enough?


cheers, map
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html

"One (indeed, perhaps the only) indisputable benefit of the 'Net is 
that you don't have to waste any stamps on, nor be complicitous in 
the killing of any trees for, letters to editors and/or other 
invincibly smug corporate behemoths that aren't going to be responded 
to because they show said institutions up, but need to be sent anyway."

        --first new, official Elements of Networking Style Slogan in 
yearsandyears