[ih] IEN Notes and INWG

[Matthias Bärwolff]

Still, Noel's take on the name of the ARPA sponsored TCP work as
documented in the IEN series seems to be right, too. Browsing through
some of the IENs, the term "Internet Working Group" appears -- though
somewhat casually -- at least two times: in IEN 26 and IEN 60. Obviously
this in no relation whatsoever to the "official" INWG (as in Internation
Network Working Group, also: IFIP WG 6.1); and, sure enough, "Internet
Protocol", or just "Internet"  was coming to be abbreviated "IN" in some
of the IENs.

John Day wrote:
> INWG originally stood for International Network Working Group, as
> opposed to the NWG which was the ARPANET group.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> At 16:42 -0400 2010/03/23, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>     > From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Matthias_B=E4rwolff?= <mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de>
>>
>>     > Just a quick question: Is it fair to say the IEN Notes came out of
>>     > INWG, or were these two different games? (There were INWG Notes,
>> too.)
>>     > Put differently, did the "group" that produced the IENs have a
>> name of
>>     > its own?
>>
>> Ah, you have, in that last sentence, put your finger on the problem!
>>
>> The group of people working under the DARPA banner didn't, AFAIK, have a
>> formal name. However, the group that worked on IP was occasionally
>> called the
>> "internet working group" (see, for instance, the first sentence of IEN
>> #26).
>>
>> When one remembers that the acronym used for 'Internet' at that point
>> in time
>> was IN, you can see exactly where this is going... The INWG that
>> produced the
>> INWG Notes was a _different_ Internet Working Group (as others have
>> already
>> pointed out).
>>
>> Just to maximize the confusion, at different times it was either one
>> or two
>> groups! Originally there was just one TCP group, then when TCP was
>> split into
>> TCP and IP, there were (for a while) separate TCP and IP groups - or, at
>> least, separate (temporally adjoining, I think) meetings.
>>
>>
>> Anyway, if you see contemporaneous (or later - the matching names have
>> confused more than one incautious historian, I have discovered)
>> references to
>> an "Internet Working Group", you need to dig a little deeper and work out
>> exactly _which_ "Internet Working Group" is being talked about...
>>
>>     Noel
> 

-- 
Matthias Bärwolff
www.bärwolff.de