[ih] IEN Notes and INWG

[John Day]

Correct.  As someone stated before the IEN series 
and the INWG series were documents for two 
different groups.

INWG had 3 sub-groups.  One working on Transport, 
one working on a Virtual Terminal Protocol, and 
one working on Formal Description Techniques. 
The final output of all three were published as 
appendices to the conference proceedings of the 
conference in Liege in Feb 1978.

Interestingly, the VTP paper has an ISO TC97/SC16 
cover sheet on it.  The first meeting of SC16 was 
still a few weeks away.  The other two do not. 
The INWG FDT work lead directly to the ISO FDT 
work, so that would imply that all 3 papers were 
contributions to that first meeting in DC.

At 10:02 +0100 2010/03/24, Matthias Bärwolff wrote:
>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