[ih] IEN Notes and INWG

[John Day]

Just an addendum to that last note:

The FDT paper which was a bibliography of the 
current work in the area may have been the first 
"network produced" conference paper. Beginning in 
1976, I was living in Houston (my wife was 
post-doc'ing at Baylor) and working at Illinois 
and commuting over the 'Net.  (I used Telenet to 
get Multics and the Multics to get back to 
Illinois over the ARPANet.)

The database of citations was at Illinois.  It 
was outputed and moved to Multics, the Intro was 
added, and since I had no means to print on the 
conference forms (remember those camera ready 
forms we had to use?), ftp'ed it to Carl Sunshine 
in Southern California who printed it and snail 
mailed it to Danthine in Leige!

The FDT group was primarily Carl, Gregor Bochman 
at U of Quebec, Chris Vissers Twente U, and 
myself.  There were undoubtedly others but I have 
forgotten who.  Richard Tenney joined the effort 
later when it moved to ISO.  (I think but could 
be wrong about when Richard showed up.)

The VTP group was at least  Peter Higginson, UCL; 
Peter Linington(?), Don Shepherd, Canada; two 
people from ETH-Zurich (Ann Duenki (sp?) and 
Peter Schicker, probably Michel Gien or Hubert 
Zimmermann and maybe Najah Naffah from INRIA and 
myself.  There were undoubtedly others I can't 
remember.  There were no authors on the paper. 
Somewhere I have photos taken at a VTP meeting at 
INRIA in the fall of 77 but not a real group 
photo.

At 7:01 -0400 2010/03/24, John Day wrote:
>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