[ih] Very early days of the IANA

[Jorge Amodio]

Hi Noel, et all,

> Anyway, as far as I know that's what produced the interest in having a set
> of rules that made us relatively safe from liability, as well as an angel
> body overhead to 'shield' us as individuals, hold insurance, etc, etc. I
> do not recall the Denmark meeting you speak of, but I am pretty sure that
> that would have been later.

Yes it was later and the plan to establish the "shield" was already in
motion. The event was the very first conference with the Inet format,
it was called Inet'91 and took place in Copenhagen Denmark on June 18,
1991, the previous week we had a workshop for developing countries.
I'm not sure if some of the information that was available on-line has
been archived in some place, I have an old email from Juha Heinanen
with a draft program for Inet'91 (UNI-C was the host and a major
sponsor).

Besides the main agenda, there were many meetings going on in
parallel, among them it was the first time that many networking
players in Latin America sat together to talk, obviously we didn't
reach any consensus :-).

At one of those meetings/hall conversations, I remember Vint
explaining the plan to launch ISOC and how the strategy was developed
to create an umbrella organization to provide an institutional
framework, deal as you said with liabilities/insurance, and somehow
give provide some support to Jon's work as IANA.

In August 1991, Vint circulated an e-mail (I've a copy of it) with a
brief description of ISOC, the announcement and an invitation to join
ISOC,

In that message, Vint included an appendix with "A Brief History of
the Internet and Related Networks", and there one of the paragraphs
said about IANA:

"The recording of identifiers is provided by the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) who has delegated one part of this
responsibility to an Internet Registry which acts as a central
repository for Internet information and which provides central
allocation of network and autonomous system identifiers, in some cases
to subsidiary registries located in various countries. The Internet
Registry (IR) also provides central maintenance of the Domain Name
System (DNS) root database which points to subsidiary distributed DNS
servers replicated throughout the Internet. The DNS distributed
database is used, interalia, to associate host and network names with
their Internet addresses and is critical to the operation of the
higher level TCP/IP protocols including electronic mail."

ISOC was not yet organized, and we had to respond directly to Vint to
become members.

Later ISOC was officially launched on June 15, 1992.

If somebody is interested in a copy of Vint's ISOC message (it was not
a private communication so I guess Vint will not object) I can copy it
to the list, it may help also to keep that piece of history archived
somewhere else.

Regards
Jorge