[ih] First file transfer on ARPANET

[John Day]

My memory is that there were two meetings:  one at BBN in late Spring 
of 73 and one at SRI in winter of 74.  There were some good ideas 
that came out of the first one, including the famous NetEd!

I remember it was toward the end of the meeting. Someone suggested it 
would be a good idea to have a common editor to use for small things 
on every host.  (I remember groaning to myself that there was 
probably no other program that was more a question of personal style. 
We would never get agreement in any reasonable time frame!  ;-)  When 
Padlipsky piped up and said that Chapter 1 of the MPM had a simple 
editor as an example PL/1 program.  Why not use that?  Amazingly, 
everyone said sure!  And what I thought was going to be an 
interminable debate was done in 5 minutes!  By the second meeting, 
there were several implementations. Of course, none of them were 
precisely the same!  ;-)

By the 2nd meeting, it seemed there was a reasonable set of things to 
start investigating.  It was really unfortunate that ARPA then chose 
to shut the whole thing down.  It had great promise and was what was 
needed for the next step in creating a true resource sharing network. 
After that, there are no new applications for a very long time.

Take care,
John



At 10:32 -0800 2012/12/12, Dave Crocker wrote:
>On 12/12/2012 7:20 AM, John Day wrote:
>>We had just gotten our feet on the ground and had an idea of what was
>>next when ARPA shut down USING, which would have started experimenting
>>with a bunch of things.
>
>
>Nancy Neigus and I chaired USING.  My recollection is that we never 
>developed a critical mass of focus or activity.
>
>Craig might have terminated the group prematurely, but I don't think 
>we had a track record that argued convincingly against the 
>termination.
>
>d/
>
>--
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net