[ih] FTP Design

[Craig Partridge]

I'm going to agree and disagree, based on my experience as an IEEE Annals
editor and author.   As an author I got pushed by editors to explain *why*
someone came up with an idea or why a particular idea was adopted -- when,
as Paul points out, the idea was so obviously right that, once found, voila!

But, having been pushed to dig deeper, every so often I found a gem -- a
challenge or flawed original idea or meme floating around the community
that inspired the original thinking.  And capturing that information is
worth a lot.

Thanks!

Craig

> 
> On 2012-07-01 4:05 AM, John Day wrote:
> > Re: [ih] FTP Design
> > Dave you are being too much the engineer and not enough the
> > historian.  ;-)  I want the intellectual history of arriving at the
> > concepts in Telnet.
> >
> > How did the ideas come about?
> >
> > If Bernie is right (and I assume he is), and his name is not on that
> > paper (and it isn't), then it can not possibly answer the question I
> > am asking.  ;-)
> 
> so, i am not dave, and i was only a kid when this was going on, but i
> have a rimshot.
> 
> the idea of symmetrical negotiation, do/don't, will/won't, is so
> obviously right that it feels like a gear meshing with other gears. it
> was the right thing to do, requiring only that some brilliant person
> unpolluted by complicated or proprietary ways of thinking, start from
> first principles, and hammer out the details.
> 
> in that it reminds me of IP, TCP, and SMTP. (not not IP6 or DNS or FTP
> or HTTP.)
> 
> "how did the ideas come about?" in this example made me think of a
> hegelian trichotomy. "because it was the right context to beget this."
> litmus test: "will the historians all say that the right person was
> finally in the right place at the right time to cause one era to end and
> the next to begin."
> 
> it's not a great dictum for daily living but it does seem to fit a lot
> of the early "internet" work to a "t".
> 
> paul