[ih] FTP Design

[John Day]

At 11:15 -0400 2012/07/03, Craig Partridge wrote:
>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!

I completely agree.  When we saw a solution like this, everyone just 
knew it was right.

There isn't much to convince people.  Or if there is, it is going 
through it carefully and then the light goes in your audience and 
everyone has the same a-ha! you did. (essentially leading them 
through your process or your realizations after you had done it. I 
have often found myself doing something for one reason and then 
realizing that its implications were much broader and more 
fundamental than I had first realized.)  And in that early ARPANET 
group, elegance was worth a lot.  ;-)

>
>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.

This too.  Sometimes they come to you in a flash.  Sometimes, there 
were ideas floating around.  Sometimes you find upon reflection that 
the a-ha was prepared because another concept had become so natural 
you didn't notice you applied it.

We were schooled to look at problems "from the point of view of the 
organism, not the observer."  Upon reflection I have found that at 
the core of many insights.

It is also interesting how you can look at the same problem many 
times and not see it and then one day it hits you what it was you 
were missing.

Now if we just knew how to teach this.

Take care,
John

>
>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