[ih] XEROX/PUP and Commercialization (was Re: FYI - Gordon Crovitz/WSJ on "Who Really Invented the Internet?")

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Jul 23, 2012, at 17:00 , Noel Chiappa wrote:

>> So, on the XEROX issue. 
> 
> I think it's worth noting that some Xerox people have gone on record as
> saying their role has been under-represented. See, for instance, "Dealers of
> Lightning" (Michael Hiltzik; Harper Collins, 1999), pg. 293:

Michael Hilzik thinks the article is wrong:
	<http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-who-invented-internet-20120723,0,5052169.story>

Of course, he could still think Xerox deserves more credit than it got. :)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


> Xerox's lawyers ... placed the team on a very short leash. ...
>  Nevertheless, they felt a powerful urge to impart their wisdom to their
>  friends at ARPA. Thanks to the leagal beagles' strictures, they were
>  reduced to getting their points across by a wierd pantomime of asking
>  inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions. ...
>  Eventually they managed to communicate enough of Pup's architecture for it
>  to become a crucial part of the ARPANET standard known as TCP/IP ...
>  PARC's contribution is mostly unsung ... Metcalfe, Shoch and the others
>  have gotten used to their contribution being minimized unfairly. "The
>  TCP/IP guys will never tell you they did this because of Xerox, because
>  they don't remember it that way", Shoch said.
> 
> Without a lot of investigation, I'm not going to take a detailed position on
> the proper apportionment of credit, but I do have a couple of comments.
> 
> First, I suspect the International Network Working Group (INWG) of the early
> 1970s (documented to some degree here:
> 
>  http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn12-2.a03.txt
> 
> by Hauben; I don't recall offhand any other good looks at it) was a big
> influence on both PUP and TCP/IP - and it rarely gets mentioned either.
> 
> Second, I think the PUP guys probably don't get as much credit as they
> properly deserve (although I'm not sure they deserve as much credit as the
> excerpt above makes it sound like they do), and I personally have always
> tried to 'write them in' when talking about the roots of the Internet (see
> e.g. here:
> 
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:History_of_the_Internet#Unbalanced
> 
> for one instance).
> 
> As to exactly how much credit the PUP people should get - I will leave that to
> others! I suspect that without transcripts of the meetings, we'll never know
> for sure, although I'd be curious to hear the reaction of those who were there
> (Vint, the MIT Daves, etc) to the Shoch/etc version of things (partiallly
> quoted above).
> 
> 	Noel
>