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

[Dave Crocker]

On 7/30/2012 8:16 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:
> On 30 Jul 2012 at 10:49, John Day wrote:
>
>> Those were the days, when CSC produced a copy of the ARPANET that was
>> 7 times slower.  Given a working example, I still don't understand
>> how they accomplished that!
>
> Maybe their programmers weren't as good...:o)


Back in the early 90s, I wrote a couple of summaries about the IETF 
processing, including an attempt to consider salient differences from 
other standards groups.

e.g.,

    http://www.bbiw.net/ietf/ietf-stds.html

In thinking about the comparison, I considered the usually range of 
claimed differences that were important, like intelligence of 
participants, politicization of the process, etc.

My own assessment was/is that us and them all tended to have bright, 
well-intentioned and knowledgeable people.  That is, all of the trivial 
points seemed consonant, rather than being legitimate points of 
departure.  (I'm painting with very broad strokes here.  So, yes, I 
think that their requiring "consensus" and our permitting "rough 
consensus" is an important difference.  But see below.)

I finally decided that the essential difference was that they tended to 
seek a solution that was the union of everyone's separate wish lists, 
whereas the IETF tended to settle on the intersection.  The critical 
pressure that seemed to force this was a sense of urgency for getting an 
initial, working capability fielded.

Would that that still drove IETF work.

d/
-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net