[ih] Header-people archive, etc

[Jack Haverty]

Noel!   Great job!   I thought the header-people annals were lost long
ago.   From what I recall,  they should be a gold mine as source of what
was actually happening through those projects.   They document what went on
between official meetings,  and outside the realm of any formal documents
that might have eventually appeared.

Craig - I agree with your causes for discrepancies,  but there's an aspect
I think you missed.   Meetings were rather nebulous things.   There was
always a semi-formal agenda,  but even more interactions,  discussions,
arguments,  and occasionally agreements or commitments happened outside of
the more formal sessions.    In the corridors,  at meals or the hotel bar,
in the afterhours bull sessions as we also discussed where to go to eat
until it was late enough that the choices were few - all were important.
There were many people who were involved in such discussions but were not
necessarily on the formal list of attendees.    They may have worked at or
near the meeting site,  or been in the area for another meeting,  or even
have come because they knew they could find an elusive person they had been
trying to contact (Hint,  initials might be VGC or REK).

So it was common to hear something,  or say something,  "at the meeting"
even without being recorded as an attendee.    It may even be that the
"meat" of a meeting actually happened outside of the formal sessions,  and
of course didn't appear in any minutes.    During one period of the
Internet meetings,  the formal sessions became largely status reports,
which conveyed what had happened recently.   The interactions outside of
the sessions, and outside of the minutes,  congealed what would happen
next.

I think that a while ago I related one such interaction that I had with Bob
Kahn while hanging on a subway strap in some city.   I don't think Bob was
in the formal list of attendees for whatever meeting it was,  but I
certainly remember him as being "at the meeting".

If you think of a meeting as a venue,  rather than as a session in a room,
you might explain many such discrepancies.   Whoever wrote the minutes
might not have been in the hall or restaurant.   Whoever said something
happened at the meeting might have not been in the formal sessions.   But
they both remember what happened at "the meeting".

Meetings were messy,  and not captured very well by minutes and
documents.   I trust recollections more,  but always remembering that no
one could be in every hallway,  bar,  and restaurant.   IMHO,  that was
important to the success of the Net.

/Jack
On May 15, 2012 10:41 AM, "Craig Partridge" <craig at aland.bbn.com> wrote:

> > I was troubled the by the difference between my recollection of the SMTP
> > history, and Craig's and Dave's, so I decided to research it a bit.
>
> Quick comment, as this is a list devoted to history.  Differences between
> recollections are common.  Also common are differences between written
> records
> and recollections.  Figuring out which one is right (even between written
> records and recollections, where you might think the contemporary written
> records are more accurate) is not easy.  When writing up a technical
> history
> of email for the IEEE Annals, I found the Rashomon effect was often
> present.
>
> A simple example: some of the early ARPANET meetings kept minutes including
> the list of attendees.  When interviewing folks for the article, I had
> people
> tell me what they'd heard/observed/said at the meeting. Later I would
> find they were not on the list of attendees. I would have to puzzle out if
> (a) they were there and not recorded; or (b) they were confusing meetings
> (often easy to do); or (c) their memory simply was playing tricks (e.g.
> confusing what had been told to them by a meeting attendee with being
> there).
>
> Craig
>
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