From casner at acm.org  Sat Sep  8 11:21:26 2012
From: casner at acm.org (Stephen Casner)
Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2012 11:21:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [ih] internet-history Digest, Vol 62, Issue 19
In-Reply-To: <a06240835cc641537120c@[192.168.0.122]>
References: <mailman.1902.1336903868.674.internet-history@postel.org>
	<85470AE3-120D-45BF-955B-CFD5B565430C@earthlink.net>
	<503E5213.8020900@dcrocker.net>
	<a06240835cc641537120c@[192.168.0.122]>
Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.1.10.1209080953140.98074@luft.gateway.2wire.net>

Probably in the more-than-you-cared-to-know department regarding Dave
Retz and ELF, some comments in-line below from my personal experience
to add to what Jake, Dave and John have said...

On Tue, 28 Aug 2012, Elizabeth Feinler wrote:
> > From: Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net>
> > Cycling back to the topic of Arpa's wanting to share resources, when we
> > tried to get funding for 32K more memory for the system, Arpa instead
> > said we should get a PDP-11 and use one of the terminal concentrator
> > systems (ANTS from Illinois or ELF from Santa Barbara) and do remote
> > computing.
>
> I believe that ELF was done by Dave Retz while he was at SRI.  Most
> DEC PDP-11s used it until it was superseded by UNIX.  I think there
> is an ELF manual (or some documentation - not sure) at CHM.

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012, Dave Crocker wrote:
> I believe Dave was at UCSB.

According to [1], Dave Retz was a graduate student at UCSB around
1966, and he moved to SRI in 1974.  For at least part of 1974, Dave
Retz was at Speech Communications Research Lab (SCRL), located in a
beautiful hilltop location above Santa Barbara, and that is where a
good portion of the ELF work was done.  I recall my first business
trip after joining ISI was when a few of us from ISI went to SCRL for
an IETF-style code sprint to work on ELF.  The reason for my
involvement was that ELF was to be the OS for the packet speech
project as well.

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012, John Day wrote:
> Yes, Retz was at UCSB.
>
> ANTS (I and II) and ELF had the same basic OS architecture.  ANTS was written
> in a high level language and ELF in PDP-11 assembler.  They got basically the
> same throughput, (which was considered inadequate at the time).  (300
> messages/sec sticks in my mind but don't quote me.)
>
> There was a paper at conference about 1975 in which a group at Waterloo tried
> to solve the same problem with the same OS structure and got basically the
> same throughput.  The Waterloo group had no contact with the ARPANET efforts,
> so I concluded that what we were seeing were the limits of the architecture,
> not the programming.

At ISI, we found that ELF's performance was not quite up to what we
needed for the packet speech work.  In particular, the context switch
time was too long and the rate at which data was moved between the
user and kernel address spaces in the PDP11/45 (for example, in
network I/O) was too low.  We decided to develop our own OS as a
replacement.  It was called EPOS, for Environment for Processing of
Online Speech, and first became operational in mid-1975.  Like ELF, it
was implemented in assembly language.  We achieved a context-switch
time of 125 microseconds and improved the inter-address-space transfer
rate by something like a factor of four.

EPOS was installed at a number of ARPANET sites, not all involved in
the packet speech project.  It was in service for 10 years, including
as the OS supporting the ST Gateway developed by Lincoln Lab for use
at the Wideband Satellite Network sites.

> Today's OSs mainly use the same architecture we had for ANTS, ELF, and UNIX.
> They have solved performance issues by using Moore's Law. IOW, they didn't.
> ;-)
>
> The problem as we saw it was to get speed while maintaining the properties of
> modularity and good system design.  Most of the overhead was in context
> switching and data copying.  It was clear that just optimizing code, i.e. do
> the whole thing in assembler was not the answer.

Indeed, those are the limitations, but the level of optimization
available to us was at least sufficient to solve our problems at the
time.

                                                        -- Steve

[1] Robert M. Gray, Linear Predictive Coding and the Internet
Protocol, now Publishers, 2010.


From vint at google.com  Tue Sep 11 09:22:59 2012
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:22:59 -0400
Subject: [ih] ignore. this is a filter test
Message-ID: <CAHxHggeazfL7ifqLayn853TXxetY_7H+7ta9L_x52oWds12d5A@mail.gmail.com>

some recipients of my emails on this list report that their email server
classifies my messages as spam (the gmail server may do this as a result of
DKIM not working when a message is re-sent through a list server).

If you see this message in your spam folder, please let me know with a
private message to vint at google.com

thanks, sorry for the broadcast but it seems to only immediate way to
provide raw data to debug the problem.

v
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20120911/652899f4/attachment.htm>

From arussell at jhu.edu  Sat Sep 22 08:46:38 2012
From: arussell at jhu.edu (Andrew Russell)
Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2012 11:46:38 -0400
Subject: [ih] =?windows-1252?q?Histories_of_the_Internet_=96_Call_for_Pape?=
	=?windows-1252?q?rs?=
Message-ID: <11AC4726-895E-4058-B467-6E0577C30BED@jhu.edu>

Hi - This may be of interest to some list subscribers.  Please pass it on,

Thanks,

Andy Russell


------------------------------------


Histories of the Internet ? Call for Papers
 
This is a call for papers for a Special Issue of Information & Culture: A Journal of History (Volume 50, Issue 1, February-March 2015). For the latest and most complete information on the special issue please see www.sigcis.org/InternetIssue.
 
Guest Editors
 
William H. Dutton, Professor of Internet Studies, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow, Balliol College
 
Thomas Haigh, Associate Professor of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin?Milwaukee
 
Andrew L. Russell, Assistant Professor of History, College of Arts & Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology
 
Deadlines
 
Abstracts can be submitted to an editor of the special issue for informal feedback until 1 March 2013: e-mail: William dot Dutton at oii dot ox dot ac dot uk.
 
Full papers should be submitted to the managing editor, George Royer, for review by 30 August 2013.
 
The Call
 
The increasing importance of the Internet, Web and related information and communication technologies, such as social media, has made it ever harder and ever more important to understand their history. Many authors have traced the timelines of technical developments, and a growing number of books have been written about the social history of the innovations that comprise and enable this network of networks. Scholars disagree over the very definition of the Internet and its history as a set of protocols, a large technical system, an infrastructure, or ensemble of technologies.
 
The editors invite original, scholarly treatments of the history of the Internet that critically examine common assumptions about its origins and developments over the decades. Submissions could take any number of approaches, including:
?      Broad historical perspectives on the Internet?s development;
?      Historical case studies of particular developments, such as ARPANet, TCP/IP, the World Wide Web, or Facebook;
?      Accounts of computer and communication networks, such as Open Systems Interconnection, online services, the European Informatics Network, and digital mobile telephone networks that contributed to or anticipated aspects of today?s Internet but did not use Internet technologies;
?      Regional histories of Internet adoption or innovation;
?      Studies of an institution, such as ICANN, W3C, or Internet Governance Forum;
?      Explorations of an event, such as the dotcom bubble;
?      Critical analyses of scholarly or popular narratives about the Internet?s history.
These are only illustrative of possible approaches, as we would welcome creative approaches to the history of the Internet that go beyond these specific examples.  
 
About the Editors
 
William H. Dutton is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, Bill was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he was elected President of the Faculty, and remains an Emeritus Professor. In the UK, Bill was a Fulbright Scholar, then National Director of the UK's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT), and founding director of the OII during its first decade. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (forthcoming 2013), and is writing a book on the Fifth Estate.
 
Thomas Haigh is an Associate Professor of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin?Milwaukee and chair of the SIGCIS group for historians of information technology. He has published widely on the history of computing ? see more at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.
 
Andrew L. Russell is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Russell has published numerous articles and book chapters on the history of computers and telecommunications, and is the author of An Open World: History, Ideology, and Network Standards (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
 
About the Journal
 
Information & Culture: A Journal of History publishes high-quality, peer reviewed articles on the history of information. The journal honors its (45+ year) heritage by continuing to publish in the areas of library, archival, museum, conservation, and information science history. However, the journal's scope has been broadened significantly beyond these areas to include the historical study of any topic that would fall under the purview of any of the modern interdisciplinary schools of information. In keeping with the spirit of the information schools, the work is human centered and looks at the interactions of people, organizations, and societies with information and technologies. Social and cultural context of information and information technology, viewed from an historical perspective, is at the heart of the journal's interests. See: http://www.infoculturejournal.org/about
 
Submission and Review Process
 
Full papers should be from 6,000 to 10,000 words, including all notes and bibliography. Shorter or longer papers might be considered in exceptional cases, based on the merit of the case. The editors expect to publish 4-6 papers in the special issue, with any additional papers that merit publication scheduled for journal issues that will appear after the special issue. Before preparing or submitting an article, please check for any updated instructions at www.sigcis.org/InternetIssue.
 
Authors are asked to please follow the submission guidelines available at http://www.infoculturejournal.org/submissions/submission_requirements. In particular, authors should prepare notes and bibliography in accordance with the journal style. Neither the editorial office nor the special editors should need to make formatting changes to notes or bibliography.