[ih] Peter Salus / Baran's work

[Noel Chiappa]

Does anyone happen to have an email address for Peter Salus? He recently (OK,
it was 2008 - time flies as one gets older ;-) published an otherwise-useful
work:

  Peter H. Salus (editor), "The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished
	Foundations of the Internet", Peer-to-Peer Communications, 2008

which, alas, contains a serious error (IMO), and I'd like to let him know
about it.


I'm give it here, too, because this is a canard that I've been trying to kill
for a long time, with little success. However, hopefully, eventually the
correction will catch up with the bogon.

So that book says (pg. xiii):

  "Unfortunately, the innovative work of Baran was executed as an Air Force
  contract ... It was not widely circulated..."

This meme is pretty common. Alas, it's wrong.

Paulina Borsook pointed out to me quite a while ago that Baran's work _was_
published openly in a fairly widely distributed journal, at the time it was
done, viz.:

  Paul Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks", (IEEE Transactions on
  Communications Systems, Vol. CS-12 No. 1, pp. 1-9, March 1964) 

This 9-page paper (check it out, here:

  http://www.cs.ucla.edu/classes/cs217/Baran64.pdf

don't take my word for it) contains all the essential ideas from the RAND
multi-page set, in some detail. (Packets - although not called that at that
time, of course - make their appearance on page 6 of that paper.)


So an assertion that his work was was 'not openly available' is, frankly,
completely incorrect.

Furthermore, an abstract of that '64 IEEE ToCS paper was published in IEEE
Spectrum (circulation about 160,000 in those days) in August '64. I don't
know how much more widely circulated one can get.

	Noel