From mfidelman at meetinghouse.net  Sat Mar 10 16:17:16 2018
From: mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 19:17:16 -0500
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed
 Mosaic & HTTPd?
Message-ID: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>

Hi Folks,

I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA 
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization 
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?

I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the 
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime 
time, so to speak.

Any insights?

Thanks,

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra



From vint at google.com  Sat Mar 10 16:51:46 2018
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 19:51:46 -0500
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>

you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.

vint


On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>
> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
> time, so to speak.
>
> Any insights?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sat Mar 10 17:26:57 2018
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 14:26:57 +1300
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <b67cc282-7a19-a1bc-2f19-ba2ffc438b59@gmail.com>

As a starting point, try 
* Chapter 7 of "How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web", James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Oxford University Press, 2000.

There are also a few hints in:
* Chapter 3 of "Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft", Jim Clark with Owen Edwards, St Martins Press, 1999.
* Chapter 6 of "Weaving the Web", Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, HarperCollins, 1999.

My impression is that, like the original server and browsers at CERN, this was a samizdat project mainly unknown to the management. Jim Clark is quite rude about NCSA management, in fact. The original http daemon was from CERN in any case (http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html).

Regards
   Brian

On 11/03/2018 13:17, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA 
> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization 
> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
> 
> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the 
> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime 
> time, so to speak.
> 
> Any insights?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sat Mar 10 17:38:13 2018
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 14:38:13 +1300
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>

I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.

Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807

In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.

Regards
   Brian

On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
> 1994.
> 
> vint
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>
>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>> time, so to speak.
>>
>> Any insights?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Miles Fidelman
>>
>> --
>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 


From bortzmeyer at nic.fr  Sun Mar 11 13:37:09 2018
From: bortzmeyer at nic.fr (Stephane Bortzmeyer)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 21:37:09 +0100
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>

On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
 Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
 a message of 25 lines which said:

> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,

It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sun Mar 11 15:56:24 2018
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 11:56:24 +1300
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
Message-ID: <e301072b-db84-7c7c-1fdc-27e75ec03253@gmail.com>

On 12/03/2018 09:37, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>  Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>  a message of 25 lines which said:
> 
>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
> 
> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
> not just a reading one).

The problem was that it only ran on a NeXt, which was a marvellous device
that failed in the market. But certainly, in the High Energy Physics world
it was of course the CERN server and client code that was installed and
used first. On the other hand, Tim immediately saw the advantage of Mosaic
at that time, when Unix and X-windows were growing like mushrooms. It was
Tim personally who showed me Mosaic (on my NCD connected to CERNVAX) and
within a day Jean-Michel Jouanigot had it running on our group server
(dxcoms.cern.ch for those with long memories).

    Brian


From jack at 3kitty.org  Sun Mar 11 16:02:14 2018
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 16:02:14 -0700
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
Message-ID: <d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>

Good point, but I'd make a stronger distinction.  TBL's vision, and the
implementation, was of a collaborative mechanism, where all the members
of the web would both produce and consume information - "authoring" and
"reading" in a collaborative environment of geographically dispersed
colleagues.  The protocol had both "GET" and "PUT" primitives.

When I first encountered the CERN code sometime in 1991 or so, I
downloaded it and got it running.  My immediate reaction was "Wow.
Finally someone has come up with the next 'killer app'."  The "network
community" had been trying to go beyond the classic workhorses of
Telnet/FTP/Mail for 20 years, but the innovation that has endured came
from the "user community" of physicists.

But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.

That has changed somewhat over time, but the focus still seems to be
consumption, not production -- browsing, rather than collaboration.
There are collaborative mechanisms (I personally like Mediawiki), but
IMHO the dominant usage is still consumption.   Production seems to have
moved to social media, where the structure of the collaboration is set
by the corporations rather than the users.

/Jack Haverty


On 03/11/2018 01:37 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>  Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>  a message of 25 lines which said:
> 
>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
> 
> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
> not just a reading one).
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> 


From jeanjour at comcast.net  Sun Mar 11 16:21:17 2018
From: jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 19:21:17 -0400
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
	<d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <517A1BB5-C689-4233-BA8D-F56476FFBBDF@comcast.net>

My understanding (from afar) was that the ?producers? for Mosaic were the supercomputer apps that were generating lots of data and they needed a tool to facilitate managing it.  There was a need at NCSA for something like what Mosaic was.

> On Mar 11, 2018, at 19:02, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> Good point, but I'd make a stronger distinction.  TBL's vision, and the
> implementation, was of a collaborative mechanism, where all the members
> of the web would both produce and consume information - "authoring" and
> "reading" in a collaborative environment of geographically dispersed
> colleagues.  The protocol had both "GET" and "PUT" primitives.
> 
> When I first encountered the CERN code sometime in 1991 or so, I
> downloaded it and got it running.  My immediate reaction was "Wow.
> Finally someone has come up with the next 'killer app'."  The "network
> community" had been trying to go beyond the classic workhorses of
> Telnet/FTP/Mail for 20 years, but the innovation that has endured came
> from the "user community" of physicists.
> 
> But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
> somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
> consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
> 
> That has changed somewhat over time, but the focus still seems to be
> consumption, not production -- browsing, rather than collaboration.
> There are collaborative mechanisms (I personally like Mediawiki), but
> IMHO the dominant usage is still consumption.   Production seems to have
> moved to social media, where the structure of the collaboration is set
> by the corporations rather than the users.
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> On 03/11/2018 01:37 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>> Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>> a message of 25 lines which said:
>> 
>>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
>> 
>> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
>> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
>> not just a reading one).
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From steve.bunch at gmail.com  Sun Mar 11 18:11:53 2018
From: steve.bunch at gmail.com (Steve Bunch)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 21:11:53 -0400
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <e301072b-db84-7c7c-1fdc-27e75ec03253@gmail.com>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
	<e301072b-db84-7c7c-1fdc-27e75ec03253@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <0DFDC755-AAA0-4794-B0C6-34C69B3F6786@gmail.com>

> 
> On Mar 11, 2018, at 6:56 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 12/03/2018 09:37, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>> Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>> a message of 25 lines which said:
>> 
>>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
>> 
>> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
>> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
>> not just a reading one).
> 
> The problem was that it only ran on a NeXt, which was a marvellous device
> that failed in the market. But certainly, in the High Energy Physics world
> it was of course the CERN server and client code that was installed and
> used first. On the other hand, Tim immediately saw the advantage of Mosaic
> at that time, when Unix and X-windows were growing like mushrooms. It was
> Tim personally who showed me Mosaic (on my NCD connected to CERNVAX) and
> within a day Jean-Michel Jouanigot had it running on our group server
> (dxcoms.cern.ch for those with long memories).

Mosaic used X Windows, available on any UNIX system of the time.  Eric Bina, who wrote much of Mosaic, worked on our X Windows team at the Motorola Computer Group facility in Champaign-Urbana for a couple of years before going across town to NCSA, and X Windows and graphics were second nature to him.  

We should never underestimate the power of ?ease of diffusion? in whether or how fast something gets adopted.  A lot of truly great ideas die on the vine of an exotic plant when it goes extinct, while less-stellar ideas live on because the software was free and easy to port.

Steve

>    Brian
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.




From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Sun Mar 11 18:35:55 2018
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 18:35:55 -0700
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
	<d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <aff7da32-2d08-3722-847c-c69c387a5d30@dcrocker.net>

On 3/11/2018 4:02 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
> somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
> consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.


Remember that for a time, gopher was very stiff competition for the web.

Poor IPR and management policies by one side or the other, gopher had 
the major advantage of being usable with existing txt documents while 
the early web /required/ html and the tools for producing them were few 
and poor.  That gave gopher a much larger cache of documents to share. 
Initially.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net


From mfidelman at meetinghouse.net  Mon Mar 12 08:45:57 2018
From: mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 11:45:57 -0400
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <aff7da32-2d08-3722-847c-c69c387a5d30@dcrocker.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<20180311203709.oomhbju7dwyqoftn@nic.fr>
	<d20c1ce9-5a34-9875-abf6-64a8856098a2@3kitty.org>
	<aff7da32-2d08-3722-847c-c69c387a5d30@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <a356e7a7-af7f-2fdc-d4cc-20823d9ec138@meetinghouse.net>

On 3/11/18 9:35 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> On 3/11/2018 4:02 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
>> somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
>> consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
>
> Remember that for a time, gopher was very stiff competition for the web.
>
> Poor IPR and management policies by one side or the other, gopher had
> the major advantage of being usable with existing txt documents while
> the early web /required/ html and the tools for producing them were few
> and poor.  That gave gopher a much larger cache of documents to share.
> Initially.
>
> d/
>
Of course, from almost the beginning, Mosaic and future browsers 
supported gopher:: URLs.? I used to host a bunch of gopher servers, and 
when we did our project installing Internet in the Cambridge Public 
Library (1st ever, high speed Internet in a public library!!!) - we set 
up the machines with Mosaic as the primary GUI, with links to things 
like the WWW Public Library - but an awful lot of the resources we 
linked to were gopher servers.

Re. losing the "producer" flavor... a lot of that went away when Mozilla 
stopped shipping with a built in WYSIWYG web composer. But.. there was 
always the conflict that one had to have somewhere to "publish" stuff.? 
In academia, that was often one's personal workstation, or the 
department server - but for everyone else, not a lot of people had write 
access to a gopher or web server.? Nowadays, laptops come with built in 
servers - but no composers, and it's kind of hard to publish from behind 
a NAT router.? Hosted WordPress seems to have become the vehicle for a 
rather huge amount of publishing to the web.

Miles



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra



From mfidelman at meetinghouse.net  Mon Mar 12 09:05:19 2018
From: mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 12:05:19 -0400
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>

Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral 
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization & 
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.

I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that 
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.? 
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to 
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to 
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual 
subsumption by today's web.

A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge 
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less 
visible.? IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the 
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by 
something even newer and shinier. Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the 
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."? I'd kind of 
like to understand the environment in which that happened.

By analogy.? Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN, 
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.? We all know the story 
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.? The 
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various 
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some 
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the 
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for 
various O/S environments.

Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a 
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all 
kind of sketchy.)

Cheers,

Miles



On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
>
> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>
> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
>
> Regards
>     Brian
>
> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
>> 1994.
>>
>> vint
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Folks,
>>>
>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>>
>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>>> time, so to speak.
>>>
>>> Any insights?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Miles Fidelman
>>>
>>> --
>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra



From tte at cs.fau.de  Mon Mar 12 09:05:29 2018
From: tte at cs.fau.de (Toerless Eckert)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 17:05:29 +0100
Subject: [ih] fragmentation (Re: Could it have been different? [was Re:
 vm vs. memory])
In-Reply-To: <59F13D7B.7030503@redbarn.org>
References: <59F13D7B.7030503@redbarn.org>
Message-ID: <20180312160529.GA1951@faui40p.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>

IMHO, the fundamental issue is that we lost the speed of experimentation
and agile improvement of network infrastructure before 1994, with
the introduction of specialized,accelerated hardware, vendor software
development processes and "professional" network operations.

I don't think we'll ever recover even though its technically not too
difficult to see whats needed: actual virtual networks that can be evolved
and innovated with. Down to the NPU and packets schedulers. If every 
network device was a VM-hosting compute system you could even think of getting
there.

Maybe we're going to get some 5% of whats needed via network slicing.
Judgemenet on the percentages is out. But its not going to be high.

Applications kinda went der othre way, having the ability for a lot more
agile innovation and experimentation through VMs in the last 10 years.
To some extend, that is also coming to an end with containeriziation
because it removes the lower layers of innovation and increases the lock in of
innovative applications into a maze of linux and ecosystem vendor peculiarities.
Not to speak of serverless compute. But at least the gilded society itself
will still be able to innovate faster than network equipment vendors.

Cheers
Toerless

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:42:19AM +0200, Paul Vixie wrote:
> 
> 
> Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> ...
> > Now that IPv4 is truly hitting its limits, the main operational complaint
> > against IPv6 is that it's too different from IPv4. But the incentives are
> > finally shifting in IPv6's favour, like it or not.
> 
> i don't even know what i don't like anymore. but for the history books 
> that may be written about our era, if indeed we have a future at all:
> 
> tony li said that ipv6 was too little, too soon. this was a play on 
> words, because the usual complaint is "too little, too late". tony was 
> right, even moreso than i realized at the time. we specified a lot of 
> things that didn't work and had to be revised or thrown out -- because 
> we did not know what we needed and we thought we were in a hurry. we had 
> time, as history will show, to spend another ten years thinking about ipng.
> 
> where we are today is that fragmentation is completely hosed. pmtud does 
> not work in practice, and also cannot work in theory due to scale 
> (forget speed-- it's scale that kills.) the only reliable way to 
> communicate with ipv6 is to use a low enough MTU that it never exceeds 
> any link MTU. in practice that means an ipv6 payload, plus its headers, 
> has to fit in an ethernet packet, so, 1500 octets. you can special case 
> the on-link LAN scenario so that if you have 9000 octets available you 
> can use them -- but that's the only time you can use more than about 
> 1200 octets for your payload.
> 
> this means one of ipv6's major claimed-up-front advantages, which is 
> that only endpoints will fragment rather than gateways doing so as in 
> ipv4, never came about. in fact, ipv6 is far worse than ipv4 in this 
> way, as we learned by using ip fragmentation on UDP/53 (my idea: bad!)
> 
> this also means that we're chained to the MTU of the second-generation 
> 10-megabit ethernet, which was carefully sized to fit a bunch of radio 
> spectrum and cable length parameters which have never applied since 
> then. but the IEEE 802 people know they're stuck with 1500 forever, 
> since no next generation of ethernet can succeed without being able to 
> transparently bridge onto the previous generation.
> 
> history is hard, let's do math.
> 
> > ; (155*10^6) / (53*8)
> >         ~365566.03773584905660377358
> > ; (10*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~833.33333333333333333333
> > ; (100*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~8333.33333333333333333333
> > ; (1000*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~83333.33333333333333333333
> > ; (10000*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~833333.33333333333333333333
> > ; (40000*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~3333333.33333333333333333333
> > ; (100000*10^6) / (1500*8)
> >         ~8333333.33333333333333333333
> 
> right, so ATM failed in the market for a lot of reasons (state is what 
> kills, not speed, like i said) but one of those reasons was that an OC3C 
> at line rate was carrying too many cells per second to be able to handle 
> all of their headers in then-current or even projected-soon electronics. 
> we were wrong, and ATM has been used at OC12C, OC48C, and i've even seen 
> OC192C and OC768C, truly a testament to human cussedness fit for a 
> bumper sticker or perhaps a t-shirt.
> 
> looks to me like less than half a 10GBE is just as bad, and that at 
> 40GBE and 100GBE it's well beyond absurdity. thankful as we are for 
> moore's law, i regret like anything the inability to send large enough 
> packets in the WAN so that we don't all need a 100 kilowatt routers to 
> handle the headers.
> 
> ipv6's mindless and unnecessary early adoption of an unworkable 
> fragmentation regime has chained my applications and those of my 
> children and their children to the maximum size of a packet in a closed 
> 10-megahertz radio network. yay us.
> 
> -- 
> P Vixie
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.

-- 
---
tte at cs.fau.de


From jack at 3kitty.org  Mon Mar 12 10:32:12 2018
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:32:12 -0700
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
	<60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <9d1f04c8-2fd6-0264-9bdd-4e630074957a@3kitty.org>

Hi Miles,

In dissecting "organizational histories ... motivations", it might be
interesting to look at the financial aspects - not only who paid for
what and when, but what benefit did they expect to get in return, wnd when.

It's the old adage - Follow The Money.  IMHO, somewhere along the
timeline from the 60s to today, the climate switched from a largely
technical focus (how can we make this work?) to a largely financial
focus (how can we make money out of this?).  That, IMHO, dictated the
development of what we have today far more than technical merits.

I remember, back in the early 90s, that you had to pay for a license to
use a browser.  That may have been a pivotal historical event, when IIRC
"apps" beforehand had been free to FTP.

/Jack

On 03/12/2018 09:05 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral 
> and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization & 
> players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
> 
> I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that 
> spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.? 
> How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to 
> TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to 
> the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual 
> subsumption by today's web.
> 
> A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge 
> of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less 
> visible.? IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the 
> HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by 
> something even newer and shinier. Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the 
> web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."? I'd kind of 
> like to understand the environment in which that happened.
> 
> By analogy.? Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN, 
> and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.? We all know the story 
> of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.? The 
> environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various 
> personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some 
> of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the 
> next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for 
> various O/S environments.
> 
> Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a 
> timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all 
> kind of sketchy.)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Miles
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
>> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
>> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
>>
>> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
>> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>>
>> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
>>
>> Regards
>>     Brian
>>
>> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
>>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
>>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
>>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
>>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
>>> 1994.
>>>
>>> vint
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Folks,
>>>>
>>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>>>> time, so to speak.
>>>>
>>>> Any insights?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Miles Fidelman
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>>
>>>> _______
>>>> internet-history mailing list
>>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>
> 


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Mon Mar 12 12:17:40 2018
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 08:17:40 +1300
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
	<60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <64ad68d4-371a-7995-a5f0-ce9adf139243@gmail.com>

On 13/03/2018 05:05, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral 
> and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization & 
> players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
> 
> I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that 
> spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.

The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
actual division leader) both stated later that their main contribution to
the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and unauthorised.
Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for details.

The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in the US was
set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now, dem at alcf.anl.gov).

A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
Classical skunk works.

> How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to 
> TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to 
> the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual 
> subsumption by today's web.
> 
> A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge 
> of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less 
> visible.? IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the 
> HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by 
> something even newer and shinier. 

In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on stimulating
that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been something else
in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more powerful
paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.

> Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the 
> web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."? I'd kind of 
> like to understand the environment in which that happened.

The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it was because
Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that Netscape
became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
didn't get out of the way.

> By analogy.? Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN, 
> and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.

I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their history;
NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.

1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439

    Brian

> We all know the story 
> of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.? The 
> environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various 
> personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some 
> of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the 
> next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for 
> various O/S environments.
> 
> Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a 
> timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all 
> kind of sketchy.)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Miles
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
>> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
>> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
>>
>> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
>> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>>
>> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
>>
>> Regards
>>     Brian
>>
>> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
>>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
>>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
>>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
>>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
>>> 1994.
>>>
>>> vint
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Folks,
>>>>
>>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>>>> time, so to speak.
>>>>
>>>> Any insights?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Miles Fidelman
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>>
>>>> _______
>>>> internet-history mailing list
>>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______
>>> internet-history mailing list
>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>
> 




From vint at google.com  Mon Mar 12 12:52:45 2018
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 15:52:45 -0400
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <64ad68d4-371a-7995-a5f0-ce9adf139243@gmail.com>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
	<60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
	<64ad68d4-371a-7995-a5f0-ce9adf139243@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggeCpLcw-RMqNYM-uqtKcL=OswTe+wyygwOkHRKcTtHmmw@mail.gmail.com>

I am with Brian on this. Maybe you should contact Larry Smarr? he headed
NCSA at the time.
Of course the 20-20 back vision may prove to be a distorted view of
history.

I will see Larry in the next month or so but sounds like you'd like a more
immediate response?

v


On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13/03/2018 05:05, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> > Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral
> > and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
> > players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
> >
> > I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that
> > spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.
>
> The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
> group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
> actual division leader) both stated later that their main contribution to
> the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and unauthorised.
> Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
> some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for details.
>
> The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
> know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
> That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in the US was
> set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now,
> dem at alcf.anl.gov).
>
> A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
> Classical skunk works.
>
> > How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
> > TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to
> > the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
> > subsumption by today's web.
> >
> > A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge
> > of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
> > visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the
> > HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by
> > something even newer and shinier.
>
> In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on
> stimulating
> that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been something
> else
> in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more powerful
> paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.
>
> > Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
> > web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of
> > like to understand the environment in which that happened.
>
> The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it was
> because
> Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that Netscape
> became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
> didn't get out of the way.
>
> > By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN,
> > and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.
>
> I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
> as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
> I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their history;
> NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.
>
> 1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439
>
>     Brian
>
> > We all know the story
> > of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The
> > environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
> > personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some
> > of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the
> > next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for
> > various O/S environments.
> >
> > Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a
> > timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all
> > kind of sketchy.)
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Miles
> >
> >
> >
> > On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> >> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
> >> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
> >> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about
> NCSA management.
> >>
> >> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
> >> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
> >>
> >> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a
> whole lot.
> >>
> >> Regards
> >>     Brian
> >>
> >> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
> >>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA
> project
> >>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project
> that
> >>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then
> CEO of
> >>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric
> Bina
> >>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape
> Communications in
> >>> 1994.
> >>>
> >>> vint
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <
> mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hi Folks,
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at
> NCSA
> >>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
> >>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked
> for?
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
> >>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
> >>>> time, so to speak.
> >>>>
> >>>> Any insights?
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks,
> >>>>
> >>>> Miles Fidelman
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> >>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> >>>>
> >>>> _______
> >>>> internet-history mailing list
> >>>> internet-history at postel.org
> >>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> _______
> >>> internet-history mailing list
> >>> internet-history at postel.org
> >>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
> >>>
> >
>
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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From paul at redbarn.org  Mon Mar 12 14:31:24 2018
From: paul at redbarn.org (Paul Vixie)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 14:31:24 -0700
Subject: [ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <64ad68d4-371a-7995-a5f0-ce9adf139243@gmail.com>
References: <5bbd19cb-4a9b-9897-abfd-e4b33dd6748a@meetinghouse.net>
	<CAHxHggem6JEjyF2XKmZpB82dBh=MK+kNn3T_GCRzsyB1ba_TqA@mail.gmail.com>
	<e4c7a734-9315-9ec8-4144-05bd9459cb79@gmail.com>
	<60de1cd6-5e75-f53c-3fd5-b405a336cef5@meetinghouse.net>
	<64ad68d4-371a-7995-a5f0-ce9adf139243@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5AA6F1AC.1050500@redbarn.org>



Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> ...
>
> The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
> know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.

everywhere i worked in the 1980's we hid our internet related costs in 
the phone bill and stonewalled the auditors if any. i remember the day 
brian reid told me to list gatekeeper.dec.com in my budget request for 
the coming year, and i remember thinking, wow, how far we have come. he 
and richard johnsson had been skunkworking it for years before i arrived.

i think this informs us not just about the history of the internet and 
the nature of disruptive innovation, but something dark about human nature.

-- 
P Vixie



From mfidelman at meetinghouse.net  Mon Mar 12 17:50:16 2018
From: mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 20:50:16 -0400
Subject: [ih] Fwd: Re: anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that
 developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
In-Reply-To: <c6e01550-780d-69a1-1cc4-0a69402d7e33@meetinghouse.net>
References: <c6e01550-780d-69a1-1cc4-0a69402d7e33@meetinghouse.net>
Message-ID: <424b658f-431d-48b1-ee9e-52961c259bc7@meetinghouse.net>

Actually, speed doesn't matter all that much - but his contact info is 
online, so I'll just reach out.? Thanks guys!

On 3/12/18 3:52 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> I am with Brian on this. Maybe you should contact Larry Smarr? he 
> headed NCSA at the time.
> Of course the 20-20 back vision may prove to be a distorted view of 
> history.
>
> I will see Larry in the next month or so but sounds like you'd like a 
> more immediate response?
>
> v
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter 
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com <mailto:brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 13/03/2018 05:05, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>     > Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the
>     oral
>     > and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
>     > players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
>     >
>     > I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates
>     that
>     > spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the
>     workers.
>
>     The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
>     group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
>     actual division leader) both stated later that their main
>     contribution to
>     the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and
>     unauthorised.
>     Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
>     some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for
>     details.
>
>     The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far
>     as I
>     know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
>     That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in
>     the US was
>     set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now,
>     dem at alcf.anl.gov <mailto:dem at alcf.anl.gov>).
>
>     A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
>     Classical skunk works.
>
>     > How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
>     > TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts
>     that led to
>     > the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
>     > subsumption by today's web.
>     >
>     > A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal
>     knowledge
>     > of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
>     > visible.? IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA
>     HTTPd, the
>     > HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher,
>     replaced by
>     > something even newer and shinier.
>
>     In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on
>     stimulating
>     that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been
>     something else
>     in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more
>     powerful
>     paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.
>
>     > Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
>     > web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."? I'd kind of
>     > like to understand the environment in which that happened.
>
>     The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it
>     was because
>     Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that
>     Netscape
>     became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
>     didn't get out of the way.
>
>     > By analogy.? Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both
>     at BBN,
>     > and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.
>
>     I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
>     as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
>     I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their
>     history;
>     NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.
>
>     1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439
>
>     ? ? Brian
>
>     > We all know the story
>     > of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.? The
>     > environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
>     > personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late"
>     and some
>     > of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known
>     about the
>     > next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail
>     systems for
>     > various O/S environments.
>     >
>     > Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA?
>     (There's a
>     > timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but
>     it's all
>     > kind of sketchy.)
>     >
>     > Cheers,
>     >
>     > Miles
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     > On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>     >> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
>     >> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
>     <http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html>
>     >> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank
>     about NCSA management.
>     >>
>     >> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
>     >> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>     <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807>
>     >>
>     >> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen"
>     finds a whole lot.
>     >>
>     >> Regards
>     >>? ? ?Brian
>     >>
>     >> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>     >>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an
>     NCSA project
>     >>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks
>     project that
>     >>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark,
>     then CEO of
>     >>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen
>     and Eric Bina
>     >>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape
>     Communications in
>     >>> 1994.
>     >>>
>     >>> vint
>     >>>
>     >>>
>     >>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman
>     <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>>
>     >>> wrote:
>     >>>
>     >>>> Hi Folks,
>     >>>>
>     >>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the
>     group at NCSA
>     >>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the
>     organization
>     >>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually
>     worked for?
>     >>>>
>     >>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the
>     enabled the
>     >>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready
>     for prime
>     >>>> time, so to speak.
>     >>>>
>     >>>> Any insights?
>     >>>>
>     >>>> Thanks,
>     >>>>
>     >>>> Miles Fidelman
>     >>>>
>     >>>> --
>     >>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>     >>>> In practice, there is.? .... Yogi Berra
>     >>>>
>     >>>> _______
>     >>>> internet-history mailing list
>     >>>> internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>     >>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     >>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org>
>     for assistance.
>     >>>>
>     >>>
>     >>>
>     >>>
>     >>>
>     >>> _______
>     >>> internet-history mailing list
>     >>> internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>     >>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     >>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org>
>     for assistance.
>     >>>
>     >
>
>
>     _______
>     internet-history mailing list
>     internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>     http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for
>     assistance.
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> New postal address:
> Google
> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
> Reston, VA 20190

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

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From joly at punkcast.com  Tue Mar 20 21:27:00 2018
From: joly at punkcast.com (Joly MacFie)
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:27:00 -0400
Subject: [ih] WSIS Forum 2018 Session 168 - Oral History of the Internet
	(OHI)
Message-ID: <CAM9VJk0qJnu_VJdbYvNyD3fgZoNXZ=usDOc4R96hD0QwgmwDvQ@mail.gmail.com>

I have grabbed the video of Monday's WSIS session and ported it to youTube
where has been roughly captioned.

There were some videos that are not visible, but may show up if and when
they publish the Adobe Connect

?=============

WSIS Forum 2018 Session 168 - Oral History of the Internet (OHI)
Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication in Shantou University
https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/forum/2018/Pages/Agenda/Session/168

Project -
https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/projects/Project/Details?projectId=1515119764

Report - https://dig.watch/sessions/oral-history-internet-ohi

YouTube - https://youtu.be/04bydF2FOPw

Download - http://isoc-ny.org/wsis2018/168

Website - http://cyberlabs.org/

==============?

If anyone want s to set their students to correcting the captions, the link
is
http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_video?v=04bydF2FOPw&ref=share

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
--------------------------------------------------------------
-
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From jack at 3kitty.org  Wed Mar 21 14:10:52 2018
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 14:10:52 -0700
Subject: [ih] FYI - DARPA "Paving the Way to the Modern Internet"
Message-ID: <c6bacfca-507d-db97-4c9f-377d536a3409@3kitty.org>

There's an interesting summary of the history and pre-history of the
Internet on DARPA's 60th Anniversary website:

https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet

There's a link on that page to "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" which
is a nice summary of the early timeline starting in 1963.

Licklider (aka "Lick") was my thesis adviser in 1970 and led the group I
was in at MIT project MAC trying his ideas about "Man Computer
Symbiosis" out on the then-new ARPANET through the  70s.  Later at BBN I
worked with Cerf and Kahn on lots of Internet projects through the 80s.
But this paper puts the early history all together, and I learned some
things I hadn't known before.

So I thought perhaps the internet-history crowd might be interested.

/Jack Haverty


From eric.gade at gmail.com  Wed Mar 21 16:26:33 2018
From: eric.gade at gmail.com (Eric Gade)
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 19:26:33 -0400
Subject: [ih] FYI - DARPA "Paving the Way to the Modern Internet"
In-Reply-To: <c6bacfca-507d-db97-4c9f-377d536a3409@3kitty.org>
References: <c6bacfca-507d-db97-4c9f-377d536a3409@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <CA+CiqoX4fbwjFvoP2Hq56mjtNE_se7KmG8fuOc5_LuQuN5Y-Qg@mail.gmail.com>

That article is by Mitch Waldrop, who has also written what I believe to be
the finest history of computing to date ("Dream Machine"). I'm wondering
what the members of this list who have read it think of the work.

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 5:10 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> There's an interesting summary of the history and pre-history of the
> Internet on DARPA's 60th Anniversary website:
>
> https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet
>
> There's a link on that page to "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" which
> is a nice summary of the early timeline starting in 1963.
>
> Licklider (aka "Lick") was my thesis adviser in 1970 and led the group I
> was in at MIT project MAC trying his ideas about "Man Computer
> Symbiosis" out on the then-new ARPANET through the  70s.  Later at BBN I
> worked with Cerf and Kahn on lots of Internet projects through the 80s.
> But this paper puts the early history all together, and I learned some
> things I hadn't known before.
>
> So I thought perhaps the internet-history crowd might be interested.
>
> /Jack Haverty
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>



-- 
Eric
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From vint at google.com  Wed Mar 21 18:20:55 2018
From: vint at google.com (Vint Cerf)
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 21:20:55 -0400
Subject: [ih] FYI - DARPA "Paving the Way to the Modern Internet"
In-Reply-To: <CA+CiqoX4fbwjFvoP2Hq56mjtNE_se7KmG8fuOc5_LuQuN5Y-Qg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <c6bacfca-507d-db97-4c9f-377d536a3409@3kitty.org>
	<CA+CiqoX4fbwjFvoP2Hq56mjtNE_se7KmG8fuOc5_LuQuN5Y-Qg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAHxHggcYgaokvJf_gHp-D=4yM0jiJcGPGyE=MoXOvUNzeOp-Bg@mail.gmail.com>

it is a terrific piece of writing - Mitch's other books are equally worth
reading.

v


On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 7:26 PM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:

> That article is by Mitch Waldrop, who has also written what I believe to
> be the finest history of computing to date ("Dream Machine"). I'm wondering
> what the members of this list who have read it think of the work.
>
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 5:10 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>
>> There's an interesting summary of the history and pre-history of the
>> Internet on DARPA's 60th Anniversary website:
>>
>> https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet
>>
>> There's a link on that page to "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" which
>> is a nice summary of the early timeline starting in 1963.
>>
>> Licklider (aka "Lick") was my thesis adviser in 1970 and led the group I
>> was in at MIT project MAC trying his ideas about "Man Computer
>> Symbiosis" out on the then-new ARPANET through the  70s.  Later at BBN I
>> worked with Cerf and Kahn on lots of Internet projects through the 80s.
>> But this paper puts the early history all together, and I learned some
>> things I hadn't known before.
>>
>> So I thought perhaps the internet-history crowd might be interested.
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>> _______
>> internet-history mailing list
>> internet-history at postel.org
>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Eric
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>
>


-- 
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
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