[ih] sad news: Peter Kirstein

[Karl Auerbach]

On 1/9/20 2:11 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
...
> IMHO, that pressure from real users with real problems was a key driver
> to all the things we had to do to get the Internet out of the "research
> lab" to come online as a reliable communications service.

 From my diggings through Internet history I agree that this is very true.

Concrete and specific needs do force focus.

The growth of the academic and research networks in the early 1980's was 
a strong driving force that nudged (perhaps that is to mild a verb?) 
people to focus.

I was at the Magnetic Fusion Energy (MFE) project at the Livermore Labs 
and they had their own network (MFEnet) that was begging to be joined to 
other fledgling networks that, like MFEnet, were ad hoc brews of 
proprietary protocols - SNA, HASP, DECnet, etc.  The goal was sharing, 
purity of protocol was secondary.

(Apart from putting Unix onto the Crays, I had a non-enviable job of 
building an e-mail link between Unix and IBM's PROFs systems - I knew 
about Ethernet and IP and TCP and would have given much to have had 
those, but instead I had to slug it out with encoding on punch card 
images conveyed from Unix to VM/370 on a BiSync link using a Unibus card 
built by ACC in Santa Barbara.)

There is a story, which I inadequately comprehend, about how the need 
for sharing at the academic and research level collided with the 
protocol developments of the TCP/IP (and Ethernet) worlds and ended up 
fusing.

(I was more closely associated with providers of the glue that made the 
smaller-scale sized machines stick to that fusion: Intercon, TGV, FTP 
Software, Epilogue, Beame & Whiteside, WRQ, etc.)

	--karl--