[ih] Historical Tracing from Concept to Reality over 5 decades?

[Vint Cerf]

PARC guys came to my networking seminars and left hits about their
protocols that started with PUP and ended with XNS.

v


On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 4:40 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hi Steve et al,
>
> Yes, I agree that there are "traceable tracks" over the last 50+ years
> from concept to what we have today, for a lot of different concepts.
> What I was searching for was a pointer to some book(s) or author(s) that
> have actually done the tracing, including multiple traces that
> influenced each other, and shown how the world got from point A to point B.
>
> I've only read a few "internet history" expositions, but all that I've
> seen have seemed to me to be quite parochial, tracing either the history
> of a person or maybe a group, or the history of a technology such as
> TCP/IP (or ARPANET).     So, for example, they don't explore any
> influences that might have occurred from other parallel efforts.
>
> One example is the development of the Internet in the early 80s, and
> cross-coupling that might have occurred between the ARPA "Internet
> Project" and the Xerox PARC creation of XNS technology.  I do have one
> tiny piece of evidence that such interactions occurred -- one of the XNS
> specifications references an RFC I wrote at MIT while in Lick's world;
> somebody at Xerox read it, although I suspect much more such
> "cross-coupling" occurred when Bob Metcalfe left Lick's group and joined
> PARC.  Also I recall John Schoch participating (and even hosting at
> PARC) one of the quarterly Internet meetings, and lively discussions of
> naming vs. addressing vs. routing.
>
> There were similarly many other concomitant "internet projects" in the
> 80s -- IBM/SNA, Novell, Banyan, OSI, DECNET, et al, which may, or may
> not, have interacted with "The Internet", if only by the effect of
> people moving around during their career.   But the "internet history"
> discussions I've seen generally don't even mention such work.
>
> So I was hoping that someone would point me to some historian's work
> which has traced something (e.g., Lick's notion of programming) through
> whatever paths it took through whatever companies and institutions over
> time, showing how it evolved from concept to reality.   I guess there
> isn't any but maybe some historian lurking here will take up the task.
>
> Meanwhile, I'm collecting thoughts to write down what I personally
> experienced, which will necessarily be parochial since I can't remember
> what I never encountered.   But I had a different path than others, so
> maybe it will provide another piece of the puzzle for someone to put
> together later.   As you said, there's plenty of room for multiple
> histories....
>
> /Jack
>
> On 7/6/20 12:25 PM, Steve Crocker wrote:
> > Jack,
> >
> > The original visions fo Lick, the AI senior people -- Simon, Newell,
> > McCarthy, Minsky, Engelbart and others repeatedly animated ARPA
> > sponsored computer science research over many years.  Some ideas
> > attempted and reattempted.  Hardware was often (always?) a gating
> > factor, but, of course, there was also a learning curve.  From mid
> > 1971 to mid 194 I oversaw the first few years of the Speech
> > Understanding Program.  The goal was understanding connected speech
> > input in a constrained task environment.  1,000 word vocabulary,
> > standard American male broadcast speech in a clean environment.  No
> > requirement to operate in real time.  There are traceable tracks from
> > that work to today's Alexa, Siri, et al.  Lick had a vision of a
> > unified library.  I'm not sure today's Google is quite what he had in
> > mind, but it's quite astonishing nonetheless.
> >
> > David Alan Grier and I are working on a history of the Arpanet.  We've
> > been trying to describe the context, i.e. the state of the art and the
> > motivation, and that's led us inevitably into the broader context of
> > the goals for man machine interaction during that period.  We
> > certainly won't be able to include all the threads from that period,
> > so there is room for multiple histories to be written.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 2:51 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history
> > <internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> >
> >     For a while now, I've been curious about how ideas progress from
> >     brainstorm to
> >     reality, and the recent mention of Licklider's vision reminded
> >     me.  So a
> >     question for the historians out there -- has anyone traced an
> >     Internet-related
> >     idea from concept decades ago to reality today?
> >
> >     There's a specific idea that I have in mind.  Back in the early 70s,
> >     Licklider
> >     ("Lick") was my thesis advisor and later boss of the group where I
> >     worked at
> >     MIT.  Lick had a vision of "verbs" and "nouns", roughly meaning
> >     subroutines and
> >     data structures, that could be used to put together "sentences,
> >     paragraphs, and
> >     documents", meaning computer subroutine libraries and programs.
> These
> >     "documents" would interact with each other across the "intergalactic
> >     computer
> >     network".
> >
> >     Having been brainwashed by Lick, I'm admittedly biased, but that
> >     sure sounds
> >     pretty close to what we have today, 50 years later.
> >
> >     Back in the 70s, part of Lick's vision was also that you could write
> >     libraries
> >     of subroutines to create a dictionary of "verbs" and standardized
> data
> >     structures , or "nouns", and through some magic (APIs) plug them
> >     together into
> >     sentences, aka programs, to do useful work.
> >
> >     Our group spent a lot of time, as part of an ARPA effort called
> >     "Automatic
> >     Programming", to build such a system, called "CALICO" (which stood
> for
> >     something
> >     but I can't remember what). The "dictionary" of pieces was
> >     well-documented
> >     (eeerr, uuhm, sorta kinda - we weren't big on documentation) and in a
> >     searchable
> >     database for use by subsequent programmers.
> >
> >     But the technology of the era dictated using PDP-10 assembly
> language,
> >     text-only
> >     terminals, and the now appallingly slow ARPANET.   None of this was
> >     especially
> >     portable and has long since disappeared.
> >
> >     Fast forward to 2020.  I recently stumbled across a technology called
> >     NodeRed,
> >     somehow associated with IBM, which provides a "palette" of components
> >     which do
> >     interesting things -- i.e., the "verbs" and "nouns" in Lick's
> >     terminology.  The
> >     programming environment is a blank screen, onto which you drag the
> >     pieces you
> >     need, and then "wire" them together to create functional
> >     programming.   You
> >     create your program by literally drawing a picture.  The Internet
> >     provides the
> >     necessary communications substrate on which all these actors
> >     perform.
> >     People
> >     can readily create new "verbs" and submit them to the library.
> >
> >     IMHO, Lick would have loved this.
> >
> >     I've been using NodeRed to create some simple home automation
> >     programs,
> >     e.g.,
> >     stuff like turning on lights when motion sensors trigger.   Or
> >     send me email
> >     when something unusual is detected.  Or almost anything else you can
> >     think of.
> >     It really is very simple to use.  I can see the parallels between
> >     Lick's 70s
> >     vision and today's actual implementations.   Instead of a PDP-10 and
> >     ARPANET,
> >     today I just use a Raspberry Pi and Wifi.
> >
> >     So, my curiosity is how the world got from point A to point B.  There
> >     were lots
> >     of people who encountered Lick over the years, e.g., at MIT, ARPA,
> >     etc.   There
> >     were lots of students who passed through Lick's group on their way to
> >     careers.
> >     Did Lick's vision travel with some of them and influence the
> >     appearance of
> >     NodeRed 50 years later?   Or was it some totally different
> >     evolution from
> >     someone's else's similar vision?
> >
> >     Do Internet Historians perform these kinds of "genealogy" traces
> >     of the
> >     evolution of technical ideas from concept to widespread use?   How
> did
> >     something
> >     like NodeRed come from vision to reality?
> >
> >     /Jack Haverty (MIT LCS 1969-1977)
> >
> >
> >
> >     --
> >     Internet-history mailing list
> >     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >     <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> >     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
>
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