[ih] History

[Dan Lynch]

Testing again where the replies go.  

Dan

Cell 650-776-7313

> On Sep 15, 2020, at 3:06 PM, Joe Touch <touch at strayalpha.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> The link I just sent. 
> 
>>> On Sep 15, 2020, at 2:59 PM, Dan Lynch <dan at lynch.com> wrote:
>>> 
>> Interesting. I did not get a copy in the list. 
>> 
>> And how do I look at the archive?
>> 
>> Thanks 
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> Cell 650-776-7313
>> 
>>>> On Sep 15, 2020, at 1:47 PM, Joseph Touch <touch at strayalpha.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>> It appears to be posted here:
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-September/006583.html
>>> 
>>> Are you not getting the copy of the post? Or do you not see it in the archive?
>>> 
>>> Joe
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 15, 2020, at 1:31 PM, Dan Lynch <dan at lynch.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> It looks like this did not make it to the list.  I don’t see the bad word in it. 
>>>> 
>>>> Dan
>>>> 
>>>> Cell 650-776-7313
>>>> 
>>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>> 
>>>>> From: Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com>
>>>>> Date: September 15, 2020 at 1:10:04 PM PDT
>>>>> To: Dan Lynch <dan at lynch.com>, Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>>>>> Subject: Re:  History
>>>>> Reply-To: karl at cavebear.com
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yes, it made it to the lists, but as an extension posted by Joe Touch on Sept 12.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I could send it again - but my copy has "the bad word" so I'd have to edit it. ;-)
>>>>> 
>>>>> The Interop saga is, to my thinking, quite important to the success of the Internet.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The show was an important place for two main reasons:
>>>>> 
>>>>>    - It was a gathering place where real tech folks could (and were required to) pound out flaws in specifications and implementations.  It replaced the old Bake Offs.  The early shows backed marketing with substance - there always were a large number of RFC authors in the background.
>>>>> 
>>>>>    - It served as a Procrustean metronome-of-doom that forced vendors to actually produce working products by specific dates.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There were lots of other reasons ranging from the fact that the show was a great place to learn a lot about how (at the time) large enterprise networks worked and failed to the fact that it was downright a lot of fun (at least to those of us who built and ran it.)  Those of in the core group got our hands on a prodigious amount of expensive gear from many vendors and we weren't shy about giving feedback, often negative, to the vendors.
>>>>> 
>>>>> And some tiny reasons grew - I remember a lunch at the Monterey conference where you and Craig Partridge were bemoaning the lack of means to monitor and manage the growing Internet.  That became fuel that powered the development of the various network management protocols - HEMS, CMIP/CMOT, and SNMP that we used in later shows.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The show was an early attractor of attacks.  I remember working with Carl Malamud to set up a bunch of NCD X terminals at one of the San Jose shows and being surprised when an remote attacker put up a username/password capture faux login screen.  Nothing surprising these days, but it was new back then.
>>>>> 
>>>>> And there was a lot of room to play - That's why we did the first Internet toasters (eventually with a robot to insert/remove the bread), juke box, weather station, talking bear, etherphones, walkabout TV station, USB/iSCSI/Wi-Fi RAID-5, ... and who can ever forget "Fluffy, the inflatable sheep" (there's more to that description but it is a bit "too colorful".)
>>>>> 
>>>>> That's not to mention all the small events, such as mbone shows and our impromptu rafting trips on the Youghiogheny river (that's where I met one of our now well known net security people by climbing through the window of her car) to some grand parties (including one three day long event at my house in Santa Cruz and nearby beaches.)  And of course there was that moment of fear and doubt when in Las Vegas we attached a remote location and saw traffic that wasn't ours - and we thought that we had accidentally tapped into one of the casino networks and we expected Guido from Baltimore to show up (turned out to be traffic from a show registration contractor.)   (A bunch - probably 15+ - of us did get mugged in front of the White House in DC - I can't imagine what kind of stupid mugger would go after a bunch of geeks with Motorola radios squawking away and within sight of the Secret Service.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Some parts were unseen - like how we sometimes did our own version of TV station signoff - we all gathered in the NOC, sang the Star Spangled Banner, and turned off the power switches to the routers.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Walking into a giant convention center, like the Atlanta Congress center, knowing that we had a couple of days to install a huge network with thousands upon thousands of nodes, spanning many huge spaces and meeting rooms, crossing railroads, crossing roads and freeways into hotels, and with multiple external providers - that was scary, but fun.
>>>>> 
>>>>> And much of the hardest but invisible work was done during the weeks and moths prior to the show when we hot-staged everything, including the cable plant, in a warehouse.  We spent months planning everything from the physical layout to address deployment to DNS to complex redundant routing.  Then we built it.   It was there were we did some of the more stressful things, like doing power failure testing.  Then we packed it up and shipped it to the convention center.
>>>>> 
>>>>> We have a lot of photos.  I wish we had the raw beta tapes that Linda Feferman shot; only a tiny part of her material made it onto that video.  It would be nice if that raw material could go into the Internet Archive collection.
>>>>> 
>>>>>         --karl--
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>