[ih] FTP RIP

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Noel,

Thanks for the pointers.  I lost my own packrat stash when I failed to
find a way to move info from Dectapes to a more modern medium.

For the historians out there, Noel's message archives provide a rare
insight into how network technology was created 50 years ago.   Many of
the messages in that archive (and others now lost) were the kinds of
presentations of ideas and ensuing discussions that, in an earlier age,
would have been carried out in a succession of papers in learned journals.

The novelty and ease of "net mail" was addictive, and lured much of the
debate and discussions online instead of onpaper.  You can see a lot of
it in the message archives Noel has saved for almost 50 years.

It happened first in the network research community, because we built
the means to hold such debate online.  The traditional and more formal
mechanisms, such as journals and even the informal RFCs, were only part
of the collaboration machinery in the ARPANET world. 

There were many "mailing lists", as well as much other informal
interaction just between pairs or small groups of network-connected
researchers by use of email.   The surviving formal materials, e.g.,
RFCs, capture a lot of what happened, and, IMHO, the messaging exchanges
can reveal a lot of why it happened.

/Jack Haverty

On 9/29/20 3:38 AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
>     > From: Jack Haverty
>
>     > This situation was discussed extensively, of course by using email as
>     > the medium, and triggering the formation of various lists such as
>     > HEADER-PEOPLE where the pros and cons were debated ad nauseam. 
>     > Sadly, I think little of those discussions was ever captured in RFCs,
>     > and email archives seem elusive or incomplete.
>
> I did manage to save MSGGROUP and most of Header-People archives, and put them up:
>
>   http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/header/
>   http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/msggroup/
>
> If anyone knows of a copy of the issing two at the front of H-P (i.e. before 6
> November, 1976), that would be great.
>
> Luckily I seem to have a pack-rat nature, and have saved a lot of stuff, e.g. the Unix NCP.
>
> 	Noel