[ih] A paper

[Bob Purvy]

Thanks, Jack.

It's probably a good thing that we / they / you didn't realize it was
going to blanket the planet. No one can design with that much pressure. If
you do turn something out that way, it'll probably be a costly flop.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 6:03 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hello Andrew,
>
> Thanks for a very cogent explanation.
>
> There's a few observations I think many people haven't considered.
>
> IMHO, the time period of the early Internet, roughly 70s/80s, was a
> unique time in history.  The traditional methods of scientific
> discussion and debate had relied on papers, letters,
> conferences/proceedings, and other such "documentation" for centuries.
> But that changed with the advent of computer networking.   I was a
> student, and later a staff member, in Professor Licklider's group at
> MIT, and so thoroughly indoctrinated in his vision of using computers
> and networks to augment human interaction.   So that's what we did.
>
> As the ARPANET grew, we naturally shifted our behavior to use "the net"
> as much as possible.   Instead of writing papers, we wrote emails.
> Instead of publishing documents, we put them on FTP servers.   The
> traditional methods increasingly atrophied, within the "ARPANET
> Community", as electronic interactions improved.    As a student, few of
> us could afford many subscriptions to journals, and the library stacks
> where you could read them much less convenient than the timesharing
> terminal down the hall, a portal into the net.  As the Internet emerged,
> and in particular CSNET and NSFNET expanded the connectivity into
> institutions not involved in building the network, I suspect the same
> transition occurred.
>
> Unfortunately, computer storage was expensive, so you couldn't put too
> much online or keep it there for posterity.  Sadly, a lot of that
> "documentation" from the 70s/80s has now disappeared.     By the 90s,
> computer storage costs had dropped dramatically, and most importantly
> the World Wide Web entered the scene.   That made it possible for people
> to put much of their "documentation" readily available online and
> perhaps fragile mechanisms such as archive.org are preserving it for
> posterity.   Sadly, few of the organizations managing the computers of
> the day apparently saw any need to preserve things like archives of
> mailing lists or email exchanges or contents of the FTP servers.   Even
> the Datacomputer, where the mail system I built in the early 70s
> deposited much "documentation" for safekeeping, apparently didn't
> preserve it.   At least not that I know of.
>
> So, IMHO there is a period of perhaps 15-20 years in the 70s/80s where
> much of the "documentation" to support historians is simply lost, except
> for "interviews and recollections".   Formal documentation was sparse,
> and the newfangled informal documentation transiting the network has
> been lost.   That may be a cause of the scenarios you describe of
> students experiencing the "I was there" reaction.
>
> Even before the 'net, I think the historical record is incomplete with
> just the formalities of public "documentation" like papers as sources.
> In particular, many organizations don't publish much of their activity,
> whether for protection of their Intellectual Property or to avoid
> embarassment, or simply because there's no business advantage in
> spending your resources on it.   So IMHO we mostly don't know what they
> did or why, yet their actions probably had a strong influence on history.
>
> Personally I spent quite a few hours on the phone a few years ago with
> Brad Fidler relating my experiences with developments like EGP.   My
> comments on the paper were primarily trying to get the facts right about
> that chunk of history.   Like much of the activities in the 70s/80s, you
> won't find much that was in formal "documentation" about that; all we
> have is personal recollections.
>
> IMHO, the 70s/80s was a unique period of time because of that transition
> that the network triggered.
>
> A second observation concerns "what we were doing".   IMHO this is often
> misunderstood.   People seem to think that we were building the Internet
> we have today, and want to know why we screwed it up in some way.
>
> I can only speak from personal experience.   But I certainly thought we
> were building a system targeted toward government and military needs,
> deploying it to see what worked, and expecting the results of such
> research to be possibly folded into the subsequent "real" mechanisms
> that were being developed by traditional means and organizations.
>
> The Internet was a research project, and its deployment was an
> experiment.  AFAIK, few of the people involved in implementing the
> network mechanisms had significant prior experience in building network
> equipment.  The contractors were organizations such as MIT, BBN, SRI,
> and such.  None of the names you'd associate with data communications
> (e.g., ATT) were involved.   We were expected to "think outside the
> box", and to try new ideas.   If there were two candidate solutions to
> some problem, one that we knew could work from others' experience, and
> one new, untried, idea, often the choice was to try something new.  We
> implemented such mechanisms not because we knew it would work, but
> because we didn't know that it wouldn't work.
>
> I don't remember anyone ever suggesting that we were building the
> communications infrastructure that would survive for 50+ years and
> blanket the entire planet.   That was OSI's job, but we could keep our
> research network going for a few years until they were ready. If we
> "defeated" the other guys, we didn't even know we were at war.   At
> least I didn't...
>
> A third observation is on the "politics" of the environment, or perhaps
> what were the mechanisms and motivations that moved it along.
>
> My perspective is that the early years (70s/early 80s) the main driving
> force was a "benevolent dictatorship", where ARPA was the dictator and
> exerted its influence by simple control of funding. Within that
> dictatorship, there was a lot of freedom to explore your interests, as
> long as they were plausible steps toward the research goals.   For
> example, since the Internet was (still is?) an experiment, there was a
> desire to run some tests.   Those tests required measuring time, which
> was not an easy thing to do in a system spanning thousands of miles, and
> no GPS satellites yet. Most of us were happy with the resolution of a
> second or so that could be obtained by the classic "synchronize your
> watches" approach and a telephone.   That wasn't good enough for Dave
> Mills, who exerted tremendous effort to create NTP so that the computers
> on the network could synchronize to milliseconds.   IMHO, Dave's the
> reason your smartphone and computers today know what time it is.
>
> As the Internet expanded, more players appeared, and commercial
> interests extered their influence, things changed.  Personally, I have
> no idea today how decisions are made that cause changes in the operating
> Internet that we all use.   From the "documentation", you might believe
> that it involves the IETF process which creates Standards.   But I've
> occasionally asked the question -- How many of the protocols and
> algorithms documented in RFCs are actually present and operating in the
> Internet machinery that I'm using right now? I've never gotten much of
> an answer, or seen much "documentation" that reveals how the design
> decisions actually are made to create the network machinery I'm using
> right now.   Or who makes those decisions.
>
> So, not knowing what that process is, or who is actually making
> decisions, I find it difficult to judge how "political" it might be.
>
> Personally, I agree that the Internet today needs regulation - as long
> as it operates in some way as effective as, and reminiscent of the
> "benevolent dictatorship" of the ARPA/NSF days.  Maybe that's just not
> possible though.   One of the design principles of the network (which
> may not appear in "documentation") was that the network must not have
> any single point of control, no one in charge.  One tangible result of
> that principle was EGP.
>
> That was important for survivability in military scenarios, so perhaps
> now we're simply stuck with it.
>
> Or maybe OSI will appear next year.
>
> Thanks for reading,
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
>
>
> On 7/18/21 2:23 PM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
> > [I think I sent this earlier from the wrong address.  Apologies for
> > any duplicates.]
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > In the sprit of full disclosure, I will note both that I work for the
> > organization that hosts this list but I'm speaking for myself, and
> > also that I have a personal relationship with one of the authors of
> > the paper that has caused so much discussion.  But I have an
> > observation.
> > On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 08:37:32AM -0700, Bob Purvy via
> > Internet-history wrote:
> >> I would hope after all that, especially Jack and Vint and Andrew's
> >> awesome
> >> summaries, you will just withdraw the paper.
> >
> > I think that would be a shame, because I think the paper is making a
> > point that some on this list seem to be missing, but that is extremely
> > important for anything pretending to be an Interhet _history_ list,
> > rather than just Internet recollections.
> >
> > In a previous career, I thought I was going to be an academic, and
> > I knew a lot of historians because I worked on what was then called
> > history and philosophy of science and technology (I think the jargon
> > is now "science and technology studies").  Young historians working on
> > the 1960s and 1970s kept having trouble publishing papers because
> > they'd submit to a journal and get back a review that said in effect,
> > "That's not what happened, because I was _there_."
> >
> > Now, the problem with our past selves is that we can't interview them.
> > We can only interview our present selves, who have all the
> > retrospective knowledge and story-telling about what we did _then_ and
> > what it meant.  That isn't to say such interviews and recollections
> > are not valuable, but they're also not documentary evidence.  And that
> > is I think an important point that is related to something the paper
> > is arguing.
> >
> > Regardless of what people doing engineering think, there are a lot of
> > people today who believe the Internet needs plenty of regulation, and
> > who have become convinced that the Internet is (or maybe I should say
> > "is only") a political instrument.  This is one interpretation of
> > Laura DeNardis's slogan, "Protocols are politics by other means."
> > (For whatever it's worth, I think that interpretation doesn't hold up
> > to a close reading of DeNardis's original text, but I have not noticed
> > that popular discourse is much affected by close readings.)  The
> > Badiei-Fidler paper is making the point that such a claim is poorly
> > justified given the history of several protocols, and that indeed the
> > historical record doesn't make it plain that the people designing
> > things _themselves_ had perfectly clear interpretations of what they
> > were doing at the time.  I don't know about you, but my experience has
> > been that I often only really know where I am going after I get
> > there.  This is in part because it is the effort of doing the work
> > that reveals what compromises need to be made in a technology.
> >
> > Indeed, as several have pointed out in this thread, that was one basic
> > problem behind the OSI approach: it appeared to want a
> > fully-worked-out design that "everyone" could agree on before anything
> > could be built and shipped, and the result was that the Internet
> > people shipped first, and so that's what took over.  And it must be
> > admitted, I think, that there is something at least partly political
> > in such a decision: one approach valued Officially Approved Agreement
> > and controlled distribution of documents over getting working things
> > in the hands of those trying to make stuff work.  The Internet
> > approach instead was to try things in the open and share documents
> > as widely as possible.  I'm not sure what to call that kind of
> > organizational decision other than "political".
> >
> > Yet, as Badiei and Fidler argue, there's no _inherent_ politics that
> > is legible in any particular protocol.  To move from, "Some Internet
> > protocols have politics built in," or even, "There is a fundamentally
> > political decision in any organizational form," to, "All protocols are
> > inherently political and must be designed to promote certain kinds of
> > values," is hard to square with the history of several protocols as
> > documented in the historical record.  That might not be surprising to
> > people on this list, who problably didn't think they were practicing
> > politics by other means when designing the networks.  But I think
> > Badiei and Fidler are trying to make that case to scholars in other
> > fields, who are busy interpreting the history that many here lived in
> > a way that might not be good for the future of innovation on the
> > Internet.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > A
> >
>
>
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