[ih] A paper

[Jack Haverty]

Ahah!   So the Ancient Greeks invented Packet Switching, complete with 
headers, but called their packets "scrolls"!

Errr, hmmm, maybe it was actually the Egyptians, or Assyrians, or ...?   
And the Greeks simply gave the headers a new name.

/Jack

On 7/19/21 4:34 PM, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> not so much ancient politics - just that you needed a header (protokollon)
> on a scroll to know what was in it just like you needed headers on packets
> to know where they were to go, etc. And both diplomatic and medical
> protocols were all about the agreements on behaviors, formats for
> interaction, etc.
>
> v
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 7:28 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> On 7/18/21 5:17 PM, Darius Kazemi via Internet-history wrote:
>>> it is interesting to note that the word "protocol"
>>> literally derives from politics, specifically that of diplomatic
>> protocol!
>>
>> It may be older than that.   I recall at one of the early Internet
>> meetings, circa 1978, Vint explained to all of us that the "Protocol" in
>> TCP was descended from the ancient Greek "protokolon", which was the
>> name of the short section of writing at the beginning of a scroll of
>> papyrus, containing an explanation of what was in the rest of the scroll
>> and how it was intended to be used.   So you could find what you wanted
>> without unrolling the whole scroll.
>>
>> So a "protokolon" was essentially a set of rules and information that
>> allowed someone to use the contents of a papyrus scroll.   Kind of like
>> how a protocol tells us how to use the bits that follow. The word is
>> still in some use today - I've seen "protokolon" used in descriptions of
>> ancient papyrus unearthed by archaeologists that I've stumbled across.
>> But I don't know if it had anything to do with ancient politics.
>>
>> /Jack
>>
>>
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