[ih] pretty good video on internet history

[Jack Haverty]

Just looked at the video - yes, it's pretty good.   A few observations 
though...

- Through the 70s, I worked with or for JCR Licklider.  I never heard 
anyone call him "JCR Lick".  To VIP visitors at the MIT lab, he was 
"Professor Licklider".  To everyone who knew him, he was just "Lick".   
Maybe it was different elsewhere, but never "JCR Lick", at least at MIT

- My general impression is that the video is a reasonably accurate 
account of what happened, or at least some parts of that history. But 
it's not very good at explaining "How" the Internet happened, or why 
TCP/IP became the basis for today's Internet after a historic battle of 
technologies and organizations.  E.g., it mentions OSI when discussing 
the Web, but neglects to mention any of the other networking 
developments going on through the 80s - SNA, DecNet, Appletalk, Netware, 
Vines, X.25/X.75 "internets", and especially XNS, which IMHO was closest 
in vision to the TCP/IP world.  I expected the "How" of today's Internet 
to include an explanation of what caused all of those other 
actitivities, including OSI, to just disappear almost overnight, leaving 
TCP/IP as the only survivor. The video mentions that OSI "never 
happened" at CERN, but the same is true of the military environment 
where it all started - the US military networks were also supposed to 
migrate to OSI, and in fact the various networks (ARPANET, MILNET, ...) 
replaced the "1822" interface with standard X.25, as a first step on the 
migration to OSI.  That was the Plan.  But, like at CERN, that migration 
also never happened -- Why not...?

- There's just a slight reference to the military origins of the 
Internet, and no explanation of what those early Internet projects were 
trying to accomplish -- i.e., what was the Internet trying to do 40-50 
years ago?  E.g., the Packet Radio technology, demos, and deployments 
aren't mentioned at all.  SATNET was mentioned, but the video ignored 
the context of its history and plans, such as the deployment to the Navy 
on an aircraft carrier.  IMHO, the Internet technology was driven by 
military command-and-control scenarios, and was purposely made "open" 
for others to use if they chose to do so. The Internet technology was, 
again IMHO, just adopted by the academic and then commercial world 
because it was the only one that they could actually use for what they 
wanted to do, and the needs of the non-military world were close enough 
to those of the military that TCP/IP fit nicely.

- After years of indoctrination by Lick I was thoroughly converted to 
his view of the "Galactic Network", in which computers and 
communications synergized to help humans do whatever humans do.  His 
"Galactic Network" vision is very close to what I see today as I type, 
looking at the screen in front of me, which I think of as "The 
Internet".  So I disagree with the statement in the video that the Web 
is not a fundamental part of the Internet, but rather lives "on top of" 
the Internet.  Packet voice was another important type of network 
traffic in the 80s, not mentioned at all in the video. Using Web 
technology for conveying images, and Internet voice technology for 
conversations, a military operation in the 80s could be envisioned, and 
today's use of teleconferencing, telemedicine, and such could adopt the 
same technology for everything people do today.  But the video 
categorizes technologies such as the Web, or Zoom, Skype, et al, as not 
being components of "The Internet" any more.   They are now "apps" that 
exist "on top of" the Internet. How did that happen...?

Jack Haverty
MIT (1966-1977), BBN (1977-1990)