[ih] pretty good video on internet history

[Brian E Carpenter]

This reached my inbox out of sequence, due to some over-enthusiastic
spam filtering by Gmail.

On 05-Nov-22 06:56, Jack Haverty wrote:
> Perhaps that paper on doi.org explains why OSI was abandoned in favor of
> TCP.  It's possibly an important part of the History of the Internet.

Not really. It's actually rather lightweight, but it was part of the
process of the European networking community digging out of its
political embroilment with OSI. Most of us knew by then that OSI wasn't
going to make it, but government and European Commission R&D money tended
to come with OSI strings attached. So we had to be diplomatic.

A more significant document was never formally published:
"Report to RARE CoA on TCP/IP" by B.Carpenter, L.Backstrom, G.Pujolle
(assisted by P.Kirstein), RARE COA(90)12, 22 January 1990.

(For RARE, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERENA)

This report recommended that RARE should recognise "the TCP/IP family
of protocols as an open multi-vendor suite, well suited to scientific
and technical applications, which offers some facilities not available
with OSI today" and so on.

The report is currently unknown to Google. I will shortly post
it at https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/RARE-TCP-IP-report.txt

> Somehow I just can't swallow the need to spend $28 to find out, the
> price to read the article, but just for 48 hours. Rather expensive
> "collimator" of history.

Sorry. I didn't realise how ridiculous the Elsevier paywall is. Pretty much
everything I wrote with a CERN official document number is somewhere in
the https://cds.cern.ch/ archive.

    Brian

>   Hmmm, perhaps it's on Amazon.
> 
> Jack
> 
> On 11/3/22 12:45, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> Everybody has their own version of history, I guess, and I agree that
>> the video is a view through a very specific collimator. I enjoyed it,
>> though.
>>
>>> The video mentions that OSI "never happened" at CERN
>>
>> Actually we got as close as anybody, because we did deploy DECnet
>> Phase V. But additionally to what the video said, the *reason*
>> TimBL could invent the web was because we more or less abandoned
>> OSI (except for DECnet) during 1989 and started supporting
>> TCP/IP.
>>
>> https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-7552(89)90040-8
>>
>> Regards
>>     Brian
>>
>> On 04-Nov-22 07:19, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>> 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)
>