[ih] Memories of Flag Day?

[Dave Crocker]

On 8/17/2023 6:58 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> Lynch: We built it for remote login and file transfer, ok, access 
>>>> to remote resources that was its absolute thing. E-mail was an 
>>>> accident.
>
> In 1995, I'd have said of the CERN and HEP (high energy physics) 
> networks:
>
> "We built them for email, remote login and file transfer, ok, access 
> to remote resources. WWW was an accident." 


At the earliest stages of effort to build the Arpanet, perhaps email was 
not in the minds of the immediate workers.

And in the motivating paper from Licklider and Taylor:

    https://bbiw.net/reports/lick-taylor-1968.pdf

there is no concept of person-to-person 'messaging' explicitly stated.

What /was/ stated was people interacting.  Push that requirement and it 
has to lead to asynchronous, as well as synchronous communications.

Bhushan said that email was part of the plan for FTP.  It didn't show up 
in the earliest FTP work, but it showed up pretty darn quickly.


On 8/17/2023 7:27 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Sure, and the WWW was literally an afterthought, mentioned very
> briefly in the Epilogue. 

As soon as there was Anonymous FTP, a richer and more usable version of 
distributed document sharing was inevitable.  So while the particular 
winner was ad hoc and from an unexpected source, something like it was 
certain to happen.


d/





-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social