[ih] Where are we preserving these early documents? Re: early networking: "the solution"

[Jack Haverty]

On 4/22/24 09:31, Bob Purvy wrote:
> I think that actually, the early history of the Internet is fairly 
> WELL preserved. Certainly better than a lot of other things.
> ,
> The Computer History Museum has a whole bunch of lengthy interviews 
> with founders, all transcribed neatly.

Sorry, I disagree.  There's a lot of the history that's not captured in 
artifacts such as "founder's interviews" and documents such as RFCs.

Everyone involved in a snippet of history, such as the "Early Internet 
Era" has a different perspective on what they experienced. The situation 
is much like that old story about the blind describing an elephant after 
touching it - one thinks it's a big snake, another concludes it's a big 
bird, a third thinks it's some kind of tree. It all depends on which 
part of the elephant they touched.

How did people competing with the Internet perceive it?   The phone 
companies, the big computer vendors, the startups promoting their own 
alternatives, and many others all had their views of the Internet as it 
destroyed them.

How did people trying to use the Internet technology experience it? I 
was amazed at how many corporations in non-computer industries were 
experimenting with their own internal "intranets" during the 80s and 
90s, as they searched for some solution to their IT needs that could 
actually be deployed.  I recall, for example, helping one of the big 
investment houses in NYC as they tried to use routers to interconnect 
London, New York, and Tokyo, encountering lots of surprises and 
disappointments along the way.  Yet industry all abandoned other schemes 
and adopted TCP/IP for their corporate communications.   Why?  I've 
never seen any papers, interviews, or other records of any of those 
early experiences as the technology escaped from the research to the 
operational worlds.

How did mere Users experience the Internet?   From the earliest days of 
dial-up, and services such as Compuserve, Lotus Notes, to the World Wide 
Web, what was the Users' experience?

IMHO, all of those perspectives, and more, are parts of Internet 
History, not even captured or well preserved.

Jack Haverty
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