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

[John Day]

History never has all of it. That is the bane of history.

See Arcadia by Tom Stoppard.

> On Apr 27, 2024, at 14:40, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Clearly, but I'd just say, "compared to what?"
> 
> Are all the relevant documents for D-Day available in one place? How about
> the WW II docs on Enigma? How about the IBM 360 OS? Sure, we have a lot of
> it, but do we have *all* of it?
> 
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 10:49 AM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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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