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

[Craig Partridge]

Speaking as someone who trained as a historian (as an undergrad), I'd
suggest it is more nuanced.

Once you get past about the 14th century in western Europe (later in
other parts of the world) the central problem is the overwhelming
volume of sources, many of which require specialized expertise to
interpret.  In many cases, when you have a specific research question,
the process feels like dumpster diving -- and figuring out where in
the dumpster the information you want might be hiding.  If you find
information, great!  if you don't there's the nagging question of did
you miss it (look in the wrong place) or is it really an unanswerable
question (e.g. the source didn't survive).  This bears on Jack H's
point about perspectives -- if you ask the question "what was the
experience of social group G in the early days of the Internet", the
material may or may not exist, but your first challenge is figuring
out where it might be hiding.

Even for very modest topics, one sometimes finds that experts develop
detailed and often substantial meta-finding aids (across various
museums and archives).  Just to mention one example: Randy Schoenberg
maintains a finding aid for information on the pre-WWII Jewish
communities of Austria and Bohemia (Czech Republic) that, if memory
serves, now runs over 100 powerpoint slides.

Craig

On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 1:43 PM John Day via Internet-history
<internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> 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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>
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