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

[John Day]

Or just serendipity.

I have ‘discovered’ unknown 17thC material because of a typo.

Or, in the case of networking, simply because no one asked the question.

You just never know.

> On Apr 27, 2024, at 16:12, Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:
> 
> 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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