[ih] Correct name for early TCP/IP working group?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: John Shoch

    > Thanks for putting up a page on the Internet Experiment Notes, and
    > early meetings.

My contribution was minimal; the latter is mostly just a list of meetings,
and links to the minutes. (Again, Jon gets all the credit for recording our
travails in detail.)

As far as I know, that era of internetting work, which was fairly important
technically (seeing the TCP-IP split, among other important steps) is very
poorly covered in later histories. E.g. Abbate's otherwise excellent book
skims over that stage in a page or two.


In part, that seems to be because her book focuses on the organizational
history, and also on what the users saw from the outside, with not much focus
on the technical details. The organizational and user history _are_
important, and should be covered in such a work. However, without the
underlying technology, there would have been no project, so it should be
covered too - in addition to being of inherent intellectual value/interest.

This is a common fault I find with histories of technology by professional
historians. (I'm not trying to give them grief, here.) They don't understand
the technology well enough to point out the key technical points - unless they
can find a piece of paper from a technologist that makes the point.  (I will
pass over a gripe I have about that trait of historians, around the argument
about dropping the bombs on Japan; it's irrelevant to us.)

And sometimes the point isn't obvious to many technologists! We had a really
great example of this recently, with the observation that packet-based
systems are inherently better at scaling to gargantuan sizes; as Brian
pointed out:

  https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2025-January/010120.html

"it's almost as if the intrinsic scalability of stateless packet switching
was an unnoticed and accidental property". 

But it's an even better example of my general observation about 'the point
not being obvious to many technologists in the field'. As I mentioned
recently, on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list (which seems to contain a
lot of mindless Unix fans who don't know anything about other OS's), they
were talking about how great Datakit was, and bemoaning the fact that it
was bypassed by history.

(Which forced me to write a note:

  https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2022-June/026001.html

explaining that virtual circuit networks wouldn't scale to the size of
today's Internet.)


A wonderful example of this is "Crystal Fire", by Hoddeson and and Riordan -
to me, by some ways, the best history of the creation of semiconductor
electronics. I think it is not an accident that Hoddeson and and Riordan were
themselves physicists, before they turned to history.

Someday someone with write a technical history of the development of
internetting. I'm not sure there is one, yet.

	Noel