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

[Vint Cerf]

how much of the technical history might be found in Dave Clark's book on
Internet design?
v


On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 3:09 PM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>     > 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
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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