[ih] Archive of internet-history email (and others)

[Jack Haverty]

My assumption has always also been that whatever gets posted on a 
mailing list has essentially become public.  I've also hoped that 
someone(s) out there are capturing all the recollections and saving them 
away somehow.   That's especially true for this mailing list.

I just checked the "sign up form" that I must have used years ago to 
join the list.   Even today, it doesn't say anything about restrictions 
on use of the material, who "owns" such material, or any kind of license 
details.   The membership list is restricted, so we can't even tell who 
gets these emails or how big the audience is.   So it's best (for me at 
least) to assume it is public.

Some other isoc.org lists say that the "Internet Society Code of 
Conduct" applies.   That code prohibits republishing without 
permission.  I couldn't find any information about who might have gotten 
such permission.   The sign-up for this list however doesn't reference 
that ISOC code.

Personally, I'd like to see the discussions on this list published more 
widely.  It seems like it would be straightforward to "gateway" this 
list (or any other) to other social media sites where it might get wider 
distribution perhaps as some kind of "Tech History Channel".  LOCKSS is 
a great idea.   Perhaps someone could "gateway" this list to some place 
like the Computer History Museum?

Maybe that's been done and I just haven't stumbled on any such site 
until I found narkive.   I found that site only as a result of a web 
search.   Was that search engine "publishing" without permission?

One salient reason for such wider dissemination is due to our own 
behavior back in the early days of networking - roughly from 1970 
through the emergence of the Web and the sharp drop in tech costs in the 
90s.  We were all enamored on the ARPANET with the new toy of email.  
Much discussion, debate, and planning occurred by email exchanges, with 
occasional RFCs, distributed by email and FTP, that have been preserved 
(thanks, Jake!).

In pre-network days, that history might have been preserved in journals, 
conference proceedings, and even letters.  But much of that email 
historical record has been lost.   Some of it was even in the Datacomputer!

Other news of that era that is now history was captured in the trade 
press - Data Communications, Computerworld, Network World, and many 
other such print media.  Such material captured the characteristic of 
the era better than RFCs, such as the many competitors to "The 
Internet".  History should remember XNS, DECNET, SNA, Netware, VINES, 
global LANs, and other such combatants that The Internet seems to have 
defeated.

Most of all that has probably also been lost, as those stacks of old 
paper in our basements decay.   Much of Internet History is only in our 
memories.  In DRAM unfortunately.

Yes, Joe deserves a lot of thanks for his efforts to keep this list going!

Jack Haverty

On 3/7/25 02:40, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> The passage of time is not good for digital documents.  Unless they are
> deliberately copied onto new media and "ported forward", they tend to
> become rare, and then as systems are decommissioned or former
> administrators die, they become very hard to access, and eventually
> impossible.  This is true of paper records too.  We get periodic requests
> for such things here on the list.
>
> For example, we'd naively think that all the RFC's would have been
> copied a bezillion times and they would be easy to access even decades
> later.  But RFC 872 by Mike Padlipsky referenced two hand-drawn figures
> that you could only get by writing to Mike.  The RFC administrators
> didn't scan them in, photograph them, xerox them, etc; they weren't
> ascii text so they didn't travel with the rest of the RFCs.  Apparently,
> nobody has a copy today.  Oops.
>
> Brian wrote:
>> If this list (and its predecessor) has any value, it's *only* as an
>> archive for future historians, and IMHO we should be glad that
>> somebody is willing to archive the old material independently.
> I agree.  And I assume that when I write something to a large mailing
> list, that I'm writing it for public consumption, now and in the future;
> not to become somebody's private property that others aren't allowed to
> share.
>
> Jack wrote:
>> A little history -- Back in the mid-70s, Lick (Licklider) had a vision
>> of human-human communications which included the ability for
>> "important" content to be copied to The Datacomputer, where it could
>> be accessible, and even searchable, for posterity.
> Where it was never backed up on ordinary media.  Its entire contents
> would now fit on a single thumb-sized flash memory drive, or an even
> smaller micro-SD card.  But instead, its entire contents are now
> apparently either completely inaccessible, or permanently gone (see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Datacomputer).  Posterity will not be
> thanking the Datacomputer administrators for their trove of important
> documents carefully husbanded from all over the ARPANET.
>
> While it's fun chatting with each other on this list about our past
> successes and failures, the more serious purpose that I thought we were
> doing here was to draw out much material that was never formally
> captured during the creation of the Internet and its predecessors.  Or
> was hard to find among all the possible places one might look.  And to
> record that valuable informal information "for posterity".
>
> There is a Stanford (and many cooperating university) project making
> local copies of scientific journals, so that when their online publisher
> goes out of business, screws up, is bought by a scrooge, or falls off
> the Internet, the university libraries and all their researchers still
> have their locally stored copies of the journals that they paid dearly
> for.  It's called LOCKSS, because:
>
>    "Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe"
>
> Right here, I'd like to thank Joe Touch for managing this mailing list,
> because I know it's a thankless job.  And yet, where will posterity find
> a copy of the mailing list archives?  On magtapes stored in the classic
> offsite backup location (under Joe's sysadmin's bed)?
>
> Explicitly setting a community expectation of public access and a public
> right to share (e.g. a CC-BY license) would reduce the transaction costs
> of cooperation, encouraging the creation of Lots Of Copies.  That would
> make it far more likely that even ONE copy survives into the distant
> future.
>
> 	John
> 	
>

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