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

[Bill Ricker]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 5:40 AM John Gilmore via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> The passage of time is not good for digital documents.  Unless they are
> deliberately copied onto new media and "ported forward", ...


quite.

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.
>

Well, I have much of Mike's files, so I may very well have the hand-drawn
ARM diagrams that were attached only in paper copies of both RFC 871 and
872,
and three figures in RFC 875.
(*I probably have my personal copies from when we were all too briefly *
*office colleagues in my own files as well, since I haven't moved but once *
*since '82. yet*.)

The *Tea-bag Papers*' figures were IIRC professionally redrawn for The
Book.
I should scan them from the book to make the RFCs complete, as well as
search for the originals.

(IIRC the *Tea-bag Papers* were also cleaned up and published as official
MITRE reports,
e.g. RFC 872 = M82-48, the others being M82-47, M82-49, M82-50, and M82-51;
and so *should* have been on DTIC, but I didn't find them when last I
looked.
They should also be in MITRE archives.)

(However, the Book did *not* contain the Quotations from Winnie The Pooh
that were excerpted as as Fair Use in RFC 872 and 875, as the Estate of
AAMilne
declined "mechanical copyright" (term of art) authorization, and the
publisher
didn't care to fight Fair Use.
Since the original was ©1926, it is now Public Domain, the Woozle
<https://archive.org/details/winniethepoohpoo0000unse_o5d7/page/34/mode/2up?q=%22One+fine+winter%E2%80%99s+day+when+Piglet+was+brushing+away+the+snow+in+front+of+his+house%22>
and Heffalump
<https://archive.org/details/winniethepoohpoo0000unse_o5d7/page/56/mode/2up?q=Heffalump>
passages can now be quoted freely, and even the classic illustration of
walking in circles
and dreams of Heffalumps.)


William Ricker, as The Literary Estate of Michael A Padlispsky
<https://n1vux.github.io/articles/MAP/>
*which latter is more collegial than AAMilne's*