[ih] capacity v bandwidth

[Craig Partridge]

The last IETF that was entirely in one room was IETF 6 @ BBN (and I'm not
sure it was all one room).  It was a joint meeting with ANSI X3S3.3, which
I remember as a series of plenary talks combined with very polite but
pointed audience commentary about whether the Internet or OSI was leading
the global networking charge.

IETF 5 sought to create WGs, but with limited success.  One afternoon we
split into two working groups: one on BGP issues and one on network
management.  I turned out to be the only person in the network management
meeting room:-).  At some point Milo Medin took pity on me and took me out
onto the Moffat Field runway to watch a U2 take off (still a treasured
memory).

Craig

On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 11:28 AM Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>     > From: Barbara Denny
>
>     > I doubt it was discussed in a hallway. To me the early meetings were
>     > more like a DARPA meeting ... Everyone was in one room as far as I
> knew.
>     > The number of people attending was not that high.
>
> IETF meetings very quickly became fairly sizeable. From the meeting list I
> linked to earlier:
>
>   1st IETF      21 Attendees    January, 1986; San Diego
>   2nd IETF      21 Attendees    April, 1986; Aberdeen
>   3rd IETF      18 Attendees    July, 1986; Ann Arbor
>   4th IETF      35 Attendees    October, 1986; Menlo Park
>   5th IETF      35 Attendees    February, 1987; Moffett Field
>   6th IETF      88 Attendees    April, 1987; Boston
>   7th IETF      101 Attendees   July, 1987; McLean
>   8th IETF      56 Attendees    November, 1987; Boulder
>   9th IETF      82 Attendees    March, 1988; San Diego
>   10th IETF     112 Attendees   June, 1988; Annapolis
>   11th IETF     114 Attendees   October, 1988; Ann Arbor
>   12th IETF     120 Attendees   January, 1989; Austin
>   13th IETF     114 Attendees   April, 1989; Cocoa Beach
>
> With the timeframe that Brian deduced for the gateway/router change -
> between
> June 1988 and June 1989 - the initial growth had pretty clearly taken off.
>
> (The 7th, in McLean, was almost certainly the one where I remember Phill,
> Dan
> Lynch and I sitting in a bar at the end of the day chanting 'It's time to
> get
> real'; no doubt it being the first one with more than 100 attendees
> contributedto that thinking.)
>
>         Noel
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