[ih] This Review is for Everyone

[Greg Skinner]

On Mar 22, 2026, at 5:20 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Craig Partridge
> 
>> the Internet Architecture TF (INarc). INarc split in 1986 into IETF,
>> ... and a more experiment/future-focused task force (may still have
>> been called INarc, I can't recall -- Dave Mills chaired it and it
>> persisted until c. 1991). I was not privy to the dynamics that led to
>> the split other than hearing rumors that there were too many
>> operational problems that required attention
> 
> Now that Dave is no longer with us, I guess I can be blunt and frank about
> this. Dave did the best he could, but he just did not have the skills needed
> to be in charge of a large group of people working on something that needed
> major attention Right Now. Don't get me wrong, he was a nice guy, smart, and
> all, but the person in charge of the nascent IETF needed a rare mix of skills
> - and Dave didn't have them all. I have the impression that this was made
> clear to us all, watching the job he did running a meeting or two of the
> pre-split InArc; IIRC, among other issues, he tended to get diverted onto
> interesting technical issues which weren't on the 'fix this _today_' path.
> 
> It's not that we needed someone to land on people - the group all knew we had
> a tremendous opportunity available (in fact, a _far_ bigger one than I think
> any of us saw), no pushing was needed. But 'herding cats' is a rare skill
> (especially at the start, when we didn't have any history in the
> organizational to guide us as to the style of leadersip needed to achieve
> that).
> 
> 	Noel
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On this subject, some remarks from Dave Mills in an interview he gave for the Charles Babbage Institute: [1]

Mills: When GADS was split into IETF and INARC—I was chairman of INARC for many
years—looking back at that time, I’m not sure what my charter was, I’m not sure what others
expected me to do. “Do good works.” I think what kind of cemented my position then was the
fact that NSF had just adopted my software, and now the genie was out of the box. So the issue
you had to do technically was how do you take all these crazy universities, with all of their crazy
networking systems, formerly connected to the ARPANET, and now they have to look out the
back door and be connected by this dinky 56 kilobit NSFNET. That had a lifetime of 2 years,
and it was grossly overloaded, and I learned an awful lot, and that was a very useful experience
for me, probably not less so for some of the researchers, but after 2 years…

--gregbo

[1] https://conservancy.umn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7f2677f4-2eb5-46d1-b9eb-fbe8e62ea47f/content