From steve at shinkuro.com  Sun Nov  1 08:13:24 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2026 11:13:24 -0500
Subject: [ih] Fwd: Fw: Internet: 57 years later,
 what does Professor Kleinrock think of the his creation?
In-Reply-To: <CAMusaY9aOMfBvFakf+jqsQSvKy41+hkZ7gqA+_t-K-32gQ-RBA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAJUtOOi25GYkVf+kqShstXr0LDz2QKLcCS=0ymrJwGZjFQydXQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <95864229.323394.1793457986498@mail.yahoo.com>
 <1929866901.804568.1793476681600@mail.yahoo.com>
 <CAMusaY9aOMfBvFakf+jqsQSvKy41+hkZ7gqA+_t-K-32gQ-RBA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CABf5zvLyLCGwnyNvzGAGp-x12SvHnR3MXF6pZJEsrF5yPbAGpA@mail.gmail.com>

Kleinrock contributed quite a bit.  Many others contributed as well.
Taylor, Roberts and Wesler in ARPA/IPTO were crucial, as was Lukasik's
support.  Frank Heart's team at BBN did a masterful job designing, building
and delivering the IMPs.  Lick in multiple ways, from early concept to
marshalling resources and support at MIT during the early development and
deployment.  Engelbart's team at SRI, of course.  And quite a few others.

Steve

On Sat, Oct 31, 2026 at 4:00?PM Alexander McKenzie via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> In addition to "Leonard Kleinrock and a team of scientists at UCLA" who
> sent the first Host-to-Host messages over the ARPAnet (not the Internet) in
> 1969 it is reasonable to say that those who "gave life to" the ARPANET
> include:
> - the visionary thinkers at ARPA who came up with the idea and the funding
> - the extraordinary engineers at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc who produced
> the working ARPAnet hardware and software in 9 months
> - the collection of Principal Investigators and grad students at the many
> computer science sites supported by ARPA who comprised the Network Working
> Group which developed ideas for the practical use of the ARPAnet
>
> Why must we continue to read accounts which try to give credit for this
> astounding development to one man who was very much on the sidelines of the
> actual work?
>
> Alex McKenzie
>
> On Saturday, October 31, 2026 at 03:19:30 AM EDT, Frantisek Borsik via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>
> "Leonard Kleinrock and a team of scientists at UCLA gave life to the
> Internet at precisely 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969, quite literally
> changing the world.
>
> 57 years later, what does Professor Kleinrock think of the his creation?"
>
> https://x.com/lainaminute/status/2115898117229039925
> <
>
> https://x.com/lainaminute/status/2115898117229039925?a=bXFqldnx0o8OUK9A6xw&s=46
> >
>
> https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BU8EMAfdG/?mibextid=wwXIfr
>
> https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfFw5IGSTy9/
> <https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfFw5IGSTy9/?mdxt=MTMzMTRwdDliNjcyNw==>
>
>
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Frank
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
>
> In loving memory of Dave T?ht: 1965-2025
> https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/
>
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714 <+421%20919%20416%20714>
> <+421%20919%20416%20714>
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885 <+420%20775%20230%20885>
> <+420%20775%20230%20885>
> Skype: casioa5302ca
> frantisek.borsik at gmail.com
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
>
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> --
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> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


-- 
Sent by a Verified

sender


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sun Nov  1 12:27:00 2026
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2026 09:27:00 +1300
Subject: [ih] W3C origins [was: Re:  J.C.R. Licklider]
In-Reply-To: <8ec8bbda-ae3c-4b2d-bb67-3ab49a909dd5@3kitty.org>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
 <8ec8bbda-ae3c-4b2d-bb67-3ab49a909dd5@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <d24b5ecb-7c1d-4fb5-a165-06ac720af2d7@gmail.com>

Thanks Jack, I hadn't seen that interview before. It would place
the meeting I referred to on 1 December, 1994. However:

"A week and a half later Brian Carpenter of
CERN called Mike to say, ??We just got funding
for a supercollider, and we can?t afford to
do anything but that.??"

I'm sure that phone call was made, but not by me. The line managers who
could have made that call were Mike Sendall (Tim BL's former group leader)t
or David Williams (his and my Division leader). Both were British so I think
Al just misremembered which Brit from CERN called MIT.

It's entirely plausible that whichever of them called Dertouzos used the
LHC decision as the excuse. The CERN Council voted to build the LHC in
early December 1994, so the dates match. However, I am 100% certain that the
real reason for CERN's decision was concern about financial propriety.

I knew Al a few years later, when he was working for Bob Kahn and running
Foretec, supplying secretariat services for the IETF. I wasn't necessarily
his favourite Brit, because I was IETF Chair while we were extracting
the IETF and its IPR from Foretec and CNRI. His daughter Amy Vezza was a
stalwart of the IETF secretariat for many years.

Regards/Ng? mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 01-Nov-26 19:41, Jack Haverty wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> Thanks for the additional info on W3C.? ?All of that occurred before Al
> contacted me, so I didn't know anything about it.? FYI, here's another
> view of that founding part of the W3C history, from Dave Walden's
> interview of Al Vezza in 2012.? You're mentioned in it:
> 
> https://www.walden-family.com/ieee/galley-proof-anhc-34-2-intv.pdf
> 
> There was quite a bit of politics involved in the History of The
> Internet -- what Lick called the "Multinet".
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> On 10/31/26 22:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>
>>> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
>>> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
>>> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
>>
>> He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
>> e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
>>
>>> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of
>>> staff" at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT
>>> and lead the W3C from there.
>>
>> I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
>> in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
>> George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
>> Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
>>
>> My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
>> were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
>> MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
>> "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the European
>> unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
>> result would be to send European funds to the USA.
>>
>> Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I wasn't, but
>> I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the departure
>> lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical meeting.
>> (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing Internet
>> capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from memory, was
>> Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger. Maybe
>> David
>> Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except Tim were
>> flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should be used
>> to route money from the EC to MIT.
>>
>> I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
>> this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also it
>> seemed
>> outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
>> Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
>> acted as the European pole.
>>
>> Regards/Ng? mihi
>>  ?? Brian Carpenter
> 

From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com  Sun Nov  1 15:44:26 2026
From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2026 23:44:26 +0000
Subject: [ih] J.C.R. Licklider
In-Reply-To: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <SA1PR12MB7038F4A3772A9423BDE369ABB16B2@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>

How can "Internet Historians" not be acquainted with Lick?!!!

I met him when he had retired from ARPA and was running the Dynamic Modeling group at MIT.  We had some great chats in the break room at 545 Tech Square - though I never learned about his role in the Internet until much later.

Ironically, it was his son Tracy, as President of the old Boston Computer Society, who materialized the initial funding for our Center for Civic Networking.

Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
________________________________
From: Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Sent: Saturday, 31 October 2026 22:50:01
To: Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: [ih] J.C.R. Licklider

Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider

 From 1970 through 1977, I was in Licklider's group at MIT, first as a
student and then as a member of his research staff.   Sometime in the
early 1960s, Lick (as everyone called him then) wrote several papers
describing his vision of a "intergalactic network" of computers, all
somehow able to communicate with each other, and working together to
help humans "do everything humans do."   His vision included the notion
that everyone would have some kind of "personal" computer that would
interact with other computers even when the human was doing something else.

Of course, in 1975 a "personal computer" was an account on some large
timeshared machine, and the human interacted with it only when s/he was
"logged in" at some kind of terminal.  Today, humans have computers in
their pockets much more powerful than the 1970s machines, and able to
interact with huge numbers of other computers using this thing we call
The Internet.   As AI and its "agents" emerge, we may be getting very
close to Lick's vision of vast numbers of interacting computers helping
humans do everything humans do.

During the 1970s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated into Lick's
"intergalactic network" vision of how computers would be integrated into
society.   In retrospect, I've realized that I spent my entire career
somehow involved in building Lick's vision, as part of the huge
community that made it happen.  It's been a wild ride and there's still
a question of whether we'll see a utopian future or one where AI kills
us all.

For anyone interested in the history of the Internet, I highly recommend
a book by Mitchell Waldrop, called "The Dream Machine". It is
essentially a biography of Lick, but also describes much of the
1960-1990 history of computing.  Among the details you may not know:

- Lick's training was in psychology and psychoacoustics, not computer
science.
- The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of ARPA was formed
to explore use of computers.  Lick was the first Director of IPTO, and
the ARPANET was a means of starting work on his vision;
- Prior to joining ARPA, Lick worked at BBN, and lobbied for the
company's first computer purchase.  It was necessary to process data
associated with the study of acoustics; later, ARPA awarded the ARPANET
contract to BBN;  Connection?
- Lick was very much a "do it" person, preferring functioning systems
over theory;  he described what we now call "agents", but he called them
Olivers
- Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
the W3C from there.  This happened too late to be covered in Waldrop's
book.  The Web was an important component of Lick's vision and W3C was a
means to drive its evolution.  Al used to be my boss and he contacted me
to get Oracle to join W3C as a Founding Member and I served as the
corporate representative.

There were a lot of people involved in the early years of what is now
The Internet, and this book describes a lot of the interactions and
behind the scenes activity that was involved.  Again, I highly recommend
it.  I found that the parts of the book that describe things that
happened while I was "in the room" are quite accurate and often explain
the "why" of things I remember happening but never knew the full story.

/Jack Haverty







From jack at 3kitty.org  Sun Nov  1 17:35:45 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2026 17:35:45 -0800
Subject: [ih] W3C origins [was: Re:  J.C.R. Licklider]
In-Reply-To: <d24b5ecb-7c1d-4fb5-a165-06ac720af2d7@gmail.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
 <8ec8bbda-ae3c-4b2d-bb67-3ab49a909dd5@3kitty.org>
 <d24b5ecb-7c1d-4fb5-a165-06ac720af2d7@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <df04d7ad-8a39-4c46-a1fc-64a08a7138fe@3kitty.org>

You're welcome!? ?Much of that kind of historical material is locked up 
behind paywalls, so it's not easy to find.? Dave Walden put that 
interview online on his own website to make it widely accessible, but it 
was probably not advertised much at all.

Al may have misremembered but I suspect it was more likely that Mike 
Dertouzos, who actually received the call, got it wrong.? One thing 
about us Americans -- all you Brits sound alike to us!? All we hear is 
the "British accent", despite the fact that English is actually your 
native language, not ours.

/Jack

On 11/1/26 12:27, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Thanks Jack, I hadn't seen that interview before. It would place
> the meeting I referred to on 1 December, 1994. However:
>
> "A week and a half later Brian Carpenter of
> CERN called Mike to say, ??We just got funding
> for a supercollider, and we can?t afford to
> do anything but that.??"
>
> I'm sure that phone call was made, but not by me. The line managers who
> could have made that call were Mike Sendall (Tim BL's former group 
> leader)t
> or David Williams (his and my Division leader). Both were British so I 
> think
> Al just misremembered which Brit from CERN called MIT.
>
> It's entirely plausible that whichever of them called Dertouzos used the
> LHC decision as the excuse. The CERN Council voted to build the LHC in
> early December 1994, so the dates match. However, I am 100% certain 
> that the
> real reason for CERN's decision was concern about financial propriety.
>
> I knew Al a few years later, when he was working for Bob Kahn and running
> Foretec, supplying secretariat services for the IETF. I wasn't 
> necessarily
> his favourite Brit, because I was IETF Chair while we were extracting
> the IETF and its IPR from Foretec and CNRI. His daughter Amy Vezza was a
> stalwart of the IETF secretariat for many years.
>
> Regards/Ng? mihi
> ?? Brian Carpenter
>
> On 01-Nov-26 19:41, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> Hi Brian,
>>
>> Thanks for the additional info on W3C.? ?All of that occurred before Al
>> contacted me, so I didn't know anything about it.? FYI, here's another
>> view of that founding part of the W3C history, from Dave Walden's
>> interview of Al Vezza in 2012.? You're mentioned in it:
>>
>> https://www.walden-family.com/ieee/galley-proof-anhc-34-2-intv.pdf
>>
>> There was quite a bit of politics involved in the History of The
>> Internet -- what Lick called the "Multinet".
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>> On 10/31/26 22:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>>
>>>> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
>>>> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well 
>>>> known to
>>>> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
>>>
>>> He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
>>> e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
>>>
>>>> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of
>>>> staff" at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT
>>>> and lead the W3C from there.
>>>
>>> I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
>>> in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
>>> George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
>>> Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
>>>
>>> My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
>>> were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
>>> MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
>>> "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the European
>>> unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
>>> result would be to send European funds to the USA.
>>>
>>> Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I wasn't, but
>>> I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the departure
>>> lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical meeting.
>>> (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing 
>>> Internet
>>> capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from memory, was
>>> Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger. Maybe
>>> David
>>> Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except Tim 
>>> were
>>> flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should be 
>>> used
>>> to route money from the EC to MIT.
>>>
>>> I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
>>> this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also it
>>> seemed
>>> outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
>>> Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
>>> acted as the European pole.
>>>
>>> Regards/Ng? mihi
>>> ??? Brian Carpenter
>>

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From jack at 3kitty.org  Sun Nov  1 18:05:15 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2026 18:05:15 -0800
Subject: [ih] J.C.R. Licklider
In-Reply-To: <SA1PR12MB7038F4A3772A9423BDE369ABB16B2@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <SA1PR12MB7038F4A3772A9423BDE369ABB16B2@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
Message-ID: <76768d55-28b5-4576-8342-b58c44c2b0ae@3kitty.org>

While I was in Lick's group at MIT, I don't recall that anyone ever 
wrote a single paper or journal article.??We even only wrote a very few 
RFCs.? Lick was not into publicity at all, preferring that we write code 
and build hardware rather than learned papers.? ?There was a stream of 
theses from students who passed through the group, but not much else.

Also, the "internet historians" (at least on this list) seem to focus on 
the technical history of the Internet - the protocols, algorithms, 
committees, RFCs, et al that got it to work.? But there's a lot more to 
the history, which is why I recommended Waldrop's book.? It contains a 
lot of the non-technical details of the people, politics, and 
interactions that were also crucial to making the Internet happen.

By the way, here's another historical account with lots of the 
non-technical details -- a 1988 interview with Lick himself:
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/03/102717159-05-01-acc.pdf

When anybody asks me "Who invented the Internet?" my answer is "Lick".? 
He had the vision of the "intergalactic network" or "Multinet", among 
other notions (like timesharing), and spent time at ARPA getting the 
ball rolling and getting lots of other people to join his mission to 
create that vision.

When I think about my 1970s indoctrination into Lick's vision of a vast 
array of "computers helping people do everything people do" it sure 
looks like we're there.? ?It's unfortunate that we can't ask Lick's 
opinion any more, since I'm sure he would have ideas about what needs to 
be fixed.? ?His background in psychology and skills in politics would be 
especially useful for current issues as the Internet (AI, social media, 
etc.) affects society.

/Jack Haverty

On 11/1/26 15:44, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> How can "Internet Historians" not be acquainted with Lick?!!!
>
> I met him when he had retired from ARPA and was running the Dynamic 
> Modeling group at MIT.? We had some great chats in the break room at 
> 545 Tech Square - though I never learned about his role in the 
> Internet until much later.
>
> Ironically, it was his son Tracy, as President of the old Boston 
> Computer Society, who materialized the initial funding for our Center 
> for Civic Networking.
>
> Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
> Get Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on 
> behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> *Sent:* Saturday, 31 October 2026 22:50:01
> *To:* Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> *Subject:* [ih] J.C.R. Licklider
> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
>
> ?From 1970 through 1977, I was in Licklider's group at MIT, first as a
> student and then as a member of his research staff. ?Sometime in the
> early 1960s, Lick (as everyone called him then) wrote several papers
> describing his vision of a "intergalactic network" of computers, all
> somehow able to communicate with each other, and working together to
> help humans "do everything humans do."? ?His vision included the notion
> that everyone would have some kind of "personal" computer that would
> interact with other computers even when the human was doing something 
> else.
>
> Of course, in 1975 a "personal computer" was an account on some large
> timeshared machine, and the human interacted with it only when s/he was
> "logged in" at some kind of terminal.? Today, humans have computers in
> their pockets much more powerful than the 1970s machines, and able to
> interact with huge numbers of other computers using this thing we call
> The Internet.? ?As AI and its "agents" emerge, we may be getting very
> close to Lick's vision of vast numbers of interacting computers helping
> humans do everything humans do.
>
> During the 1970s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated into Lick's
> "intergalactic network" vision of how computers would be integrated into
> society.? ?In retrospect, I've realized that I spent my entire career
> somehow involved in building Lick's vision, as part of the huge
> community that made it happen.? It's been a wild ride and there's still
> a question of whether we'll see a utopian future or one where AI kills
> us all.
>
> For anyone interested in the history of the Internet, I highly recommend
> a book by Mitchell Waldrop, called "The Dream Machine". It is
> essentially a biography of Lick, but also describes much of the
> 1960-1990 history of computing.? Among the details you may not know:
>
> - Lick's training was in psychology and psychoacoustics, not computer
> science.
> - The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of ARPA was formed
> to explore use of computers.? Lick was the first Director of IPTO, and
> the ARPANET was a means of starting work on his vision;
> - Prior to joining ARPA, Lick worked at BBN, and lobbied for the
> company's first computer purchase.? It was necessary to process data
> associated with the study of acoustics; later, ARPA awarded the ARPANET
> contract to BBN;? Connection?
> - Lick was very much a "do it" person, preferring functioning systems
> over theory;? he described what we now call "agents", but he called them
> Olivers
> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
> at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
> the W3C from there.? This happened too late to be covered in Waldrop's
> book.? The Web was an important component of Lick's vision and W3C was a
> means to drive its evolution.? Al used to be my boss and he contacted me
> to get Oracle to join W3C as a Founding Member and I served as the
> corporate representative.
>
> There were a lot of people involved in the early years of what is now
> The Internet, and this book describes a lot of the interactions and
> behind the scenes activity that was involved.? Again, I highly recommend
> it.? I found that the parts of the book that describe things that
> happened while I was "in the room" are quite accurate and often explain
> the "why" of things I remember happening but never knew the full story.
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
>
>
>

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From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sun Nov  1 19:52:04 2026
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2026 16:52:04 +1300
Subject: [ih] Euro RFCs [was: W3C origins [was: J.C.R. Licklider]]
In-Reply-To: <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <48e0aeaa-0f39-4e9d-8854-9ad2af28fb46@gmail.com>

BTW, while checking the dates for this I came across the assertion that
the first RFC by a European author was RFC1405 (January 1993). This
struck me as implausible, so I checked. I believe it was in fact RFC588
in October 1973 "LONDON NODE IS NOW UP" when UCL joined ARPANET.

Regards/Ng? mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 01-Nov-26 18:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> 
>> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
>> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
>> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
> 
> He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
> e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
> 
>> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
>> at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
>> the W3C from there.
> 
> I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
> in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
> George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
> Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
> 
> My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
> were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
> MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
> "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the European
> unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
> result would be to send European funds to the USA.
> 
> Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I wasn't, but
> I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the departure
> lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical meeting.
> (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing Internet
> capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from memory, was
> Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger. Maybe David
> Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except Tim were
> flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should be used
> to route money from the EC to MIT.
> 
> I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
> this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also it seemed
> outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
> Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
> acted as the European pole.
> 
> Regards/Ng? mihi
>      Brian Carpenter
> 

From vgcerf at gmail.com  Mon Nov  2 03:21:31 2026
From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2026 06:21:31 -0500
Subject: [ih] Euro RFCs [was: W3C origins [was: J.C.R. Licklider]]
In-Reply-To: <48e0aeaa-0f39-4e9d-8854-9ad2af28fb46@gmail.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
 <48e0aeaa-0f39-4e9d-8854-9ad2af28fb46@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAAFtm_WAyhYP-Sb1wdvc_K=_gqwuq1oormDLR0pxk7Co=vwmWQ@mail.gmail.com>

this is wrong too. The first RFC by a European author is RFC 7:



0007 Host-IMP interface. G. Deloche. May 1969. (Format: TXT, HTML)
     (Status: UNKNOWN) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC0007)

vint cerf


On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 10:52?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> BTW, while checking the dates for this I came across the assertion that
> the first RFC by a European author was RFC1405 (January 1993). This
> struck me as implausible, so I checked. I believe it was in fact RFC588
> in October 1973 "LONDON NODE IS NOW UP" when UCL joined ARPANET.
>
> Regards/Ng? mihi
>     Brian Carpenter
>
> On 01-Nov-26 18:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> >
> >> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
> >> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
> >> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
> >
> > He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
> > e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
> >
> >> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
> >> at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
> >> the W3C from there.
> >
> > I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
> > in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
> > George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
> > Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
> >
> > My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
> > were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
> > MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
> > "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the European
> > unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
> > result would be to send European funds to the USA.
> >
> > Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I wasn't, but
> > I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the departure
> > lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical meeting.
> > (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing Internet
> > capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from memory, was
> > Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger. Maybe
> David
> > Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except Tim were
> > flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should be used
> > to route money from the EC to MIT.
> >
> > I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
> > this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also it
> seemed
> > outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
> > Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
> > acted as the European pole.
> >
> > Regards/Ng? mihi
> >      Brian Carpenter
> >
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Mon Nov  2 16:34:17 2026
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2026 13:34:17 +1300
Subject: [ih] Euro RFCs [was: W3C origins [was: J.C.R. Licklider]]
In-Reply-To: <CAAFtm_WAyhYP-Sb1wdvc_K=_gqwuq1oormDLR0pxk7Co=vwmWQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
 <48e0aeaa-0f39-4e9d-8854-9ad2af28fb46@gmail.com>
 <CAAFtm_WAyhYP-Sb1wdvc_K=_gqwuq1oormDLR0pxk7Co=vwmWQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <d6a68c29-b6c1-4bac-93b9-580078377fb5@gmail.com>

Ah, I was looking for Europeans based in Europe!

(Also, for anyone unclear about where "Europe" is, the UK had joined
the Common Market in January 1973, so UCL was definitely European
at the time of RFC 588.)

Regards/Ng? mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 03-Nov-26 00:21, vinton cerf wrote:
> this is wrong too. The first RFC by a European author is RFC 7:
> 
> 
> 
> 0007 Host-IMP interface. G. Deloche. May 1969. (Format: TXT, HTML)
>       (Status: UNKNOWN) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC0007)
> 
> vint cerf
> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 10:52?PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>     BTW, while checking the dates for this I came across the assertion that
>     the first RFC by a European author was RFC1405 (January 1993). This
>     struck me as implausible, so I checked. I believe it was in fact RFC588
>     in October 1973 "LONDON NODE IS NOW UP" when UCL joined ARPANET.
> 
>     Regards/Ng? mihi
>      ? ? Brian Carpenter
> 
>     On 01-Nov-26 18:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>      > On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>      >
>      >> Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
>      >> player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
>      >> Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
>      >
>      > He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
>      > e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
>      >
>      >> - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
>      >> at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
>      >> the W3C from there.
>      >
>      > I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
>      > in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
>      > George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
>      > Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
>      >
>      > My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
>      > were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
>      > MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
>      > "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the European
>      > unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
>      > result would be to send European funds to the USA.
>      >
>      > Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I wasn't, but
>      > I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the departure
>      > lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical meeting.
>      > (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing Internet
>      > capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from memory, was
>      > Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger. Maybe David
>      > Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except Tim were
>      > flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should be used
>      > to route money from the EC to MIT.
>      >
>      > I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
>      > this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also it seemed
>      > outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
>      > Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
>      > acted as the European pole.
>      >
>      > Regards/Ng? mihi
>      >? ? ? Brian Carpenter
>      >
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     -
>     Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history <https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history>
> 

From jack at 3kitty.org  Tue Nov  3 12:45:42 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2026 12:45:42 -0800
Subject: [ih] W3C origins [was: Re: J.C.R. Licklider]
In-Reply-To: <CAC-QkAAk0Js33z_0x_o5ULVvn=EfYdrxzQQbfT=og=ZE1+unQQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <7d6f08de-4571-4c26-b343-4f8a9fdb2324@3kitty.org>
 <0cd61b08-eb5c-424e-b216-f352afd89ab1@gmail.com>
 <CAC-QkAAk0Js33z_0x_o5ULVvn=EfYdrxzQQbfT=og=ZE1+unQQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <0727d197-3337-4b6f-8ff6-a6cfe09f5dab@3kitty.org>

Hi John!

It's been a long time since the days in Tech Square.? Thanks for 
mentioning the Cambridge Project.

In all the time I was in Lick's group in the 1970s, I don't recall ever 
hearing any mention all that time of the Cambridge Project, even its 
name.? Lick did disappear from Dynamic Modeling (DM) for days at a time 
but we all just assumed he was off at meetings or such stuff.? Lick did 
tell us when he left for a year or so to return to ARPA, and explained 
that he had to go back "to fix some things."? While I was there, I never 
knew about his second job as PI of the Cambridge Project.

However, now knowing a bit about the Cambridge Project, he did bring 
some of that psychology and sociology influence into the DM group. One 
of the things he got us involved in was "electronic mail", more 
generically known as "computer assisted human communications."? This fit 
his vision of people using computers to do what they do, and especially 
the notion that everyone would have their own "personal machine", which 
would interact with others' personal machines using the whimsical 
intergalactic network, instantiated at that time as the ARPANET and 
accounts on some timeshared computer.

That led to the notion of "mail servers" always active and working to 
move human communications around even when their human was absent.? My 
task in DM was to create the mail server; others in the DM group had the 
task to make various UI interfaces between humans and the server.

One of the psychology/sociology principles that Lick introduced was the 
notion that human communications needed some kind of inherent "back 
pressure" to discourage overuse.? If communications was free, sociology 
and psychology indicate that it will get overused, and everyone will be 
swamped with all sorts of unwanted input.? ?Sound familiar...?

As engineers this made a lot of sense to us programmers.? Electrical 
engineers are taught that negative feedback is important to design of 
amplifiers.? Mechanical engineers similarly learn that engines need 
negative feedback, e.g., governor on 19th century steam engines.

So in electronic mail, we tried to introduce some mechanism for such 
"negative feedback".? ?We tried to introduce the notion of "stamps" for 
electronic mail.? Such feedback didn't have to be blatantly financial; 
even some limits such as a cap on number or size of messages sent per 
day for an account would provide some negative feedback.

That idea was soundly rejected by the email community.? Some thought 
email should be always free.? ?Some thought it was too much work and 
more important to keep email simple (hence SMTP - the Simple Mail 
Transport Protocol).? In any event it never happened.

Lick's vision for "human communications" was quite broad, encompassing 
not only what we now know as email but also functions such as "workflow" 
to process messages through a chain of approvals in an office, or 
services such as "escrow" to provide a way for trusted third parties to 
verify that some particular communication had been delivered at a 
certain date and time.? The server I built even knew how to archive 
emails to the Datacomputer by using the ARPANET to get it there or later 
retrieve it, as well as make it accessible to other users on the 
distribution list.? ?In Lick's vision, a "conversation" might start as a 
chat session, progress to a lengthy multi-media interchange, and become 
popular enough to establish a "forum" for continued discussion.? ?We 
have all of these now, but it's very difficult to tie them together.

In Lick's vision, email was handled by computer programs talking among 
themselves and passing data structures around, to do what humans had 
requested.? We published several RFCs (e.g., 713, 722) to get that 
started but, like "stamps" it was deemed too complex. People wanted 
human-readable interactions and flexibility to use their own nuances in 
what became mail headers.

If Lick's vision had been followed, perhaps spam and forged email 
wouldn't be as much of a problem as it has been over the decades. I've 
always been disappointed that we never got back to implementing the 
various sociology and psychology principles that Lick thought were 
important for the intergalactic network.? ?As more and more agents 
appear on the Internet, maybe it's time for the sociology and psychology 
issues to be included.

/Jack Haverty



On 11/3/26 08:45, John Klensin wrote:
> Brian,
> Apologies for the delay, but let me add three small bits to this for 
> anyone who doesn't know and is curious.
>
> * The definitive biography of Lick, going back to the origins of, and 
> visions behind, all of this (not just the Internet), is M. Mitchell 
> Waldrop's, _The Dream Machine_, Viking Penguin, 2001.? ? IMO, but I am 
> very biased, the treatment in Katie Hafner's book falls short of 
> "fully credited".? Even the Waldrop book falls short in at least one 
> area, something that he and I discussed a bit after the book came out 
> (which was the first time I heard of the effort).? In particular...
>
> * During the late 1960s and through part of the 1970s, Lick was 
> Principal Investigator on two separate research projects at MIT.? One 
> was the Dynamic Modeling effort within Project MAC in the School of 
> Engineering, where Jack was involved.? The other, far less known these 
> days even around MIT, was something called the Cambridge Project, an 
> effort in computing in the social and behavioral sciences that was 
> sufficiently interdisciplinary and actually inter-university to report 
> directly to the Provost.? I had something of a leadership role in the 
> latter.? Lick decided, in around 1972, that it was time to start 
> developing and demonstrating ways that the emerging network could and 
> would improve collaboration and results well beyond computer science, 
> networking, and even the physical sciences, and that the Cambridge 
> Project was the place to start that effort.? ?We brought in efforts 
> from around the US and, in a few cases, around the world to do that 
> and some of the effects are still obvious although rarely credited.
>
> * Lick's interests and impact extended well beyond anything we would 
> have thought of in terms of those two project areas at the time.? ? 
> For example, his 1965 __Libraries of the Future_ book laid many of the 
> foundations for digital libraries and, some have claimed, for 
> widespread use of interactive computing.._
> _
> _
> _Towering figure, with a very wide range of interests, and a really 
> nice person._
> _
> _
> _?john_
> _
> _
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 1:07?AM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>     On 01-Nov-26 15:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>
>     > Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
>     > player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well
>     known to
>     > Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider
>
>     He's fully credited in any serious history of the Internet, I think,
>     e.g. Katie Hafner's book.
>
>     > - Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of
>     staff"
>     > at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT
>     and lead
>     > the W3C from there.
>
>     I would add that Michael Dertouzos was *at least* as influential as Al
>     in attracting TimBL to MIT. Probably more, because Dertouzos's old pal
>     George Metakides (an MIT alum) was the senior official in the European
>     Commissionin charge of funding the European end of the W3C.
>
>     My understanding at the time was that Dertouzos and Metakides (they
>     were both Greek) had decided that the main part of the W3C would be at
>     MIT, with European Commission (EC) funding, but with a small European
>     "pole". Metakides thought it would be a fine idea to place the
>     European
>     unit at CERN, but CERN refused to be part of an exercise whose main
>     result would be to send European funds to the USA.
>
>     Al Vezza was very much in the room for these discussions. I
>     wasn't, but
>     I knew all the CERN participants, and in fact met them in the
>     departure
>     lounge at Brussels airport on their way back from the critical
>     meeting.
>     (I was in Brussels the same day for a meeting related to growing
>     Internet
>     capacity in Europe.) The CERN team in that discussion, from
>     memory, was
>     Mike Sendall, Tim B-L, Robert Cailliau, and Francois Fluckiger.
>     Maybe David
>     Williams, our Division Leader, was there too. All of them except
>     Tim were
>     flabbergasted by the idea that CERN (a non-EC institution) should
>     be used
>     to route money from the EC to MIT.
>
>     I heard within a few days that the CERN management definitely refused
>     this. It seemed politically dangerous and was it even legal? Also
>     it seemed
>     outside CERN's mission as a physics laboratory. And nobody missed that
>     Metakides and Dertouzos were buddies. So in the end, INRIA in France
>     acted as the European pole.
>
>     Regards/Ng? mihi
>     ? ? Brian Carpenter
>
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     -
>     Unsubscribe:
>     https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>

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From gregskinner0 at icloud.com  Thu Nov  5 10:13:35 2026
From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 10:13:35 -0800
Subject: [ih] Fwd: [Nethistory] Closure of the nethistory mailing list
References: <BN2P110MB1107A2C04532B8F63F1A83F7DCA9A@BN2P110MB1107.NAMP110.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>
Message-ID: <1AE887D8-70CF-4E82-A44E-2FF97121F0C4@icloud.com>

If you would like the IETF nethistory list <mailto:nethistory at ietf.org> to remain open, please make your wishes known on that list.

--gregbo

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Roman Danyliw <rdd at cert.org>
> Subject: [Nethistory] Closure of the nethistory mailing list
> Date: August 31, 2026 at 1:58:52?PM PDT
> To: "nethistory at ietf.org" <nethistory at ietf.org>
> 
> Hi!
>  
> As part of a regular non-WG list review process, the IESG is trying to reduce the number of open and unused mailing lists.
>  
> It looks like this list has had no real traffic since March 2020.  Unless there are objections, I intend to close this list in 4 weeks. 
>  
> Closing the list will mean that no new posts will be permitted. The list archives will remain intact.
>  
> Regards,
> Roman Danyliw
> (as GEN AD)



From mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com  Thu Nov  5 11:14:13 2026
From: mfidelman at protocoltechnologiesgroup.com (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 19:14:13 +0000
Subject: [ih] Closing the list?  NO!
Message-ID: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>

What's this about closing this list?  It's too important to close.  We need more internet Historians!

Miles Fidelman

Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>


From touch at strayalpha.com  Thu Nov  5 11:17:07 2026
From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 11:17:07 -0800
Subject: [ih] Closing the list?  NO!
In-Reply-To: <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
Message-ID: <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>

This list isn?t closing; it?s the IETF?s list that is.

Joe (list operator)

> On Nov 5, 2026, at 11:14?AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> What's this about closing this list?  It's too important to close.  We need more internet Historians!
> 
> Miles Fidelman



From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Thu Nov  5 11:26:51 2026
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2026 08:26:51 +1300
Subject: [ih] Closing the list? NO!
In-Reply-To: <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
 <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
Message-ID: <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>

That IETF list never attracted any serious traffic. Over 13 years there were ~101 messages, mainly useless, all archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/nethistory/

Regards/Ng? mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 06-Nov-26 08:17, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
> This list isn?t closing; it?s the IETF?s list that is.
> 
> Joe (list operator)
> 
>> On Nov 5, 2026, at 11:14?AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> What's this about closing this list?  It's too important to close.  We need more internet Historians!
>>
>> Miles Fidelman
> 

From jack at 3kitty.org  Thu Nov  5 11:52:15 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 11:52:15 -0800
Subject: [ih] Closing the list? NO!
In-Reply-To: <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
 <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
 <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <04c5e916-2f1b-4f46-91c7-9d02866a7f4e@3kitty.org>

IMHO, the popularity and content of a mailing list is driven by the 
population of that list and the material that they post.? ? It's often 
difficult to determine much information about that population though.

JoeT -- can you tell us anything about the population of this list, 
e.g., how many subscribers, how they are distributed around the 'net and 
planet, etc.?

/Jack

On 11/5/26 11:26, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> That IETF list never attracted any serious traffic. Over 13 years 
> there were ~101 messages, mainly useless, all archived at 
> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/nethistory/
>
> Regards/Ng? mihi
> ?? Brian Carpenter
>
> On 06-Nov-26 08:17, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
>> This list isn?t closing; it?s the IETF?s list that is.
>>
>> Joe (list operator)
>>
>>> On Nov 5, 2026, at 11:14?AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history 
>>> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> What's this about closing this list?? It's too important to close.? 
>>> We need more internet Historians!
>>>
>>> Miles Fidelman
>>

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From touch at strayalpha.com  Thu Nov  5 12:02:15 2026
From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 12:02:15 -0800
Subject: [ih] Closing the list? NO!
In-Reply-To: <04c5e916-2f1b-4f46-91c7-9d02866a7f4e@3kitty.org>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
 <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
 <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>
 <04c5e916-2f1b-4f46-91c7-9d02866a7f4e@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <1C7449FE-7579-4B1E-865D-4F7B7E3B4847@strayalpha.com>

Hi, Jack,

We currently have 713 email addresses subscribed, however:
	- some people may subscribe from multiple addresses (so they can post from each)
	- some addresses are lists themselves (exploders)

Note that the interface doesn?t give me an easy way to dump the full list out so I can do further analysis.

I can note that we have been active every year since July 2001*, but there?s no direct dump of that either for further analysis.

(Apologies for missing our 25th anniversary, but consider this at least a confirmation that we?re still going strong)

Joe (list operator)

> On Nov 5, 2026, at 11:52?AM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> IMHO, the popularity and content of a mailing list is driven by the population of that list and the material that they post.    It's often difficult to determine much information about that population though.
> 
> JoeT -- can you tell us anything about the population of this list, e.g., how many subscribers, how they are distributed around the 'net and planet, etc.?
> 
> /Jack
> 
> On 11/5/26 11:26, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>> That IETF list never attracted any serious traffic. Over 13 years there were ~101 messages, mainly useless, all archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/nethistory/
>> 
>> Regards/Ng? mihi
>>    Brian Carpenter
>> 
>> On 06-Nov-26 08:17, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
>>> This list isn?t closing; it?s the IETF?s list that is.
>>> 
>>> Joe (list operator)
>>> 
>>>> On Nov 5, 2026, at 11:14?AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> What's this about closing this list?  It's too important to close.  We need more internet Historians!
>>>> 
>>>> Miles Fidelman
>>> 
> 
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history



From ajs at crankycanuck.ca  Thu Nov  5 12:16:13 2026
From: ajs at crankycanuck.ca (Andrew Sullivan)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 15:16:13 -0500
Subject: [ih] Closing the list? NO!
In-Reply-To: <1C7449FE-7579-4B1E-865D-4F7B7E3B4847@strayalpha.com>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
 <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
 <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>
 <04c5e916-2f1b-4f46-91c7-9d02866a7f4e@3kitty.org>
 <1C7449FE-7579-4B1E-865D-4F7B7E3B4847@strayalpha.com>
Message-ID: <auzjvY0Bm_st5oNF@crankycanuck.ca>

On Thu, Nov 05, 2026 at 12:02:15PM -0500, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
>
>Note that the interface doesn?t give me an easy way to dump the full list out so I can do further analysis.
>

If I recall correctly, there _is_ a way to get this conveniently.  It might only be available to the Internet Society staff.  But if that's right, perhaps you can ask them for it.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca


From el at lisse.NA  Thu Nov  5 12:28:00 2026
From: el at lisse.NA (Eberhard W Lisse)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2026 22:28:00 +0200
Subject: [ih] Closing the list? NO!
In-Reply-To: <1C7449FE-7579-4B1E-865D-4F7B7E3B4847@strayalpha.com>
References: <SA1PR12MB7038E6A48512AF239256E00FB1772@SA1PR12MB7038.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>
 <5E86DBC9-B004-43AF-B72F-3C6A9A0F932A@beachpine.com>
 <3CF48B33-83FA-4146-BAEF-63AE95C816CD@strayalpha.com>
 <f8738203-539a-4a7b-b133-eeb0bc2c4804@gmail.com>
 <04c5e916-2f1b-4f46-91c7-9d02866a7f4e@3kitty.org>
 <1C7449FE-7579-4B1E-865D-4F7B7E3B4847@strayalpha.com>
Message-ID: <440f001f-2dd3-4ad5-bdeb-8339bc152861@lisse.NA>

Turn an AI loose?

el

On 2026-11-05 22:02, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
> Hi, Jack,
> 
> We currently have 713 email addresses subscribed, however: - some
> people may subscribe from multiple addresses (so they can post from
> each) - some addresses are lists themselves (exploders)
> 
> Note that the interface doesn?t give me an easy way to dump the full
> list out so I can do further analysis.
> 
> I can note that we have been active every year since July 2001*, but
> there?s no direct dump of that either for further analysis.
> 
> (Apologies for missing our 25th anniversary, but consider this at
> least a confirmation that we?re still going strong)
> 
> Joe (list operator)
-- 
Eberhard W. Lisse     \         /Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (retired)
el at lisse.NA           / *      |     Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell)
PO Box 8421 Bachbrecht\      /     If this email is signed with GPG/PGP
10007, Namibia         ;____/    Sect 20 of Act No. 4 of 2019 may apply



From vgcerf at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 05:08:55 2026
From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 08:08:55 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
Message-ID: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>

Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?

UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
SRI XXXX-XXXX
<unknown>
USC-ISI XXXX - 1998

thanks

vint


From dhc at dcrocker.net  Sat Nov  7 05:16:00 2026
From: dhc at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Sat,  7 Nov 2026 13:16:00 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <48fc39d0-71c3-4250-be5d-f209bbfcc62d@dcrocker.net>

> <unknown>

Wasn't he briefly? at MITRE?

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

dhc at dcrocker.net
bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
+1.408.329.0791

Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
Northern California Coastal Region
Information & Planning Coordinator
American Red Cross
dave.crocker2 at redcross.org



From steve at shinkuro.com  Sat Nov  7 05:35:26 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 08:35:26 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <48fc39d0-71c3-4250-be5d-f209bbfcc62d@dcrocker.net>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <48fc39d0-71c3-4250-be5d-f209bbfcc62d@dcrocker.net>
Message-ID: <CABf5zvJ3h14jW=X=9EYFE1bwBbqXTuc4e=oX3iH24u0tiLFtYA@mail.gmail.com>

Iirc, he took a job at mitre washington after completing his PhD.  His
girlfriend at the time took a job in or near Richmond, va, and the rented a
place halfway in between.  Around the same time I was leaving DARPA,
getting married, and moving to ISI -- Aug-Sep 1974 -- I believe Jon was
also   splitting up with his girlfriend and moving to SRI.  He briefly
moved into my DC residence.  I vacated that residence in late September and
began a leisurely cross country trip to ISI with my new bride.  Jon was
gone before then.


Sent by a Verified

sender

On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:16?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> > <unknown>
>
> Wasn't he briefly  at MITRE?
>
> d/
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> dhc at dcrocker.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
> +1.408.329.0791
>
> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
> Northern California Coastal Region
> Information & Planning Coordinator
> American Red Cross
> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


From lyman at interisle.net  Sat Nov  7 05:41:04 2026
From: lyman at interisle.net (Lyman Chapin)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 08:41:04 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <FED515C2-DF10-445C-AE04-C579436BE3D5@interisle.net>



> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?

Hi Vint -

From the latest CV (dated 9/20/97) for Jon in my files:

October 1967?June 1973
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Worked on the META-5 compiler-compiler system. Served as a member, then leader, of the ARPANET Network Measurement Center programming team, developing a time-sharing operating system for the SDS Sigma-7 and helping define ARPANET protocols, including NCP and Telnet.

October 1973?June 1974
The MITRE Corporation
Studied implementations of the ARPANET Network Control Protocol (NCP); the study became a MITRE technical report.

July?September 1974
Keydata
Redesigned and reimplemented NCP in the DEC PDP-15 data-management system used by ARPA.

October 1974?March 1977
SRI International
Worked in Doug Engelbart?s Augmentation Research Center on NLS, later called Augment, emphasizing communications. Led protocol-specification work for AUTODIN-II and, toward the end of his tenure, led the approximately 20-person ARC development group.

March 1977?October 1998
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
Began on the technical staff, became a project leader, and subsequently held several division-management positions. Alongside those duties, directed IANA and served as RFC Editor.

- Lyman

> 
> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> SRI XXXX-XXXX
> <unknown>
> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> 
> thanks
> 
> vint
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history

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From lyman at interisle.net  Sat Nov  7 05:46:36 2026
From: lyman at interisle.net (Lyman Chapin)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 08:46:36 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>

A quick search shows that the CV is also online at https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt

- Lyman

> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> 
> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> SRI XXXX-XXXX
> <unknown>
> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> 
> thanks
> 
> vint
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history

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From vgcerf at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 06:04:06 2026
From: vgcerf at gmail.com (vinton cerf)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 09:04:06 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CABf5zvJ3h14jW=X=9EYFE1bwBbqXTuc4e=oX3iH24u0tiLFtYA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <48fc39d0-71c3-4250-be5d-f209bbfcc62d@dcrocker.net>
 <CABf5zvJ3h14jW=X=9EYFE1bwBbqXTuc4e=oX3iH24u0tiLFtYA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAAFtm_U-G_sa3-LLTgPSmB+TC4s-_6+jKixG+c9iF=ci_4b4iQ@mail.gmail.com>

thanks, yes, I had forgotten about MITRE. He had a place in what I think
was Lake of the Woods.

v


On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:35?AM Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com> wrote:

> Iirc, he took a job at mitre washington after completing his PhD.  His
> girlfriend at the time took a job in or near Richmond, va, and the rented a
> place halfway in between.  Around the same time I was leaving DARPA,
> getting married, and moving to ISI -- Aug-Sep 1974 -- I believe Jon was
> also   splitting up with his girlfriend and moving to SRI.  He briefly
> moved into my DC residence.  I vacated that residence in late September and
> began a leisurely cross country trip to ISI with my new bride.  Jon was
> gone before then.
>
>
> Sent by a Verified
>
> sender
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:16?AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> > <unknown>
>>
>> Wasn't he briefly  at MITRE?
>>
>> d/
>>
>> --
>> Dave Crocker
>>
>> dhc at dcrocker.net
>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>> +1.408.329.0791 <(408)%20329-0791>
>>
>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
>> Northern California Coastal Region
>> Information & Planning Coordinator
>> American Red Cross
>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>>
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> -
>> Unsubscribe:
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>
>


From steve at shinkuro.com  Sat Nov  7 06:15:10 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 09:15:10 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
Message-ID: <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>

Lyman,

Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.

The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held copies
of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off system
developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was an
interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
had direct access to it.

Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.  In
addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the flow
of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why contractor X
hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to the
creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in past
quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of asking,
we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.

We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.

Steve


Sent by a Verified

sender

On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>
> - Lyman
>
> > On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> >
> > UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> > SRI XXXX-XXXX
> > <unknown>
> > USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> >
> > thanks
> >
> > vint
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > -
> > Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


From nigel at channelisles.net  Sat Nov  7 11:03:41 2026
From: nigel at channelisles.net (nigel at channelisles.net)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 19:03:41 +0000
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3871368d-4991-4dae-a98d-86b041113b17@channelisles.net>

  29th October 1969 ? First ARPANET message sent between UCLA and SRI.
21st November 1969 ? First permanent ARPANET link established.
5th December 1969 ? Four node ARPANET established.

*******************************************************************
23rd December 1969 - Jon Postel starts work at UCLA as Postgraduate 
Research Engineer (I)
*******************************************************************

March 1970 ? ARPANET reaches US East Coast.

20-September-1971: "Standardization of host mnemonics", Karp. P (RFC226) 
published. Introduces standardised naming of ARPAnet hosts.
1972 - Network Information Centre (NIC) established by Elizabeth Feinler 
at Stanford University to co-ordinate host addresses.
1973 ? Norway connects to the ARPANET
1973 - UK (UCL) connects to ARPANET.
22nd June 1973 - Arpawocky, Merryman, R. (RFC527) published; contains 
references to NIC.

*******************************************************************
24th August 1973 - Postel leaves UCLA for MITRE.
*******************************************************************

1975 ? ARPANET declared operational.1
1975 ? ARPANET transferred from DoD ARPA agency to DoD DCA agency.2

*******************************************************************
March 1977 ? Postel joins USC-ISI as Assistant Professor
*******************************************************************

September 1981 ? Internet Domain Names, Mills, D. L. (RFC799) published.
August 1982 "The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User 
Applications", Postel, J. & Su, Z.S. (RFC819) published.

On 11/7/26 13:08, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?


From jack at 3kitty.org  Sat Nov  7 11:09:50 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 11:09:50 -0800
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>

Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my first 
encounter with government bureaucracy.

Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.? 
 ?Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was 
refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly 
Technical Report, aka QTR.? I clearly remembered submitting that report, 
on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to write 
their piece.? After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been Vint) 
confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.? But the government still 
refused to pay the bill.

With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had to be 
accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).? ?The form for our 
QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its 
travels through the government bureaucracy.? No DD-54, no Deliverable 
received.? The actual QTR didn't really matter.? Without the DD-54, the 
government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.

That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy - 
just do what the system requires.? I didn't know Jon had worked on the 
Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might have 
called him up and reported a Bug.? ?I suspect he would have told me it's 
a Feature.

/Jack Haverty

On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> Lyman,
>
> Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
>
> The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held copies
> of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off system
> developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was an
> interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
> had direct access to it.
>
> Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
> status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
> Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.  In
> addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the flow
> of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why contractor X
> hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to the
> creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in past
> quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of asking,
> we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
> reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
>
> We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
> natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
> support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
>
> Steve
>
>
> Sent by a Verified
>
> sender
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
>> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>>
>> - Lyman
>>
>>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>>>
>>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
>>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
>>> <unknown>
>>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
>>>
>>> thanks
>>>
>>> vint
>>> --
>>> Internet-history mailing list
>>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>> -
>>> Unsubscribe:
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> -
>> Unsubscribe:
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>

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From steve at shinkuro.com  Sat Nov  7 11:13:27 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:13:27 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <3871368d-4991-4dae-a98d-86b041113b17@channelisles.net>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <3871368d-4991-4dae-a98d-86b041113b17@channelisles.net>
Message-ID: <CABf5zvJWCEvekw_5MUP0VN2DLNn2+fExn_zxEU8bC2WCuiJmKA@mail.gmail.com>

Nigel,

Thanks.  A couple of questions and comments embedded below.

Steve


On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:03?PM Nigel Roberts via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>   29th October 1969 ? First ARPANET message sent between UCLA and SRI.
> 21st November 1969 ? First permanent ARPANET link established.
>

SDC: I'm not sure what this means.  The UCLA IMP was installed about 1 Sep
1969, the SRI IMP around 1 Oct 1969, and UCSB IMP. around 1 Nov 1969 and
the Utah IMP around 1 Dec 1969.  I believe all of the links between the
IMPs were working when each IMP was installed.  Thus, around 1 Nov 1969
UCLA, SRI and UCSB were each connected to the other two.  I don't recall
anything special later that month except, possibly, a visit to UCLA by
Larry Roberts.


> 5th December 1969 ? Four node ARPANET established.
>
> *******************************************************************
> 23rd December 1969 - Jon Postel starts work at UCLA as Postgraduate
> Research Engineer (I)
> *******************************************************************
>

Hmm... I arrived at UCLA, originally just for the summer, in May 1968.
Vint was already there, as were several others.  I don't recall whether
Postel was already there or joined later.  The above suggests he joined in
December 1969.

>
> March 1970 ? ARPANET reaches US East Coast.
>
> 20-September-1971: "Standardization of host mnemonics", Karp. P (RFC226)
> published. Introduces standardised naming of ARPAnet hosts.
> 1972 - Network Information Centre (NIC) established by Elizabeth Feinler
> at Stanford University to co-ordinate host addresses.
> 1973 ? Norway connects to the ARPANET
> 1973 - UK (UCL) connects to ARPANET.
> 22nd June 1973 - Arpawocky, Merryman, R. (RFC527) published; contains
> references to NIC.
>
> *******************************************************************
> 24th August 1973 - Postel leaves UCLA for MITRE.
> *******************************************************************
>
> 1975 ? ARPANET declared operational.1
> 1975 ? ARPANET transferred from DoD ARPA agency to DoD DCA agency.2
>
> *******************************************************************
> March 1977 ? Postel joins USC-ISI as Assistant Professor
> *******************************************************************
>
> September 1981 ? Internet Domain Names, Mills, D. L. (RFC799) published.
> August 1982 "The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User
> Applications", Postel, J. & Su, Z.S. (RFC819) published.
>
> On 11/7/26 13:08, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> > Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


-- 
Sent by a Verified

sender


From steve at shinkuro.com  Sat Nov  7 11:45:49 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:45:49 -0500
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
 <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>

:) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.  One day I went to
the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs.  Each one had a cover sheet
-- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet resembling a title page.  The cover
sheet contained all sorts of information.  Contract number, contractor
name, contract dates, total contract amount, title of the work, etc.
However, none of this information indicated the report date or
sequence number or anything that changed from one report to the next.  Nor
did the content of each report help very much ;)

Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit language
dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the QTRs were in complete
conformance.

I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the
contracting offices, and suggested they fix this.  Nothing happened.  Some
time later, I called them again.  Nothing happened.  Yet later, completely
exasperated, I wrote a memo explaining the issue once again and mentioned
that I had already reported it twice before.  This triggered a desperate
search for my previous two complaints.  Since my previous two complaints
were verbal, there was no record.

And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call me asking
for relief from a contract constraint.  He had written a lengthy report on
their AI research and discovered an explicit formula in the contract
limiting the total number of pages to 25,000 (i.e., number of pages x
number of copies ? 25,000).  He wanted to print more copies.  I thought it
was a good idea since reporting on AI research was skimpy in those days and
I thought it would help the cause.  His contract was part of my budget, but
I was only the COTR.  Relief from a contract requirement could come only
from the Contracting Officer.  I called the Contracting Officer.  He was a
really old guy, maybe 50 years old.  I was in my twenties.  I explained the
issue.  He said no.  I explained it again and said it would be helpful.  He
said no.  I got a little agitated and inappropriately suggested we could
move the next contract renewal to another Contracting Office.  He said we
could do whatever we wanted, but that constraint was a statute.  A
statute!  Not an OMB circular, not a FAR regulation, not an Agency
directive?  There's a whole parfait of regulations and rules.  Statutes are
at the base.  That means Congress passed a law.

He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth or
enjoying the moment.  "Reports bigger than that have to be sent to the
Government Printing Office."  The light dawns.  I can fill in the rest.
And farmed out to various bidders.  I thanked him for his time, ended the
call, and reorganized.  I wasn't about to give up.  I could have asked
someone else in the office or figured it out myself.  Instead, I decided to
ask someone else who might have faced this problem.  I estimated the
university was roughly at the B+ level of sophistication in dealing with
government bureaucracy.  I called a friend at the Rand Corporation.  Rand
had fifty years of experience dealing with the U.S. government.  Almost
certainly at the A+ level.

My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report with
appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been through a couple
of versions?"  "Why, yes," I said, "that's exactly what he has."

I called the professor back, explained about appendices and volumes, then
sat back in my chair feeling very good about my service to the community
and to the people and government of the United States.

Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the program
managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and said simply cut it
into multiple pieces.  But he was quite a bit older than I had been.
Experience counts.

Steve




On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10?PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my first
> encounter with government bureaucracy.
>
> Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.
>   Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was
> refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly
> Technical Report, aka QTR.  I clearly remembered submitting that report,
> on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to write
> their piece.  After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been Vint)
> confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.  But the government still
> refused to pay the bill.
>
> With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had to be
> accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).   The form for our
> QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its
> travels through the government bureaucracy.  No DD-54, no Deliverable
> received.  The actual QTR didn't really matter.  Without the DD-54, the
> government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.
>
> That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy -
> just do what the system requires.  I didn't know Jon had worked on the
> Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might have
> called him up and reported a Bug.   I suspect he would have told me it's
> a Feature.
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
> On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> > Lyman,
> >
> > Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
> >
> > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held copies
> > of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off system
> > developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was an
> > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
> > had direct access to it.
> >
> > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
> > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
> > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.  In
> > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the
> flow
> > of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why
> contractor X
> > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to
> the
> > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in
> past
> > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of
> asking,
> > we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
> > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
> >
> > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
> > natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
> > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > Sent by a Verified
> >
> > sender
> >
> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
> >>
> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
> >>
> >> - Lyman
> >>
> >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> >>>
> >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
> >>> <unknown>
> >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> >>>
> >>> thanks
> >>>
> >>> vint
> >>> --
> >>> Internet-history mailing list
> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >>> -
> >>> Unsubscribe:
> >>
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
> >>
> >> --
> >> Internet-history mailing list
> >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >> -
> >> Unsubscribe:
> >>
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
> >>
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
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-- 
Sent by a Verified

sender


From nigel at channelisles.net  Sat Nov  7 12:02:32 2026
From: nigel at channelisles.net (nigel at channelisles.net)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 20:02:32 +0000
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <CABf5zvJWCEvekw_5MUP0VN2DLNn2+fExn_zxEU8bC2WCuiJmKA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <3871368d-4991-4dae-a98d-86b041113b17@channelisles.net>
 <CABf5zvJWCEvekw_5MUP0VN2DLNn2+fExn_zxEU8bC2WCuiJmKA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <37e3caab-ad89-42cd-93b9-af1a172bf6cc@channelisles.net>

Steve

This is from some research I did about 10 years ago (you need the 
Wayback Machine to see it now).

I dont guarantee the bits outside the asterisk-highlights, which I 
recall were largely taken from historic RFCS, but the details Jon's work 
history are taken from his actual employment records, which I obtained 
using FOIA.

I suppose this deserves preservation

http://web.archive.org/web/20190427155235/http://timeline.as/tiki-index.php


On 11/7/26 19:13, Steve Crocker wrote:
> Nigel,
> 
> Thanks.? A couple of questions and comments embedded below.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:03?PM Nigel Roberts via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet- 
> history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>      ? 29th October 1969 ? First ARPANET message sent between UCLA and SRI.
>     21st November 1969 ? First permanent ARPANET link established.
> 
> 
> SDC: I'm not sure what this means.? The UCLA IMP was installed?about 1 
> Sep 1969, the SRI IMP around?1 Oct 1969, and UCSB IMP. around 1 Nov 1969 
> and the Utah IMP around?1 Dec 1969.? I believe all of the links between 
> the IMPs were working when each IMP was installed.? Thus, around 1 Nov 
> 1969 UCLA, SRI and UCSB were each connected to the other two.? I don't 
> recall anything special later that month except, possibly, a visit to 
> UCLA by Larry Roberts.
> 
>     5th December 1969 ? Four node ARPANET established.
> 
>     *******************************************************************
>     23rd December 1969 - Jon Postel starts work at UCLA as Postgraduate
>     Research Engineer (I)
>     *******************************************************************
> 
> 
> Hmm... I arrived at UCLA, originally just for the summer, in May 1968.  
> Vint was already there, as were several others.? I don't recall whether 
> Postel was already there or joined later.? The above suggests he joined 
> in December 1969.
> 
> 
>     March 1970 ? ARPANET reaches US East Coast.
> 
>     20-September-1971: "Standardization of host mnemonics", Karp. P
>     (RFC226)
>     published. Introduces standardised naming of ARPAnet hosts.
>     1972 - Network Information Centre (NIC) established by Elizabeth
>     Feinler
>     at Stanford University to co-ordinate host addresses.
>     1973 ? Norway connects to the ARPANET
>     1973 - UK (UCL) connects to ARPANET.
>     22nd June 1973 - Arpawocky, Merryman, R. (RFC527) published; contains
>     references to NIC.
> 
>     *******************************************************************
>     24th August 1973 - Postel leaves UCLA for MITRE.
>     *******************************************************************
> 
>     1975 ? ARPANET declared operational.1
>     1975 ? ARPANET transferred from DoD ARPA agency to DoD DCA agency.2
> 
>     *******************************************************************
>     March 1977 ? Postel joins USC-ISI as Assistant Professor
>     *******************************************************************
> 
>     September 1981 ? Internet Domain Names, Mills, D. L. (RFC799) published.
>     August 1982 "The Domain Naming Convention for Internet User
>     Applications", Postel, J. & Su, Z.S. (RFC819) published.
> 
>     On 11/7/26 13:08, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>      > Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-
>     history at elists.isoc.org>
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <https://
>     elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>     -
>     Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/
>     form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?
>     The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>     <https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?
>     The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Sent by a Verified
> 
> sender



From gregskinner0 at icloud.com  Sat Nov  7 13:20:08 2026
From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 13:20:08 -0800
Subject: [ih] Fwd:  Postel's work history
References: <2072474691.784070.1794075105988@mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <B7DBF614-E860-41E1-A131-237B0238471B@icloud.com>

Forwarded for Barbara.  Also, I would add co-founder of the Los Nettos regional network <https://www.losnettos.net/history> to JBP?s work history.

> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Barbara Denny <b_a_denny at yahoo.com>
> To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> Sent: Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 10:06:28 AM PST
> Subject: Re: [ih] Postel's work history
> 
> A little more info.  Cameron Station (Army) was in the west end of Alexandria, Virginia.  I knew it mostly for the PX when I was growing  up (Neighbors were military).  It is now a housing development and preserved the name.
> 
> barbara
> 
> 
> On Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 06:15:31 AM PST, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Lyman,
> 
> Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
> 
> The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held copies
> of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off system
> developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was an
> interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
> had direct access to it.
> 
> Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
> status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
> Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.  In
> addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the flow
> of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why contractor X
> hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to the
> creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in past
> quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of asking,
> we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
> reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
> 
> We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
> natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
> support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> Sent by a Verified
> 
> sender
> 
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
> > A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
> > https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
> >
> > - Lyman
> >
> > > On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> > >
> > > Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> > >
> > > UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> > > SRI XXXX-XXXX
> > > <unknown>
> > > USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> > >
> > > thanks
> > >
> > > vint
> > > --
> > > Internet-history mailing list
> > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > > -
> > > Unsubscribe:
> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
> >
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> > -
> > Unsubscribe:
> > https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
> >
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history



From jack at 3kitty.org  Sat Nov  7 13:35:15 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 13:35:15 -0800
Subject: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
In-Reply-To: <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
 <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
 <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>

This list reminds me a lot of the Internet Meetings more than 40 years 
ago -- whatever the current topic was, it was easy to go off on tangents 
that could only be corrected by activation of the Rathole Protocol? 
(search the archives of this list).

I changed the subject of this message to reflect the current distraction.

In the BBN world, someone started putting a serial number in the Title 
of the report, e.g., "Quarterly Technical Report #23".? That made it 
easier to track the QTRs, since the Title was also on the cover page.? 
 ?I just continued the practice and don't know who started it.? 
 ?Probably some experienced old guy.

The lesson I learned was that it was far easier to work around a 
bureaucratic rule than to try to change it.

At BBN we built hardware for the government.? The contract boilerplate 
was often huge, containing all sorts of rules as dictated by laws.? ?I 
recall one required the contractor (us) to procure all ball bearings 
used in the design from a particular company in some US state.? 
 ?Fortunately there is little use for ball bearings in computer 
equipment.? ?But I've always wondered about the History of that rule and 
law that required it.? Some legislator somewhere got something for his 
or her insistence on including that requirement in passing the law that 
led to the procurement regulation in the boilerplate.

But the bureaucratic history is also an important, and likely 
influential, part of Internet History.? Did bureaucracy help establish 
The Internet, or hinder it?? ? There were other governments involved, 
not just the US.? What kinds of such issues were there in Europe or 
elsewhere as the Internet grew?

/Jack Haverty

On 11/7/26 11:45, Steve Crocker wrote:
> :) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.? One day I 
> went to the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs. Each one had a 
> cover sheet -- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet resembling a title 
> page.? The cover sheet contained all sorts of information.? Contract 
> number, contractor name, contract dates, total contract amount, title 
> of the work, etc. However, none of this information indicated the 
> report date or sequence?number or anything that changed from one 
> report to the next.? Nor did the content of each report help very much ;)
>
> Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit 
> language dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the QTRs 
> were in complete conformance.
>
> I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the 
> contracting offices, and suggested they fix this. Nothing happened.? 
> Some time later, I called them again. Nothing happened.? Yet?later, 
> completely exasperated, I wrote a memo explaining the issue once again 
> and mentioned that I had already reported it twice before.? This 
> triggered a desperate search for my previous two complaints.? Since my 
> previous two complaints were verbal, there was no record.
>
> And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call me 
> asking for relief from a contract constraint.? He had written a 
> lengthy report on their AI research and discovered an explicit formula 
> in the contract limiting the total number of pages to 25,000 (i.e., 
> number of pages x number of copies ? 25,000).? He wanted to print more 
> copies.? I thought it was a good idea since reporting on AI research 
> was skimpy in those days and I thought it would help the cause.? His 
> contract was part of my budget, but I was only the COTR.? Relief from 
> a contract requirement could come only from the Contracting Officer.? 
> I called the Contracting Officer.? He was a really old guy, maybe 50 
> years old.? I was in my twenties.? I explained the issue. He said no.? 
> I explained it again and said it would be helpful.? He said no.? I got 
> a little agitated and inappropriately suggested we could move the next 
> contract renewal to another Contracting Office.? He said we could do 
> whatever we wanted, but that constraint was a statute.? A statute!? 
> Not an OMB circular, not a FAR regulation, not an Agency directive?? 
> There's a whole parfait of regulations and rules.? Statutes are at the 
> base.? That means Congress passed a law.
>
> He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth or 
> enjoying the moment.? "Reports bigger than that have to be sent to the 
> Government Printing Office."? The light dawns.? I can fill in the 
> rest.? And farmed out to various bidders.? I thanked him for his time, 
> ended the call, and reorganized.? I wasn't about to give up.? I could 
> have asked someone else in the office or figured it out myself.? 
> Instead, I decided to ask someone else who might have faced this 
> problem.? I estimated the university was roughly at the B+ level of 
> sophistication in dealing with government bureaucracy.? I called a 
> friend at the Rand Corporation.? Rand had fifty years of experience 
> dealing with the U.S. government.? Almost certainly at the A+ level.
>
> My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report with 
> appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been through a 
> couple of versions?"? "Why, yes," I said, "that's exactly what he has."
>
> I called the professor back, explained about appendices and volumes, 
> then sat back in my chair feeling very good about my service to the 
> community and to the people and government of the United States.
>
> Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the program 
> managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and said simply 
> cut it into multiple pieces.? But he was quite a bit older than I had 
> been.? Experience counts.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10?PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>     Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my
>     first
>     encounter with government bureaucracy.
>
>     Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.
>     ??Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was
>     refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly
>     Technical Report, aka QTR.? I clearly remembered submitting that
>     report,
>     on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to
>     write
>     their piece.? After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been
>     Vint)
>     confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.? But the government still
>     refused to pay the bill.
>
>     With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had
>     to be
>     accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).? ?The form for our
>     QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its
>     travels through the government bureaucracy.? No DD-54, no Deliverable
>     received.? The actual QTR didn't really matter.? Without the
>     DD-54, the
>     government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.
>
>     That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy -
>     just do what the system requires.? I didn't know Jon had worked on
>     the
>     Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might
>     have
>     called him up and reported a Bug.? ?I suspect he would have told
>     me it's
>     a Feature.
>
>     /Jack Haverty
>
>     On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>     > Lyman,
>     >
>     > Thanks!? I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
>     >
>     > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.? It
>     held copies
>     > of the contracts and management reports.? The system was a
>     one-off system
>     > developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).?
>     It was an
>     > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve
>     Lukasik,
>     > had direct access to it.
>     >
>     > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of
>     contract
>     > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
>     > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.? Paper reports arrived
>     monthly.? In
>     > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also
>     disrupted the flow
>     > of control.? One day I got a call from the director asking why
>     contractor X
>     > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.?
>     Prior to the
>     > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been
>     interested in past
>     > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.? In the process
>     of asking,
>     > we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
>     > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for
>     updates.
>     >
>     > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
>     > natural step.? And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
>     > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
>     >
>     > Steve
>     >
>     >
>     > Sent by a Verified
>     >
>     > sender
>     >
>     > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
>     > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>     >
>     >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
>     >>
>     https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>     >>
>     >> - Lyman
>     >>
>     >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>     >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>     >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>     >>>
>     >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
>     >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
>     >>> <unknown>
>     >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
>     >>>
>     >>> thanks
>     >>>
>     >>> vint
>     >>> --
>     >>> Internet-history mailing list
>     >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>     >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     >>> -
>     >>> Unsubscribe:
>     >>
>     https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>     >>
>     >> --
>     >> Internet-history mailing list
>     >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>     >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     >> -
>     >> Unsubscribe:
>     >>
>     https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>     >>
>
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>     -
>     Unsubscribe:
>     https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>
>
>
> -- 
> Sent by a Verified
>
> sender

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From byeager at fastmail.fm  Sat Nov  7 13:37:01 2026
From: byeager at fastmail.fm (william yeager)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 13:37:01 -0800
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
Message-ID: <1FDDF132-89C0-4BA8-AAC6-DA3F30AD4993@fastmail.fm>


> On Nov 7, 2026, at 12:02 PM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
> I suppose this deserves preservation

Speaking of preservation: When Jon passed away, USC/ISI locked his office on the 10th floor, and placed memorabilia, awards, etc, on the outside with photos on the windows.

I and my wife visited USC/ISI last Summer - ISI is not open to the public and requires a security clearance or a good friend with one to enter and I do have such a friend - we wanted to see the annealing quantum computer. 

We had a tour of the latter and other related facilities. My friend mentioned Jon?s office. Up the elevator we went, and there is was, a permanent shrine to this remarkable, lucid thinker. Such brilliant, gentle, and kind fellow he was. I only had sevearl telephone and email conversations with him in the late 1980s. The previous personality features were very obvious. I feel priviledged to have only briefly known Jon. 

The research on quantum communication is fascinating. On our previous year?s visit we were introduced to a young woman, Haley Weinstein, in her small lab testing what she and her colleagues?  quantum stenographic cryptography discoveries.

This is to the direction of the distant Internet physical layers as Claude Shannon?s <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon> ?The Mathematical Theory of Communication? paper writen in 1949  is to today's ethernet, WiFi, etc. His work on showing that boolean logic could be use for switches and relays is considered ?The birth certificate of the electronic age.? It was his 1937 MIT masters thesis and is considered called the greatest masters thesis of all time by some. Many have compared Shannon's influence on the digital age to that which "the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature? The above reference is worth reading for all who have been involved in digital technology. Thus, we have Anthropic?s Claude.

The Haley Weintein paper is here <https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03881> for those who might be interested.

Bill 



??????????
?????
<Happy year of the horse>
???? ?????????
<Bless & Protect all living things>










































??????????
?????
<Happy year of the horse>
???? ?????????
<Bless & Protect all living things>
??????????
?????
<Happy year of the horse>
???? ?????????
<Bless & Protect all living things>
??????????
?????
<Happy year of the horse>
???? ?????????
<Bless & Protect all living things>











































From steve at shinkuro.com  Sat Nov  7 13:46:22 2026
From: steve at shinkuro.com (Steve Crocker)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 16:46:22 -0500
Subject: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
In-Reply-To: <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
 <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
 <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <CABf5zvLU_8MFPvf8R8hj1OJHS-xnE0pQM7ivpPSj5Jv84NiqOQ@mail.gmail.com>

I can't speak about the role of the bureaucracy in creating the Internet.
I saw a tiny bit of the bureaucracy during the creation of the Arpanet.

Two particularly relevant pieces of the bureaucracy related to the
procurement of the 50 kilobit per second leased lines.  On the positive
side, the government had access to a special price, I believe that made it
possible use the lines instead of much slower lines and stay within the
available budget.

On the other hand, the rules for ordering the lines included a nine month
lead time.  That made it very hard to adjust to the occasional issues that
arose requiring replanning the topology.

Steve


Sent by a Verified

sender

On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 4:35?PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> This list reminds me a lot of the Internet Meetings more than 40 years ago
> -- whatever the current topic was, it was easy to go off on tangents that
> could only be corrected by activation of the Rathole Protocol  (search the
> archives of this list).
>
> I changed the subject of this message to reflect the current distraction.
>
> In the BBN world, someone started putting a serial number in the Title of
> the report, e.g., "Quarterly Technical Report #23".  That made it easier to
> track the QTRs, since the Title was also on the cover page.   I just
> continued the practice and don't know who started it.   Probably some
> experienced old guy.
>
> The lesson I learned was that it was far easier to work around a
> bureaucratic rule than to try to change it.
>
> At BBN we built hardware for the government.  The contract boilerplate was
> often huge, containing all sorts of rules as dictated by laws.   I recall
> one required the contractor (us) to procure all ball bearings used in the
> design from a particular company in some US state.   Fortunately there is
> little use for ball bearings in computer equipment.   But I've always
> wondered about the History of that rule and law that required it.  Some
> legislator somewhere got something for his or her insistence on including
> that requirement in passing the law that led to the procurement regulation
> in the boilerplate.
>
> But the bureaucratic history is also an important, and likely influential,
> part of Internet History.  Did bureaucracy help establish The Internet, or
> hinder it?    There were other governments involved, not just the US.  What
> kinds of such issues were there in Europe or elsewhere as the Internet grew?
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
> On 11/7/26 11:45, Steve Crocker wrote:
>
> :) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.  One day I went to
> the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs.  Each one had a cover sheet
> -- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet resembling a title page.  The cover
> sheet contained all sorts of information.  Contract number, contractor
> name, contract dates, total contract amount, title of the work, etc.
> However, none of this information indicated the report date or
> sequence number or anything that changed from one report to the next.  Nor
> did the content of each report help very much ;)
>
> Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit language
> dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the QTRs were in complete
> conformance.
>
> I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the
> contracting offices, and suggested they fix this.  Nothing happened.  Some
> time later, I called them again.  Nothing happened.  Yet later, completely
> exasperated, I wrote a memo explaining the issue once again and mentioned
> that I had already reported it twice before.  This triggered a desperate
> search for my previous two complaints.  Since my previous two complaints
> were verbal, there was no record.
>
> And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call me
> asking for relief from a contract constraint.  He had written a lengthy
> report on their AI research and discovered an explicit formula in the
> contract limiting the total number of pages to 25,000 (i.e., number of
> pages x number of copies ? 25,000).  He wanted to print more copies.  I
> thought it was a good idea since reporting on AI research was skimpy in
> those days and I thought it would help the cause.  His contract was part of
> my budget, but I was only the COTR.  Relief from a contract requirement
> could come only from the Contracting Officer.  I called the Contracting
> Officer.  He was a really old guy, maybe 50 years old.  I was in my
> twenties.  I explained the issue.  He said no.  I explained it again and
> said it would be helpful.  He said no.  I got a little agitated and
> inappropriately suggested we could move the next contract renewal to
> another Contracting Office.  He said we could do whatever we wanted, but
> that constraint was a statute.  A statute!  Not an OMB circular, not a FAR
> regulation, not an Agency directive?  There's a whole parfait of
> regulations and rules.  Statutes are at the base.  That means Congress
> passed a law.
>
> He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth or
> enjoying the moment.  "Reports bigger than that have to be sent to the
> Government Printing Office."  The light dawns.  I can fill in the rest.
> And farmed out to various bidders.  I thanked him for his time, ended the
> call, and reorganized.  I wasn't about to give up.  I could have asked
> someone else in the office or figured it out myself.  Instead, I decided to
> ask someone else who might have faced this problem.  I estimated the
> university was roughly at the B+ level of sophistication in dealing with
> government bureaucracy.  I called a friend at the Rand Corporation.  Rand
> had fifty years of experience dealing with the U.S. government.  Almost
> certainly at the A+ level.
>
> My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report with
> appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been through a couple
> of versions?"  "Why, yes," I said, "that's exactly what he has."
>
> I called the professor back, explained about appendices and volumes, then
> sat back in my chair feeling very good about my service to the community
> and to the people and government of the United States.
>
> Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the program
> managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and said simply cut it
> into multiple pieces.  But he was quite a bit older than I had been.
> Experience counts.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10?PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my first
>> encounter with government bureaucracy.
>>
>> Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.
>>   Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was
>> refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly
>> Technical Report, aka QTR.  I clearly remembered submitting that report,
>> on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to write
>> their piece.  After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been Vint)
>> confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.  But the government still
>> refused to pay the bill.
>>
>> With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had to be
>> accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).   The form for our
>> QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its
>> travels through the government bureaucracy.  No DD-54, no Deliverable
>> received.  The actual QTR didn't really matter.  Without the DD-54, the
>> government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.
>>
>> That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy -
>> just do what the system requires.  I didn't know Jon had worked on the
>> Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might have
>> called him up and reported a Bug.   I suspect he would have told me it's
>> a Feature.
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>> On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> > Lyman,
>> >
>> > Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
>> >
>> > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held
>> copies
>> > of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off
>> system
>> > developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was
>> an
>> > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
>> > had direct access to it.
>> >
>> > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
>> > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
>> > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.
>> In
>> > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the
>> flow
>> > of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why
>> contractor X
>> > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to
>> the
>> > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in
>> past
>> > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of
>> asking,
>> > we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
>> > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
>> >
>> > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
>> > natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
>> > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
>> >
>> > Steve
>> >
>> >
>> > Sent by a Verified
>> >
>> > sender
>> >
>> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
>> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
>> >>
>> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>> >>
>> >> - Lyman
>> >>
>> >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>> >>>
>> >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
>> >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
>> >>> <unknown>
>> >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
>> >>>
>> >>> thanks
>> >>>
>> >>> vint
>> >>> --
>> >>> Internet-history mailing list
>> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> >>> -
>> >>> Unsubscribe:
>> >>
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Internet-history mailing list
>> >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> >> -
>> >> Unsubscribe:
>> >>
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>> >>
>>
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> -
>> Unsubscribe:
>> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>
>
>
> --
> Sent by a Verified
>
> sender
>
>
>


From jack at 3kitty.org  Sat Nov  7 13:57:22 2026
From: jack at 3kitty.org (Jack Haverty)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 13:57:22 -0800
Subject: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
In-Reply-To: <CABf5zvLU_8MFPvf8R8hj1OJHS-xnE0pQM7ivpPSj5Jv84NiqOQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
 <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
 <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>
 <CABf5zvLU_8MFPvf8R8hj1OJHS-xnE0pQM7ivpPSj5Jv84NiqOQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <53c601fa-c531-4334-84a7-c4cc1ec32043@3kitty.org>

In the 1980s at BBN, there were other IMP networks that we installed and 
sometimes also operated for commercial clients.? One of them we operated 
had nodes in all sorts of weird places.? One weird place was some small 
country in South America.? We encountered a similar problem with 
ordering lines.? The nation's "phone company" had a 9-month delay to get 
a new line.? Maybe.? If they got around to it. Don't plan on it.

The client had a simple solution to the problem.? ?They simply bought 
the local phone company.? Problem solved.

/Jack

On 11/7/26 13:46, Steve Crocker wrote:
> I can't speak about the role of the bureaucracy in creating the 
> Internet.? I saw a tiny bit of the bureaucracy during the creation of 
> the Arpanet.
>
> Two particularly relevant pieces of the bureaucracy related to the 
> procurement of the 50 kilobit per second leased lines.? On the 
> positive side, the government had access to a special price, I believe 
> that made it possible use the lines instead of much slower lines and 
> stay within the available budget.
>
> On the other hand, the rules for ordering the lines included a nine 
> month lead time.? That made it very hard to adjust to the occasional 
> issues that arose requiring replanning the topology.
>
> Steve
>
>
> Sent by a Verified
>
> sender
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 4:35?PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>
>     This list reminds me a lot of the Internet Meetings more than 40
>     years ago -- whatever the current topic was, it was easy to go off
>     on tangents that could only be corrected by activation of the
>     Rathole Protocol? (search the archives of this list).
>
>     I changed the subject of this message to reflect the current
>     distraction.
>
>     In the BBN world, someone started putting a serial number in the
>     Title of the report, e.g., "Quarterly Technical Report #23".? That
>     made it easier to track the QTRs, since the Title was also on the
>     cover page.? ?I just continued the practice and don't know who
>     started it.? ?Probably some experienced old guy.
>
>     The lesson I learned was that it was far easier to work around a
>     bureaucratic rule than to try to change it.
>
>     At BBN we built hardware for the government.? The contract
>     boilerplate was often huge, containing all sorts of rules as
>     dictated by laws.? ?I recall one required the contractor (us) to
>     procure all ball bearings used in the design from a particular
>     company in some US state. ?Fortunately there is little use for
>     ball bearings in computer equipment.? ?But I've always wondered
>     about the History of that rule and law that required it.? Some
>     legislator somewhere got something for his or her insistence on
>     including that requirement in passing the law that led to the
>     procurement regulation in the boilerplate.
>
>     But the bureaucratic history is also an important, and likely
>     influential, part of Internet History.? Did bureaucracy help
>     establish The Internet, or hinder it? There were other governments
>     involved, not just the US. What kinds of such issues were there in
>     Europe or elsewhere as the Internet grew?
>
>     /Jack Haverty
>
>     On 11/7/26 11:45, Steve Crocker wrote:
>>     :) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.? One day
>>     I went to the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs.? Each
>>     one had a cover sheet -- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet
>>     resembling a title page.? The cover sheet contained all sorts of
>>     information.? Contract number, contractor name, contract dates,
>>     total contract amount, title of the work, etc. However, none of
>>     this information indicated the report date or sequence?number or
>>     anything that changed from one report to the next.? Nor did the
>>     content of each report help very much ;)
>>
>>     Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit
>>     language dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the
>>     QTRs were in complete conformance.
>>
>>     I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the
>>     contracting offices, and suggested they fix this.? Nothing
>>     happened.? Some time later, I called them again.? Nothing
>>     happened.? Yet?later, completely exasperated, I wrote a memo
>>     explaining the issue once again and mentioned that I had already
>>     reported it twice before.? This triggered a desperate search for
>>     my previous two complaints.? Since my previous two complaints
>>     were verbal, there was no record.
>>
>>     And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call
>>     me asking for relief from a contract constraint.? He had written
>>     a lengthy report on their AI research and discovered an explicit
>>     formula in the contract limiting the total number of pages to
>>     25,000 (i.e., number of pages x number of copies ? 25,000).? He
>>     wanted to print more copies.? I thought it was a good idea since
>>     reporting on AI research was skimpy in those days and I thought
>>     it would help the cause.? His contract was part of my budget, but
>>     I was only the COTR.? Relief from a contract requirement could
>>     come only from the Contracting Officer.? I called the Contracting
>>     Officer.? He was a really old guy, maybe 50 years old.? I was in
>>     my twenties.? I explained the issue.? He said no.? I explained it
>>     again and said it would be helpful.? He said no. I got a little
>>     agitated and inappropriately suggested we could move the next
>>     contract renewal to another Contracting Office.? He said we could
>>     do whatever we wanted, but that constraint was a statute.? A
>>     statute!? Not an OMB circular, not a FAR regulation, not an
>>     Agency directive?? There's a whole parfait of regulations and
>>     rules. Statutes are at the base.? That means Congress passed a law.
>>
>>     He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth
>>     or enjoying the moment.? "Reports bigger than that have to be
>>     sent to the Government Printing Office."? The light dawns.? I can
>>     fill in the rest.? And farmed out to various bidders.? I thanked
>>     him for his time, ended the call, and reorganized.? I wasn't
>>     about to give up.? I could have asked someone else in the office
>>     or figured it out myself.? Instead, I decided to ask someone else
>>     who might have faced this problem.? I estimated the university
>>     was roughly at the B+ level of sophistication in dealing with
>>     government bureaucracy.? I called a friend at the Rand
>>     Corporation.? Rand had fifty years of experience dealing with the
>>     U.S. government.? Almost certainly at the A+ level.
>>
>>     My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report
>>     with appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been
>>     through a couple of versions?"? "Why, yes," I said, "that's
>>     exactly what he has."
>>
>>     I called the professor back, explained about appendices and
>>     volumes, then sat back in my chair feeling very good about my
>>     service to the community and to the people and government of the
>>     United States.
>>
>>     Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the
>>     program managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and
>>     said simply cut it into multiple pieces.? But he was quite a bit
>>     older than I had been.? Experience counts.
>>
>>     Steve
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10?PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history
>>     <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>>         Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of
>>         my first
>>         encounter with government bureaucracy.
>>
>>         Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract
>>         with BBN.
>>         ??Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the
>>         government was
>>         refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our
>>         Quarterly
>>         Technical Report, aka QTR.? I clearly remembered submitting
>>         that report,
>>         on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody
>>         involved to write
>>         their piece.? After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have
>>         been Vint)
>>         confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.? But the government
>>         still
>>         refused to pay the bill.
>>
>>         With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables
>>         had to be
>>         accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).? ?The form
>>         for our
>>         QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost
>>         in its
>>         travels through the government bureaucracy.? No DD-54, no
>>         Deliverable
>>         received.? The actual QTR didn't really matter. Without the
>>         DD-54, the
>>         government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to
>>         explain why.
>>
>>         That was my first lesson in how to deal with government
>>         bureaucracy -
>>         just do what the system requires.? I didn't know Jon had
>>         worked on the
>>         Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I
>>         might have
>>         called him up and reported a Bug.? ?I suspect he would have
>>         told me it's
>>         a Feature.
>>
>>         /Jack Haverty
>>
>>         On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>>         > Lyman,
>>         >
>>         > Thanks!? I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
>>         >
>>         > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.?
>>         It held copies
>>         > of the contracts and management reports.? The system was a
>>         one-off system
>>         > developed by Keydata under contract through our office
>>         (IPTO).? It was an
>>         > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director,
>>         Steve Lukasik,
>>         > had direct access to it.
>>         >
>>         > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking
>>         of contract
>>         > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at
>>         Cameron
>>         > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.? Paper reports
>>         arrived monthly.? In
>>         > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also
>>         disrupted the flow
>>         > of control.? One day I got a call from the director asking
>>         why contractor X
>>         > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few
>>         years.? Prior to the
>>         > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been
>>         interested in past
>>         > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.? In the
>>         process of asking,
>>         > we would have become aware of the situation and we would
>>         likely have
>>         > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand
>>         for updates.
>>         >
>>         > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a
>>         host was a
>>         > natural step.? And Jon was just the right person to help
>>         Keydata add
>>         > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
>>         >
>>         > Steve
>>         >
>>         >
>>         > Sent by a Verified
>>         >
>>         > sender
>>         >
>>         > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46?AM Lyman Chapin via
>>         Internet-history <
>>         > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>         >
>>         >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
>>         >>
>>         https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>>         >>
>>         >> - Lyman
>>         >>
>>         >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08?AM, vinton cerf via
>>         Internet-history <
>>         >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>         >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>>         >>>
>>         >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
>>         >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
>>         >>> <unknown>
>>         >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
>>         >>>
>>         >>> thanks
>>         >>>
>>         >>> vint
>>         >>> --
>>         >>> Internet-history mailing list
>>         >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>         >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>         >>> -
>>         >>> Unsubscribe:
>>         >>
>>         https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>         >>
>>         >> --
>>         >> Internet-history mailing list
>>         >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>         >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>         >> -
>>         >> Unsubscribe:
>>         >>
>>         https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>         >>
>>
>>         -- 
>>         Internet-history mailing list
>>         Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>>         https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>         -
>>         Unsubscribe:
>>         https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>>
>>
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Sent by a Verified
>>
>>     sender
>

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From touch at strayalpha.com  Sat Nov  7 14:28:46 2026
From: touch at strayalpha.com (Joe Touch)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 14:28:46 -0800
Subject: [ih] Postel's work history
In-Reply-To: <0963F8EB-849F-4FDE-AB0A-BDC428BF0A73@beachpine.com>
References: <0963F8EB-849F-4FDE-AB0A-BDC428BF0A73@beachpine.com>
Message-ID: <161E8E91-ABDB-4DA6-AE97-ED3E22671A6C@strayalpha.com>

> On Nov 7, 2026, at 1:37?PM, william yeager via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Speaking of preservation: When Jon passed away, USC/ISI locked his office on the 10th floor, and placed memorabilia, awards, etc, on the outside with photos on the windows.

FWIW, his office was locked and its contents sent to the USC archivist, who AFAIK continues to hold them. They are not currently open to the public, in keeping with archivist codes, because some of the contents are inextricably combined with personnel and other work-related matters. Perhaps in another 45 years.

His former office was occupied and in regular use from just after it was emptied through at least 2017 (when I was last there). The floors have been employee/hosted guest only as far as I can recall, back through my arrival there in 1992.

We had an active ?Postel Center? lab in the center of the 11th floor. It was documented at the Postel.org website, which helped setup. That lab had a case with a few of his awards and the first Postel Award ?globe? sat in my office (because it wouldn?t fit in the case), all again through at least 2017.

There was also a Postel Center office which housed visiting scholars during my time there, where some of his other memorabilia was housed. Jon never worked from that office, at least not during my time at ISI.

Joe
Postel Center director, 2000-2017, USC/ISI


From brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com  Sat Nov  7 19:40:33 2026
From: brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2026 16:40:33 +1300
Subject: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
In-Reply-To: <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>
References: <CAAFtm_V-fgqaobHxqhE8k00mntZKj8HyxvNgJMOt2DJycrRQ-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <44888EE4-5317-443B-8D46-A7FBF341BB10@interisle.net>
 <CABf5zvJ9HJUit7hy62qr+K72_F=-g27LrN4_TBN9x+fFizjr9w@mail.gmail.com>
 <6530c54c-a3ad-41f1-9a98-a759eeb541b5@3kitty.org>
 <CABf5zv+e_gB0aMpxjN1Mnr0=KQ64SeE_aj==tiJN9QFvQcm7+Q@mail.gmail.com>
 <c17ec45b-390c-4a71-b402-8cc720acba87@3kitty.org>
Message-ID: <b4a08abf-d8e6-4c8a-92e0-bb309a3e63c3@gmail.com>

On 08-Nov-26 10:35, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:

<snip>

> But the bureaucratic history is also an important, and likely
> influential, part of Internet History.? Did bureaucracy help establish
> The Internet, or hinder it?? ? There were other governments involved,
> not just the US.? What kinds of such issues were there in Europe or
> elsewhere as the Internet grew?

There was certainly a phase in Europe when bureaucracy in the form of
the European GOSIP profile was intentionally used to hinder the Internet,
both by some European Commission officials and by those defending the PTT
monopolies in the large West European countries. Major projects funded by
Brussels *required* OSI, and as soon as the monopoly carriers understood
TCP/IP they used all their bureaucratic (regulatory) weapons against it.

I kept as clear of "European" projects as I could, and one reason was the
odious reporting requirements. If you missed a "deliverable" (i.e. a report)
the money stopped (or Brussels would require advance payments to be returned).
Basically the one thing in a project that was compulsory was keeping up to
date with your reports. But this worked against OSI-based projects so,
paradoxically, it allowed Internet deployment in Europe to advance while
the bureaucracy was only interested in OSI monthly reports.

Regards/Ng? mihi
    Brian Carpenter

From gregskinner0 at icloud.com  Sat Nov  7 23:17:14 2026
From: gregskinner0 at icloud.com (Greg Skinner)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2026 23:17:14 -0800
Subject: [ih] Fwd:  Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
References: <1684297794.841122.1794103019359@mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <B89FC1B3-CFE0-4A71-A466-B117A1C0DF8F@icloud.com>

Forwarded for Barbara

> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Barbara Denny <b_a_denny at yahoo.com>
> To: Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> Sent: Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 05:55:26 PM PST
> Subject: Re: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
> 
> Not sure people know about this so I thought i would add it to the mix here.  This article sounds  pretty good.  Even though i did meet P?l,  i don't know much about the work.
> 
> https://btw.media/en/pal-spilling-cable-made-norway-reachable-vulnerable
> 
> https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/pal-spilling/
> 
> barbara
> 
> On Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 01:46:43 PM PST, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I can't speak about the role of the bureaucracy in creating the Internet.
> I saw a tiny bit of the bureaucracy during the creation of the Arpanet.
> 
> Two particularly relevant pieces of the bureaucracy related to the
> procurement of the 50 kilobit per second leased lines.  On the positive
> side, the government had access to a special price, I believe that made it
> possible use the lines instead of much slower lines and stay within the
> available budget.
> 
> On the other hand, the rules for ordering the lines included a nine month
> lead time.  That made it very hard to adjust to the occasional issues that
> arose requiring replanning the topology.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> Sent by a Verified
> 
> sender



From b_a_denny at yahoo.com  Sun Nov  8 22:08:36 2026
From: b_a_denny at yahoo.com (Barbara Denny)
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2026 06:08:36 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [ih] Fwd:  Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
In-Reply-To: <B89FC1B3-CFE0-4A71-A466-B117A1C0DF8F@icloud.com>
References: <1684297794.841122.1794103019359@mail.yahoo.com>
 <B89FC1B3-CFE0-4A71-A466-B117A1C0DF8F@icloud.com>
Message-ID: <1755364395.1013050.1794204516052@mail.yahoo.com>

 A little bit more about the struggle with Norway's telecommunications state authority, televerket .
https://www.ffi.no/en/news/from-the-us-to-ffi-kjeller-was-first-online

barbara

    On Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 11:17:36 PM PST, Greg Skinner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 Forwarded for Barbara

> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Barbara Denny <b_a_denny at yahoo.com>
> To: Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> Sent: Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 05:55:26 PM PST
> Subject: Re: [ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet
> 
> Not sure people know about this so I thought i would add it to the mix here.? This article sounds? pretty good.? Even though i did meet P?l,? i don't know much about the work.
> 
> https://btw.media/en/pal-spilling-cable-made-norway-reachable-vulnerable
> 
> https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/pal-spilling/
> 
> barbara
> 
> On Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 01:46:43 PM PST, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I can't speak about the role of the bureaucracy in creating the Internet.
> I saw a tiny bit of the bureaucracy during the creation of the Arpanet.
> 
> Two particularly relevant pieces of the bureaucracy related to the
> procurement of the 50 kilobit per second leased lines.? On the positive
> side, the government had access to a special price, I believe that made it
> possible use the lines instead of much slower lines and stay within the
> available budget.
> 
> On the other hand, the rules for ordering the lines included a nine month
> lead time.? That made it very hard to adjust to the occasional issues that
> arose requiring replanning the topology.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> Sent by a Verified
> 
> sender

-- 
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