[ih] W3C origins [was: Re: J.C.R. Licklider]

[Jack Haverty]

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/Ngā 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/Ngā mihi
>>>     Brian Carpenter
>>

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