more on Setting history straight: So, who really did invent the Internet?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

The archeological approach is interesting given that we can do first  
hand reality checking. I’m a little concerned that Peter’s paper has  
a political agenda but then it’s useful to counter the argument that  
the Internet should be owned and operated by Americans.



The word “theory” is strange as we seem to be arguing over  
definitions by pointing to artifacts.



Much of the confusion stems from what do we mean by "The Internet"  
and why we should care. It’s not whether “TCP/IP” is the basis for  
the Internet – it’s the fact that the / in TCP/IP captures that  
dynamic that made all the difference in the world and to the world.  
It’s about a network architecture that structures a marketplace. The  
End-to-End argument paper in 1984 http://www.reed.com/Papers/ 
EndtoEnd.html gave a formal explanation.



What is important is that we understand the marketplace process that  
has unfolded over the last few decades. Statements like “Later on,  
TCP/IP won the protocol wars on costs and simplicity of adoption.”  
don’t really capture the sense of the marketplace process.



It would be interesting to collect the personal accounts of the  
various participants, well-known and otherwise in one place in order  
to create a timeline though we’d have to speculate on the  
intermingling of ideas and not worry to much about official credit.



What is clear is that some of the ideas were “discovered”. The Aloha  
(Radio) Net was a pragmatic approach that didn’t require special  
network hardware. It thus became connectionless by default even if  
the software interfaces might have defined connections. Putting the  
Aloha Net on a coax (Ethernet) in 1973 kept this key design element.  
The use of “network” created an ambiguity since the term was used in  
a different sense to describe the network as a reliable service.  
Experimenters (to avoid the loaded work hackers) didn’t care about  
such things – the Ethernet was a wonderful opportunity. PUP was a  
direct result and TCP/IP certainly benefited from the experience.



Discovery itself is not enough – the ideas to need to be accepted  
rather than defeated. Would the Web exist as we know it today if Tim  
Berners-Lee insisted on maintaining the original idea of two-way  
links? Was that what limited the adoption of Hypertext which was  
developed in the early 1970’s?



The marketplace model is important because it also helps us  
understand that we have an ongoing process. The network of network  
model needs to be revisited in an era of mobile devices and dynamic  
reconfiguration. The P2P community is doing just that now in an  
ongoing experiment in taking the key end-to-end concepts and applying  
them to render the current Internet as a just another step in the  
process.




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