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