Notes from: A history of modern times: The Internet and communications. Torch club talk 2014-01-14
- Communications in the 1950s
- The Bell System
- Circuit Switching
- "Analog" technology vs digital technology
- Time/frequency division multiplexing
- Cold War and the need for survivable communications
- Paul Baran (1962) of RAND and distributed communications, store-and-forward
- UK National Physics Laboratory, David Davies – time sharing and packet switching, the Mark I (1967)
- Lawrence Roberts, Lincoln Lab and ARPA
- Gatlinburg 1967
- ARPA
- Three “applications”: login, file transfer, remote job execution
- Bob Taylor, Director ARPA Information Processing Techniques
- ARPAnet – 1969
- Interface Message Processors
- Inter-network 1970s
- Cyclades – France
- NPL – UK
- NORSAR – Norway
- TCP (and IP)
- Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf – Transmission Control Protocol (1974)
- Toward the Internet Protocol 1975-1982
- Flag Day: January 1, 1983 – TCP/IP
- Online Communities in the 80s: UUCP/Usenet and the BBS community
- NSFnet, WWW, and into the modern Internet
- Personal Computers
- Email/forums
- BBS
- Other applications: gopher, http – 1991
- Blacksburg Electronic Village
- AOL and September That Never Ended
- Internet2 and advancements in networking
- Futures
- IPv6
- Bellheads vs Network Geeks – Culture of Innovation
- ISO vs ARPA “reference models”
- Design Philosophy
- Reference Implementation – BSD/Unix
- The RFC process, Postel’s Law
- Reflections on post-Sputnik vs post-9/11
- Patriot Act
- Snowden
- Big Data and “metadata” analysis
Michael Padlipsky quotes (mostly in regard to ISO)
- Beware of the panacea peddlers: just because you wind up naked doesn’t make you an emperor
- Layering makes a good servant but a bad master
- If you know what you’re doing, three layers is enough; if you don’t seventeen won’t help
- If you build a better mousetrap, the voluntary standards organizations will plod a path at least 37° off-course from your door
- Perhaps they really do strive for incomprehensibility in their specs; after all, when the liturgy was written in Latin, the laity knew their place
- Oversold, underdesigned, and years from here
- Standards should be discovered, not decreed
- If the boat is nearly swamped and you don’t have a bailing bucket, then it makes a good deal of sense to rock the boat … in hopes you’ll slosh some of the bilgewater out the other side
- Do you want protocols that look nice or protocols that work nice?
- Optimality differs according to context
- It must be our great task, gentlemen, to keep the monkeys away from the typewriters – attributed to Wiener
Postel’s Law
- TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
- Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept
William of Ockham (c. 1287 – 1347)
- Plurality is not to be posited without necessity
posted by ckg at 01:06
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