Notes from: A history of modern times: The Internet and communications. Torch club talk 2014-01-14

1. Communications in the 1950s
• The Bell System
• Circuit Switching
• "Analog" technology vs digital technology
• Time/frequency division multiplexing
2. 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
3. ARPA
• Three “applications”: login, file transfer, remote job execution
• Bob Taylor, Director ARPA Information Processing Techniques
• ARPAnet – 1969
• Interface Message Processors
4. Inter-network 1970s
• Cyclades – France
• NPL – UK
• NORSAR – Norway
5. 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
6. Online Communities in the 80s: UUCP/Usenet and the BBS community
• NSFnet, WWW, and into the modern Internet
• Personal Computers
• Email/forums
• BBS
7. Other applications: gopher, http – 1991
• Blacksburg Electronic Village
• AOL and September That Never Ended
8. Internet2 and advancements in networking
• Futures
• IPv6
9. Bellheads vs Network Geeks – Culture of Innovation
• ISO vs ARPA “reference models”
• Design Philosophy
• Reference Implementation – BSD/Unix
• The RFC process, Postel’s Law
10. Reflections on post-Sputnik vs post-9/11
• Patriot Act
• Snowden
• Big Data and “metadata” analysis

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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

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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

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William of Ockham (c. 1287 – 1347)

• Plurality is not to be posited without necessity