Re: Bake-off as trademark

[[e-mail]]

>In message <[e-mail]>, "Henning G. Schulzrinne"
writes:
>>I've been approached regarding the use of the (claimed-to-be)
>>trademarked term bake-off. It would be helpful if somebody can provide
>>credible evidence that this term has been used within the technical
>>community for many years. (In case you didn't know,
>>http://www.bakeoff.com/ shows the non-technical use....)
>
>It's used in RFC 1371, from October 1992.  Of course, that RFC also
>says:
>
>   The IAB/IETF are committed to a timely introduction of OSI into the
>   Internet.

There is an earlier reference.

From the text of RFC1025:

   In the early days of the development of TCP and IP, when there were
   very few implementations and the specifications were still evolving,
   the only way to determine if an implementation was "correct" was to
   test it against other implementations and argue that the results
   showed your own implementation to have done the right thing.  These
   tests and discussions could, in those early days, as likely change
   the specification as change the implementation.

   There were a few times when this testing was focused, bringing
   together all known implementations and running through a set of tests
   in hopes of demonstrating the N squared connectivity and correct
   implementation of the various tricky cases.  These events were called
   "Bake Offs".

   An early version of the list of tests included here appears in IEN-69
   of October 1978.  A demonstration of four TCP implementations was
   held at the Defense Communication Engineering Center in Reston,
   Virginia on 4 December 1978, and reported in IEN-70 of December 1978.
   A bake off of six implementations was held 27-28 January 1979 at
   USC-Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, California and
   reported in IEN-77 of February 1979.  And a distributed bake off was
   held in April 1980 over the network and reported in IEN-145 of May
   1980.

   The following section reproduces (with very slight editing) the
   procedure, tests, and scoring of the April 1980 Bake Off.

Of course one would hope that they were called "bake offs"
back then, as well.


>Anyway -- I seem to recall seeing the term in "TCP/IP Protocol
>Transition Handbook", from circa 193, but my copy isn't conveniently
                                  ^^^
>accessible at the moment.
>
>         --Steve Bellovin

You must have misplaced the stone tablets.

-Mike