Re: [Nethistory] Need a change
Jack Haverty <jack@3kitty.org> Fri, 04 January 2019 20:14 UTC
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From: Jack Haverty <jack@3kitty.org>
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Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:14:12 -0800
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Subject: Re: [Nethistory] Need a change
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On 1/4/19 7:52 AM, Heather Flanagan wrote: > I know the Computer History Museum would be happy to get their hands on > the first 1000 or so RFCs held as ISI, but the library at USC is also > quite interested in keeping them and everything else that was in Jon > Postel's office. One observation I'd like to toss into the bucket of nethistory... The period from the early 70s through the 80s was, IMHO, an anomalous time with respect to the history of historical records. Electronic mail had just been created, and communications of all kinds, from short notes to formal documents, had started to be created and existed in digital form. An analogous time might be when the transition to printing presses occurred, replacing papyrus, scrolls, and other forms of document storage. Having lived through that 70s/80s transition, one thing I noticed was that the ways in which people interacted changed drastically. In earlier days, debate, discussion, and argument was carried out through conferences, papers, journals, and other such means. After the advent of computers and especially networks, electronic mechanisms became a preferred mechanism for interaction, at least by anyone who had access to them. Electronic mail, mailing lists, FTP servers, gophers, et al carried much more of the ongoing debates than appeared, or were captured, by papers, conferences and such in that era. Much of the intellectual work was never captured in any traditional form. It was simply easier and faster to interact electronically. So we did. After the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, even the new electronic mechanisms became much more permanent, with human interactions saved for posterity in electronic servers and archives, and even old paper, audio, and video records appearing in electronic form. But through the 70s/80s, such archival mechanisms did not widely exist. For historians, my point is simply that the 70s/80s were a unique era in computing history, when much of interesting debate, discussion, and exploratory thinking was not captured at all in the more formal mechanisms of publication, but only survives, if at all, in personal records and sporadically saved artifacts such as archives of popular mailing lists, newsgroups, et al. So, while the RFCs are quite important as a rare early "formal" publication of the research, they are themselves an anomaly in the sense that they did not capture much of the other debate, discussion, alternatives, issues, ideas, concepts, and other interesting historical activity especially of the 70s/80s. They only tell one part of the story, and little of the story behind the story. Archives of mailing lists, such as HEADER-PEOPLE, MSGGROUP, TCP-IP-WORKING-GROUP and others (I may not have the names exactly right), are important historically. Materials from other worlds of that same era, if they still exist, also tell important parts of the story, e.g., documents, electronic mail archives, and such materials from ARPA, NSF, ISO, CCITT, SRI, BBN, MIT, Xerox, DEC, IBM, and many others would put the early history of The Internet into the context of the 70s/80s. Museums (and libraries) traditionally seem to like to save things that they can display. Digital artifacts don't fit very well in that picture. Is any organization collecting digital artifacts for historical preservation? /Jack Haverty Nevada City, CA January 4, 2019
- [Nethistory] Need a change Elizabeth Feinler
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Sanjeev Gupta
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change John R. Levine
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Brian E Carpenter
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change John R. Levine
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Scott Brim
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Brian E Carpenter
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change ian.peter@ianpeter.com
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Xing Li
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Heather Flanagan
- Re: [Nethistory] Need a change Jack Haverty