From Newsgroup: alt.folklore.computers
On 25/08/2025 04:12, Lars Poulsen wrote:
The academics building the Internet did not participate in this process,
but the engineers doing the work went and swapped ideas, and once they
had working code, published open standards before patents could be
filed. We all know how this outcompeted the ITU and IEEE standards.
On 2025-08-25, The Natural Philosopher <
tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Indeed we did, Interop and all that lark 'My telnet client wont talk to
your telnet server, why is that? let's put a packet monitor on and see'
'Oh, well that's not illegal, but my also not illegal code barfs on it. Let's think of the simplest standard addition that we can both adhere to
to get stuff working'
Fun days.
For a few years in the early 1990s, I went to the IETF meetings. Very
busy events, with 8-12 tracks of working group meetings. When they got
to 2000 participants, it became really unwieldy. The best times were the
late night sessions in the Hyatt atriums, when the NSA guys and the NASA
guys were playing Global Thermonuclear War surrounded by a large group watching.
In then there were the PPP plugfests. For years, I kept a T-shirt that
said "I can PPP". And someone from PacBell pointed out the woman who was
the real life inspiration for "Alice" in Dilbert.
Some of the people were truly amazing. Some weird shit was happening
behind the scenes. A guy in Finland built an anonymous remailer
(double-blind). Many government agencies did not like it, but could not persuade the Finns to stop it. Eventually Milo told the network people
at Helsinki University, that if they did not get him out, Finland would disappear from the Internet. 24 hours later that particular problem
was gone - permanently.
--
Lars P
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