Subject: [Nethistory] Need a change

From: Elizabeth Feinler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2019 18:38:11 -0800

Hello All,

I am not sure who is still on this mailing list, but if you are still out there I have a request.

This mailing list was set up a while ago to raise the awareness of IETF members about saving important historical archives and artifacts. I was the instigator at the Orlando meeting, but was not supposed to be the coordinator of the list. I am at an age that I need to beg off being the coordinator. You need someone more in the mainstream than I am now.  Also, the name (which I did not pick) was ill-advised, because there is already the [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]> interest group, and the two list names were confusing. So my request is two-fold - 1) will one of you volunteer to coordinate this mailing list and remove my name as coordinator and 2) will you change its name to “saving internet archives” or something similar that does not confuse people .

Best wishes for a great 2019

   Jake
   (Elizabeth Feinler)

---

From: Sanjeev Gupta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2019 14:59:42 +0800

> I am not sure who is still on this mailing list, but if you are still out

For any newcomers (?), this is Ms Feinler:
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/elizabeth-feinler

> 1) will one of you volunteer to coordinate this mailing list and remove my
> name as coordinator and 2) will you change its name to “saving internet
> archives” or something similar that does not confuse people .
>

I am not sure there is much work to coordinate, there having been no
traffic on the list for months in a row.  I can remember only two things,
JPNIC published a Timeline of the Internet, and there was some discussion
of whether the DNS<->IP address list fit in a wallet.

The mailing list is archived, for the historians of the future, so maybe we
could sunset this project?
-- 
Sanjeev Gupta
+65 98551208     http://www.linkedin.com/in/ghane

---

From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Jan 2019 08:21:15 -0500

> traffic on the list for months in a row.

There have only been 47 messages ever sent to this list in the five years 
it's existed.  Before the recent two, there was one in late 2016 and one 
in 2015.  The list is archived in the IETF's general mail archive so I 
agree that the sensible thing to do is to close it.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 14:22:29 +1300

The only thing is, do we (for some value of "we") care about this?:

>>> raise the awareness of IETF members about saving important historical archives and artifacts. 

If we close the list, we're saying either that we (the IETF) don't care, or
that IETF people are already aware of the need to save stuff.

I do care, because I've worked a bit on the history of computing and I'm very
much aware of the historical value of personal records, alongside official
sources. But whether this is worthy of IETF cycles is a separate question.
It seems like something that should perhaps be an ISOC topic.

    Brian

> _______________________________________________
> Nethistory mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/nethistory
>

---

From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Jan 2019 21:01:18 -0500

> that IETF people are already aware of the need to save stuff.

No, we're just acknowledging that this list hasn't been an effective way 
to encourage people to archive material.

Regards,

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2019 23:15:53 -0500

Brian, what would you propose happen here? This list will not achieve
critical mass (although I now remember the launch fondly). Take it to ISOC?

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 17:31:40 +1300

> critical mass (although I now remember the launch fondly). Take it to ISOC?

I don't really have the ergs to do any more than make the suggestion,
but yes, I think that would be a better next step than simply giving
up. I would imagine that some sort of cooperation with the Internet
Archive would be desirable. Also possibly with the Computer History
Museum, if any old-fashioned paper with ink is involved.

   Brian

---

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2019 05:04:18 +0000

While agreeing that the Internet Archive and the Computer History Museum 
could play useful roles, I think it might be best to continue efforts 
via the [email-masked] list, rather than set up something 
new at this stage.

Thanks Jake for all your efforts, and all the best to you.

Ian Peter

------ Original Message ------
From: "Brian E Carpenter" <[email-masked]>
To: "Scott Brim" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>; "Sanjeev Gupta" 
<[email-masked]>; "Elizabeth Feinler" <[email-masked]>; 
[email-masked]
Sent: 4/01/2019 3:31:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Nethistory] Need a change

---

From: Xing Li <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2019 13:45:50 +0800

I beilieve the low traffic in this mailing list is due to that very few 
people know its existence.
A company in China recently is doing "The OHI Project – 50 Years of the 
Internet" (http://cyberlabs.org/ohi). Could this mailing list give them 
some advices?

Thanks Jakes to wake up this mailing list. Best wishes to you!

xing

[email-masked] 写道:
> While agreeing that the Internet Archive and the Computer History 
> Museum could play useful roles, I think it might be best to continue 
> efforts via the [email-masked] list, rather than set up 
> something new at this stage.
>
>>>>>>> raise the awareness of IETF members about saving important 
>>>>>>> historical
>>>> archives and artifacts.
>>>>
>>>> I do care, because I've worked a bit on the history of computing 
>>>> and I'm
>>>> very

---

From: Heather Flanagan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 07:52:51 -0800

> Museum, if any old-fashioned paper with ink is involved.

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.

The Computer History Museum and the Royal Library of Sweden are both 
partnering with the RFC Editor to keep a digital copy of RFCs in their 
archive.

-Heather

---

From: Jack Haverty <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 12:14:12 -0800

> quite interested in keeping them and everything else that was in Jon

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