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On Mon, 10 Apr 1995, Chip Bayers wrote:

> At 1:49 PM 4/10/95, S. Finer wrote:
> >
> >> Dave Farber is one of the people who helped to create the Internet as we
> >> know it today.
> >
> >And how many of those were there?  Scores, if not hundreds.
> Try at most a dozen.
There was a cadre of about 1 dozen "board members", like the 6-12 people 
who sighn the dotted line as directors of non-profit corporations.  Dave 
Farber, Vint Cerf, Gene Spafford, and about 20 others actually went 
before congress to get funding, ordered equipment...

There were hundreds of "contributors", nearly 1 million engineers, 
college students, and vendors, contributing software, hardware, 
telecomms, and technical research, using the net to communicate.

> >
> >He helped to creat the NSFNet.
> >Scores, if not hundreds, etc.
> 
> Sorry I wasn't specific enough: he was founding chairman of the main
> advisory committee to the National Science Foundation on network issues.
> That committee drew up the plans for the NSFNet, which operated, until
> recently, the main backbone of the Net.
The NSFNet is still the main "unofficial" routing crossroads for 
intercarrier traffic. When something needs to go from MCI to AT&T, it 
crosses the NSFNet router.  The role of the NSFNet has greatly diminished 
since 1992.

> >> He's a professor of
> >> telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania, and is one of the
> >> founders and current board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
> >> He's a trustee of the Internet Society.
> >Scores anyway---perhaps not hundreds.
Both of these organizations coordinate the volunteer efforts of hundreds 
of others.  If they had to pay us standard consultant rates, they would 
be running a corporation twice the size of Microsoft.

> Yes, there certainly are scores, if not hundreds, who have contributed to
> the growth of the Net. Scores, however, have not led NSFNet development
> efforts _AND_ serve as an ISOC Trustee _AND_ founded the EFF. Only someone
> like Vint Cerf could claim to have been more instrumental in the
> development of the Net today. Check out Farber's CV at:
> http://macpond.cis.upenn.edu/vita.
Again there are many who volunteered their efforts and contributions, 
including source-code, proposals submitted via e-mail, bug fixes, and 
hardware reccomendations.  Farber and Cerf however are like Icons in the 
internet community precisely because the did successfully forge the 
cooperation between groups that were otherwise bitter rivals.  When Vint 
and Dave first pounded out the Specs for Internet Protocol, Xerox, Dec, 
IBM, Wang, and Televideo all had competing protocols, none of which could 
communicate with each other.  Under the powerful leadership of men like 
Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, the "Superpowers" of computing were willing to 
implement and bring to workability, what we now know as the TCP/IP suite.

On the other hand, we don't want to forget the people like Bill Joy, who, 
as a college student, wrote TFTP and RSH, until working implementations 
of FTP and Telnet could be constructed.  Or the development of UDP by the 
boys and girls at MIT and Berkely.  Then there were the ports.  For IP to 
be universally accepted, working implmentations of TCP/IP had to be 
ported to over 2000 hardware/operating-system configurations.  Men like 
Richard Stallman of MIT with the Free Software Foundation became 
responsible for the repository of software now known as the General 
Public License suite.  This "unsupported" software receives over 300 
upgrades/week and is maintained by volunteers and staff of the FSF at sites
like MIT, CMU, UCB, CU Boulder, and "SunSite".

> >> He runs a mailing list called
> >> interesting-people. You should know him.
> >Why? Because he is a friend of your friend?  I focus far more on
> >commercial issues than academics, and am unfamiliar with his list.
Unfortunately, while you were oggling Bill Gates, these guys were 
building an infrastructure that drives an organization nearly 8 times the 
size of Microsoft.

> >Haven't paid much attention to EFF since 93' when the clipper chip issue
> >became an exercise in hysteric diatribes.
> Ignoring the EFF because of its political positions should not
> automatically lead you to ignorance of the influence of its board members.
Hysteric diatribes are part of the development process at EFF :-).  We 
had such diatribes over TCP vs. UDP (each now has it's place), and XDR vs 
ASN.1 flavors of Remote Procedure Calls (one of my contributions-circa 1983).
What ultimately occurs is that issues and concerns get raised, solutions 
are developed, and a consensus is established.

There are about 300 technical newsgroups on the internet, which strive to 
define standards and get consensus.  Groups like comp.dcom.* or comp.arch.*
or comp.os.*  You won't get a lot of "Pretty Pictures", but you will get 
a 1 to 3 year lead on where the industry is going.

> I'm sure by now that you haven't heard of any of them, but some of the
> other EFF board members besides Farber - Denise Caruso, Stewart Brand, John
> Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson - are influencing many of the
> decisions made by government and corporations about "commercial issues" (in
> your words) on the Net.
I know many of these names.  I also notice that many are missing.  Many 
of the missing names have gone on to other ventures, like running their 
own corporations.

I for one would like to thank them all.  You've done a great job, keep it up.


> __________________________________________________________________________
> Chip Bayers                                       email: chip@hotwired.com

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Apr 11 10:45:35 1995
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