Infrastructure creation is not a simple task

The development of the Internet is one of those Infrastructure Creations that by now has affected at least half of the world's population directly, and nearly everyone indirectly.

One advantage the creators had was that they were dealing in a near vacuum rather than modifying or adapting older communication networks.  Thus, they didn't try to run the Internet (at first) on radio or television networks, nor for that matter on the telephone networks.  Even so, the design was not easy.

For insight into the difficulty, I'd recommend a brief (20 pp) paper, titled "A brief history of the Internet" written by eight of the original designers.  You can see it at  

http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet

While it is a great tour through some of the issues, it lacks the "first person" angst that often accompanies such work.  Especially the frustrations when you 'know you are right, but no one is listening' or worse, others are actively trying to sabotage your work for personal gain.

In this vein, I'd like to recommend a 'new' web-based 'book' called "The history of Computer Communications: 1968-1988" by Jim Pelkey.

You can access it directly from http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/.  

I first met Pelkey in 1984 (propitious year, don't you think, with the Apple MacIntosh launch on January 23rd of that year, thirty years ago).  He was the new CEO of Sorcim, a company building a very fast spreadsheet to compete with Visicalc (doomed due to Lotus 1-2-3 hitting the street almost simultaneously).  Sorcim was a name derived from reversing the spelling of MICROS, which appeared in the mirrored image of a magazine cover on the airplane windowpane for the founder Richard Frank.

Pelkey couldn't grasp, as a novice Venture Capitalist, what all the hysteria was in the 1986/87 timeframe, over networks, and in particular where to put his investments.  So he launched a personal quest, to interview lots of folk in the maelstrom and see if that gave any clues.

The result was 85 interviews, which are just now becoming available for wider readership.  They are a true testament to the value of getting the info 'from the horse's mouth'.  See for example the interview with Phil Kaufman, who was an unknown collaborator with Bob Metcalfe and Gordon Bell on the new Ethernet standard in the early 80's.   

Kaufman died prematurely of a heart attack on a trip to Japan for his company Silicon Compilers not long after this interview.  He is recalled today by the EDA Industry Award in his name for the best designers of CAE and EDA equipment in the world -- an infrastructure world so arcane that 99.99% of the world has no clue what it is about, even though at least 70% of our material goods are produced by its tools.

The interview reveals some very intriguing insights, in particular about the flawed "standards" process that 'the world' trusts, called IEEE standards, and how large corporations take full advantage of the mythology about this process.  Enough that IBM nearly blocked the Internet standard, a story not often seen in print, but quite true for those of us who lived it.