4 Oct
2018
4 Oct
'18
4:13 p.m.
From: Eric Smith
I think the account given in the book may be a bit
confused on this
point. ... That sequence of events is contradicted by Pelkey ...
describes the name change from Alto Aloha to Ether as happening in May
1973 in agreement with WWSUL, except that in the Pelkey account the
Alto network wasn't designed and built until June, _after_ the name
change.
It's quite possible that in Metcalfe's interview (which is what the WWSUL
account seems to be pretty much wholly based on), N years after it all
happened, his memory flaked and he got the sequence wrong.
I've had the same thing happen to me, trying to recall the sequence/timing of
early IP work at MIT. I was sure X happened before Y, and then Jerry Saltzer
dug up an old progress report... There's a reason that the gold standard for
historians is contemporary documentation.
Along those lines, here:
http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/nontech/tmlotus.html
is an amusing story of my encounters with this effect on some Lotus Indycar
research I did.
Noel