20 Jan
2014
20 Jan
'14
6:36 p.m.
My short list would include any available materials related to the
following, in addition to ARPAnet and Internet history:
RSCS:
The obvious IBM stuff, but also things like URep and JNet; both of which
seem to have disappeared entirely.
Some of the BITNET history is interesting and has had lasting impact.
DECnet:
We got things like ISIS from DECnet.
Xerox XNS:
This was really influential; even implemented in BSD.
The ISO OSI protocols:
These were also really influential, even if they never had much direct
impact.
Chaosnet:
An oft overlooked footnote in networking history; this stuff even made it
into Lisp machines.
Oberon System 3:
Not exactly a networking system per se, but the networking that was built
into Oberon was pretty cool.
On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Just throwing this out to see what other people
think.
I suspect we're at the tail end of the usage life of devices that don't
speak IP.
I'm mostly thinking about networking devices 80's > 00's
So, what needs to be preserved? How much of this does CHM need to do? Is
any other
collecting institution already covering this? How much is within scope?
We've been having curatorial discussions about this for years inside CHM,
and have
been doing some directed collecting since before the big exhibition was
locked down
in 2010, but it is a big topic and there were a lot of evolutionary
dead-ends.
What got me thinking about this is I've been working with someone who has
storage
units full of mid-80's IBM SNA stuff and it's taken me months to scan a
fraction
of it. I know there are huge swaths of telephony and networking that I've
never
even looked at. It's pretty overwhelming, actually, to get my head around
from the
software side.