Our next inductee developed protocols for the ARPANET, initiated the Request For Comment
series. Please give it up for Steve Crocker.
[APPLAUSE]
Vint talked about the secrets of what really drove us on the early network, left out one small detail
we were part of a small group at UCLA in the quite positive and open environment under
Len Kleinrock, an environment that was sponsored by Larry Roberts and a very generous environment
and we had to choose a name for the operating system for our network
[LAUGHTER]
We checked various things we had a Sigma 7, Sigma 7 Executive... just Sex.
First host on the ARPANET, we put Sex on the internet.
[LAUGHTER] It's documented.
[offstage] - We were younger then, that's what drove us!
We were so much younger then, indeed. Not content with that, we had a sign on the door
that said when Sex was available, we had a Sex users group, a Sex users manual, the whole thing.
There's a theme besides sex that has marbled through all of this. Yes there were bits and
bandwidth and all kinds of calculations and system designs and so forth, all fairly technical
and all of this was very exciting but it was instantly clear from the very beginning
that there was an overlay on top of all of this which was the human component,
and one of our early slogans was "networks bring people together".
And so in rooms much much smaller than this, with collections of people that fit in half of one row here,
we sat around the table and tried to imagine what would happen. I'll interrupt for a second and say
I get asked as many of us do, 'did you understand, could you see, how much of what's happening
now could you envision?', so my standard answer is "well everything's happening exactly on schedule"
But more seriously, it's what we couldn't see and most importantly what we knew we couldn't see,
was that knowledge, that we could not tell everything that was going to happen, and therefore
it was absolutely essential to leave room for the next generation and the next generation of people
and processes and everything, so we designed both the architecture and the processes surrounding
the architecture, the social processes, to be open as opposed to closed. Open architecture, thin layers
that were there as a helpmate if you needed them, and you could go around them if you wanted
to build something else, that was the technical side, and open publication of design notes that
we tried not to take too seriously, and hence the little linguistic device of calling them
Request for Comments, deliberately making them available absolutely for free around the
world, any time, anybody, and the processes by which people could contribute to that
- anybody could contribute, no restrictions, and that tradition has progressed essentially unbroken
for the entire 40 plus year period and we now have the Internet Engineering Task Force
try to find what the omission criteria is, try to find what the enfranchisement criteria is, and it's
hard to understand, there's no voting, there's no membership, there's no fees, you've got to pay for
the cookies when you come... but it's completely open, in '94 I made my first trip to India
and I gave a talk at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and I was introduced to
a graduate student who was building some interesting software, and he told me all about it
and it was indeed a fairly complex project, and I was impressed that he was able to put together
so much technology, and I said "how did you do that", and he said "I just read the RFCs,
I downloaded them, read them and implemented them" and it really... choked me up,
as it's doing a little bit now. And it's that process which we were just frankly fortunate to be
in the right place at the right time, and it's been one hell of a ride. Thank you.