Documenting our legacies

[Michael Thomas <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

I recently wrote a blog post documenting, in part, my experiences with 
the internet protocols in the mid 1980's (we didn't have connectivity 
until around 1990), and am planning on doing the same for DKIM. For all 
of the day to day squabbling, it's easy to lose sight that the Internet 
is really a remarkable achievement. The way it was built was much more 
akin to the Quantum Mechanics than a single Einstein having a good year. 
I consider the Quantum Mechanics to be most remarkable set of people the 
world has ever seen, especially how they cooperated and built on each 
other. None of us is getting any younger, and our memories are getting 
worse. It would be a shame for history -- and there will be history 
written -- to lose everybody's experiences. If _When Wizards Stay Up 
Late_ is our only legacy, there isn't going to be much fodder for future 
historians to figure out how we built this remarkable thing.

What would be ideal, I think, is for IETF itself to host a repo of all 
of those stories so they aren't subject to the whim of the flavor of the 
day repository. I recently read a PhD dissertation on the Usenet group 
soc.motss where she scraped years of dejanews (which was an imperfect 
repo, but better than nothing at all), and think we'd be doing a 
disservice to all of those future dissertations trying to make sense of 
the how/what/why's of the Internet, and especially the early days, by 
losing that knowledge.

Mike

PS: if you're interested, you can read it here: 
https://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2020/12/how-to-build-laser-printer-from-nothing.html