> On Jan 14, 2016, at 2:43 AM, IETF Chair <chair@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > This week marks the 30th anniversary of the meeting that became the > very first edition of IETF meetings now held three times per year. > On 16-17 January 1986 in San Diego, California, 21 people attended > what is now known as IETF 1. > > As we work on the day-to-day tasks needed to make the Internet work > better, from time-to-time it is useful to consider our work on longer > timescales. > > Here are my thoughts about the occasion: > > https://www.ietf.org/blog/2016/01/30-years-of-engineering-the-internet/ > > And happy birthday, IETF, on Saturday! > > What are your thoughts? > > Jari Arkko, IETF Chair 30 years! Time really flies !! But changes seem going even faster: it's hard to believe how much the world has changed in this 30 years. Not only Internet changed from connecting a few K's hosts to connecting over 3 billion users as Jari mentioned, but behind these numbers are some really fundamental changes in Internet applications, user communities (shouldn't we count IoT devices and smart cars here), infrastructures, and almost everything else (except IPv4 packet format didn't change, though its address interpretation changed). Now looking back, the world at that time was really simple, though one didn't feel that way then: the dawn of inter-domain routing, multicast was coming, congestion, not to mention ISO... but that really has no comparison to what we have today. - ART is the largest area now(back then there was little app)--45 WGs? almost twice as many as the 2nd largest area (routing) - routing wise now we do anycast routing, multicast routing, ad hoc routing, DTN routing (and I dont know if I should group things like MPLS and VPNs here, or SDN and openflow for that matter) - back then we had simple IP routers, now firewalls, load balancers, NATs and all sorts of other middleboxes. - back then there was no security, now we have DNSSEC, BGPSEC, IPSEC, TLS, DTLS, and bunch other security related things not mentioned (like DKIM) - how many new WGs have been created to address IoT challenges? If we keep going like this, one has to wonder how IETF/IETF products might look like another 20 years down the road. I must also add that we learned tremendous amount of stuff too over 30 years, though that could take a lot time and hard work to collect and summarize. maybe an interesting discussion at IETF 100? which is also coming in no time. Lixia