Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan
Postel Center Visiting Research Scholar
Wednesday, December 15 at 11:00am
11th floor large CR

Network History: Archives and Archaeology

Archives can be defined as: "the non-current records of individuals, groups, institutions, and governments that contain information of enduring value". To be an Internet historian requires access to archives containing source materials such as the RFCs, IENs, INWGs, NIC documents, minutes of working group meetings, key memos and email discussions, manuals, listings of S/W, etc. This talk will first describe archiving basics, the Jon Postel Collection, along with comments on other network archives, digital archiving mechanics, future digital archives that the Postel Center or ISI might build, and the role of USC's Archives.

The talk is based on my experience this Fall at the Postel Center, which focused on: (1) helping archivists, curators, and the Postel Center assess and plan various collections of key source materials, and (2) digging through source materials similarly to an archaeologist, by starting from some well-known early document and then searching for earlier layers of documents that might reveal the design discussion.... all for the purpose to eventually create a set of stories about the design. The talk includes an archeaological history of early TCP documents from 1973 to 1977 and examples of such uncovered design discussions.

Bio:
Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan is a visiting researcher with ISI's Postel Center, who joined us for the Fall semester from the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches network protocols courses and investigates Internet History. She coordinated the widely-successful Internet History tutorial at Sigcomm 1999, which brought together many of the original contributors to the design of the Internet to discuss how the architecture was developed and how it continues to evolve.