[TUHS] In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

[TUHS] In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

[Dave Horsfall]

What a weird day...

We lost computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra in 2002; he gave us ALGOL, 
structured programming, semaphores, and ranted against the GOTO statement 
(much to the distress of the Fortranites and their spaghetti coding). 
Oh, and a certain Prof. Goto used to complain that everybody wanted to 
eliminate him :-)

However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he 
could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 5 Aug 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> The problem with using the number of documents as a gauge for that is 
> that Jon often acted as scribe, so that for many things published under 
> his name, he was acting more as editor.

OK, I'll think of some way of modifying it (I am always open to 
corrections, but preferably offline); you won't believe the number of 
"history" sites I've seen that directly contradict each other (even when 
taking UTC/US/local time into account, and I try and use local time 
wherever possible).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he
    > could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet.

The problem with using the number of documents as a gauge for that is that Jon
often acted as scribe, so that for many things published under his name, he
was acting more as editor.

As to who (if anyone) does deserve that title, I'm also not sure about the
importance of Cerf and Kahn. NOTE: I am not saying they _didn't_ make the key
contribution - I just haven't looked into it in enough detail to say.

For example, before the TCP/IP effort got rolling, there was something called
the International Packet Network Working Group (INWG) which had a big role,
but which has been poorly documented. There's a note called "The Internet: On
its International Origins and Collaborative Vision" by Rhonda Hauben,
available here:

  http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/haubenpap.rtf

which covers it some, and there's a more recent thing by Alex Mackenzie which
is probably better, but I'm too lazy to go find it.

Louis Pouzin (or whoever it was at CYCLADES who actually had the idea to move
the reliability out of the packet switches, and into the hosts), also would
have a good claim to the title.


Anyway, sorry for the offtopic, but my 'fake history' alarm went off...

	Noel