Technical History and Digital Archiving of Protocols in Network Architectures
				June 20,2000
 
Goals:
A) To create online, SEARCHABLE (text) archives of the technical 
   design documents produced in the development of several network 
   architectures.  

   Audience: network researchers/students and for History of Science historians)
    
B) To create online archives of supporting materials: 
   including email archives, technical interviews (oral and written), 
   software (implementations/tools), drafts, momentos (such as the IMP log), maps, .....
      ("searchable" is much less important here, options ranging from NOT searchable to 
      searchable via a librarian-constructed indexing scheme) 

   Note:  this goal reminds me of a virtual museum, and would need a good
  	archivist to find, solicit, index and organize this material.

   Audience: half of this would be of interest to network researchers/students
   and all of it would be of interest to historians)

C) To create NEW technical descriptions of each network architecture,
   that draw upon (and link to) the original source materials for
   several different technical audiences (the only historians that
   would be interested in this would be historians with a science background):  

   (Note: we don't want to duplicate textbooks or a good survey paper...)  

   c1) The HIGHLIGHTS TOUR, with annotated links to a select subset
	of original source materials 

	(could the audience be network enthusiasts, and CS undergrads in their 
	first networking course????)

   c2) The THOROUGH TOUR of network protocol characteristics (combined
	with a discussion of design goals), using a taxonomy of network 
        protocol categories (with hypertext to the most relevant original 
	source material for each protocol, for further discussion)

	(could the audience be students who have finished at least one
	networking course?)

   c3) A COMPARISON ACROSS ARCHITECTURES, using a taxonomy of network protocol 
	categories  (audience would be students in advanced networking courses)

   c4) Other possible models could be developed, as well as identifying 
	and developing a new set of interviews, depending upon how technical and complete 
        the Charles Babbage Institute Oral Histories are,

	(after writing/researching parts of c1/c2/c3, we could discover that
	 some mysteries are still unanswered, and then prepare some 
	 interview questions ...)	

         ??? lessons learned ????, 

	??? annotated bibliographies ???

   It may turn out that Goal C becomes a "research venue" for the Digital Libraries Initiative???

D) Select/prioritize the list of possible network architectures to be
   included:  such as Baran's project, Davies' project, Arpanet (how many 
   iterations to include???), Internet (how many iterations to include...), 
   Cyclades, Japan's ...., OSI, SNA, Decnet, XNS (novell), ??? local area networks???, 
   ATM, X.25, ....

E) To create a community of people who are willing to collect/advise on all 
   of the above for a specific network architecture, or contribute source 
   materials, create interviews, solicit funding, guide the project....