The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at one of the more underwhelming operating systems released: Windows 1.0. In our previous episode, we covered Windows 1.0. Released in 1985, it was cute. Windows 2 came in 1987 and then Windows 3 came in 1990. While a war of GUIs had been predicted, it was clear by 1990 that Microsoft was winning this war. Windows 3.0 sold 10 million licenses. It was 5 megabytes fully installed and came on floppies. The crazy thing about Windows 3 is that it wasn’t really supposed to happen. IBM had emerged as a juggernaut in the PC industry, largely on the back of Microsoft DOS. Windows 1 and 2 were fine, but IBM seeing that Microsoft was getting too powerful would not run it on their computers. Instead, they began work on a new operating system called OS/2, which was initially released in 1987. But David Weise from the Windows team at Microsoft wanted to reboot the Windows project. He brought in Murray Sargent and the two started work in 1988. They added a debugger, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, and I’m pretty sure everyone knew they were on to something big. IBM found out and Microsoft placated them by saying it would kill Windows after they spent all this money on it. You could tell with the way they upgraded the UI, with how they made memory work so much better, and with the massive improvements to multitasking. Lies. They added File Manager, which would later evolve into File Explorer. They added the Control Panel which lives on to the modern era of Windows and they made it look more like the one in the Mac OS at the time. They added the Program Manager (or progman.exe), parts of which would go on to Windows Explorer and other parts which would form the Start Menu in the future. But it survived until XP Service Pack 2. They brought us up to 16 simultaneous colors and added support for graphics cards that could give us 256 colors. Pain was upgraded to Painbrush and they outsourced some of the graphics for the famed Microsoft Solitaire to Susan Kare. They also added macros using a program called Recorder, which Apple released the year before with Macro Maker. They raised the price from $100 to $149.95. And they sold 4 million copies in the first year, a huge success at the time. They added a protected mode for applications, which had supposedly been a huge reason IBM insisted on working on OS/2. One result of all of this was that IBM and Microsoft would stop developing together and Microsoft would release their branch, then called Windows NT, in 1991. NT had a new 32-bit API. The next year they would release Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.1, which would sell another 3 million copies. This was the first time I took Windows seriously and it was a great release. They replaced Reverse with the now-iconic Minesweeper. They added menuing customization. They removed Real Mode. They added support to launch programs using command.com. They brought in TrueType fonts and added Arial, Courier New, and the Times New Roman fonts. They added multimedia support. And amongst the most important additions, they added the Windows Registry, which still lives on today. That was faster that combing through a lot of .ini files for settings. The Workgroups version also added SMB file sharing and supported NetBIOS and IPX networking. The age of the Local Area Network, or LAN, was upon us. You could even install Winsock to get the weird TCP/IP protocol to work on Windows. Oh and remember that 32-bit API, you could install the Win32 add-on to get access to that. And because the browser wars would be starting up, by 1995 you could install Internet Explorer on 3.1. I remember 3.11 machines in the labs I managed in college and having to go computer to computer installing the browser on each. And installing Mosaic on the Macs. And later installing Netscape on both. I seem to remember that we had a few machines that ran Windows on top of CP/M successor Dr DOS. Nothing ever seemed to work right for them, especially the Internets. So… Where am I going with this episode? Windows 3 set Microsoft up to finally destroy CP/M, protect their market share from Microsoft and effectively take over the operating system, allowing them to focus on adjacencies like Internet and productivity tools. This ultimately made Bill Gates the richest man in business and set up a massive ride in personal computing. But by the time Windows 95 was announced, enough demand had been generated to sell 40 million copies. Compaq, Dell, Gateway, HP, and many others had cannibalized the IBM desktop business. Intel had AMD nipping at their heels. Mother board, power supply, and other components had become commodities. But somehow, Microsoft had gone from being the cutesy little maker of BASIC to owning the market share for Operating systems with NT, Windows 95, 98, Millenium, 2000, XP, 7, 8, 10, and it wasn’t until Google made Android and ChromeOS. They did it, not because they were technologically the best solution available. Although arguably the APIs in early Windows were better than any other available solution. And developing Windows NT alongside 95 and on once they saw there would be a need for a future OS was a master-stroke. There was a lot of subterfuge and guile. And there were a lot of people burned during the development but there’s a distinct chance that the dominance of a single operating system really gave the humans the ability to focus on a single OS to care about and an explosion in the number of software titles. Once that became a problem, and was stifling innovation, Steve Jobs was back at Apple, Android was on the rise, and Linux was always an alternative for the hacker-types and given a good market potential it’s likely that someone could have built a great windowing system on top of it. Oh wait, they did. Many times. So whether we’re Apple die-hards, Linux blow-hards, crusty old Unix grey beards, or maybe hanging on to our silly CP/M machines to write scripts on, we still owe Microsoft a big thanks. Without their innovations the business world might have been fragmented so much on the operating system side that we wouldn’t have gotten the productivity levels we needed out of apps. And so Windows 95 replaced Windows 3, and Windows 3 rode off into the sunset. But not before leaving behind a legacy of the first truly dominant OS. Thanks for everything, Microsoft, the good and the bad. And thanks to you, sweet listeners. It’s been a blast. You’re the best. Unlike Windows 1. Till next time, have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at one of the more underwhelming operating systems released: Windows 1.0. Doug Englebart released the NLS, or oN-Line System in 1968. It was expensive to build, practically impossible to replicate, and was only made possible by NASA and ARPA grants. But it introduced the world to the computer science research community to what would be modern video monitors, windowing systems, hypertext, and the mouse. Modern iterations of these are still with us today, as is a much more matured desktop metaphor. Some of his research team ended up at Xerox PARC and the Xerox Alto was released in 1973, building on many of the concepts and continuing to improve upon them. They sold about 2,000 Altos for around $32,000. As the components came down in price, Xerox tried to go a bit more mass market with the Xerox Star in 1981. They sold about 25,000 for about half the price. The windowing graphics got better, the number of users were growing, the number of developers were growing, and new options for components were showing up all over the place. Given that Xerox was a printing company, the desktop metaphor continued to evolve. Apple released the Lisa in 1983. They sold 10,000 for about $10,000. Again, the windowing system and desktop metaphor continued on and Apple quickly released the iconic Mac shortly thereafter, introducing much better windowing and a fully matured desktop metaphor, becoming the first computer considered mass market that was shipped with a graphical user interface. It was revolutionary and they sold 280,000 in the first year. The proliferation of computers in our daily lives and the impact on the economy was ready for the j-curve. And while IBM had shown up to compete in the PC market, they had just been leapfrogged by Apple. Jobs would be forced out of Apple the following year, though. By 1985, Microsoft had been making software for a long time. They had started out with BASIC for the Altair and had diversified, bringing BASIC to the Mac and releasing a DOS that could run on a number of platforms. And like many of those early software companies, it could have ended there. In a masterful stroke of business, Bill Gates ended up with their software on the IBM PCs that Apple had just basically made antiques - and they’d made plenty of cash off of doing so. But then Gates sees Visi On at COMDEX and it’s not surprise that the Microsoft version of a graphical user interface would look a bit like Visi, a bit like what Microsoft had seen from Xerox PARC on a visit in 1983, and of course, with elements that were brought in from the excellent work the original Mac team had made. And of course, not to take anything away from early Microsoft developers, they added many of their own innovations as well. Ultimately though, it was a 16-bit shell that allowed for multi-tasking and sat on top of the Microsoft DOS. Something that would continue on until the NT lineage of operating systems fully supplanted the original Windows line, which ended with Millineum Edition. Windows 1.0 was definitely a first try. IBM TopView had shipped that year as well. I’ve always considered it more of a windowing system, but it allowed multitasking and was object-oriented. It really looked more like a DOS menu system. But the Graphics Environment Manager or GEM had direct connections to Xerox PARC through Lee Lorenzen. It’s hard to imagine but at the time CP/M had been the dominant operating system and so GEM could sit on top of it or MS-DOS and was mostly found on Atari computers. That first public release was actually 1.01 and 1.02 would come 6 months later, adding internationalization with 1.03 continuing that trend. 1.04 would come in 1987 adding support for Via graphics and a PS/2 mouse. Windows 1 came with many of the same programs other vendors supplied, including a calculator, a clipboard viewer, a calendar, a pad for writing that still exists called Notepad, a painting tool, and a game that went by its original name of Reversi, but which we now call Othello. One important concept is that Windows was object-oriented. As with any large software project, it wouldn’t have been able to last as long as it did if it hadn’t of been. One simplistic explanation for this paradigm is that it had an API and there was a front-end that talked to the kernel through those APIs. Microsoft hadn’t been first to the party and when they got to the party they certainly weren’t the prettiest. But because the Mac OS wasn’t just a front-end that made calls to the back-end, Apple would be slow to add multi-tasking support, which came in their OS 5, in 1987. And they would be slow to adopt new technology thereafter, having to bring Steve Jobs back to Apple because they had no operating system of the future, after failed projects to build one. Windows 1.0 had executable files (or exe files) that could only be run in the Windowing system. It had virtual memory. It had device drivers so developers could write and compile binary programs that could communicate with the OS APIs, including with device drivers. One big difference - Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld spent a lot of time on frame buffers and moving pixels so they could have overlapping windows. The way Windows handled how a window appeared were in .ini (pronounced like any) files and that kind of thing couldn’t be done in a window manager without clipping, or leaving artifacts behind. And so it was that, by the time I was in college, I was taught by a professor that Microsoft had stolen the GUI concept from Apple. But it was an evolution. Sure, Apple took it to the masses but before that, Xerox had borrowed parts from NLS and NLS had borrowed pointing devices from Whirlwind. And between Xerox and Microsoft, there had been IBM and GEM. Each evolved and added their own innovations. In fact, many of the actual developers hopped from company to company, spreading ideas and philosophies as they went. But Windows had shipped. And when Jobs called Bill Gates down to Cupertino, shouting that Gates had ripped off Apple, Gates responded with one of my favorite quotes in the history of computing: "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." The thing I’ve always thought was missing from that Bill Gates quote is that Xerox had a rich neighbor they stole the TV from first, called ARPA. And the US Government was cool with it - one of the main drivers of decades of crazy levels of prosperity filling their coffers with tax revenues. And so, the next version of Windows, Windows 2.0 would come in 1987. But Windows 1.0 would be supported by Microsoft for 16 years. No other operating system has been officially supported for so long. And by 1988 it was clear that Microsoft was going to win this fight. Apple filed a lawsuit claiming that Microsoft had borrowed a bit too much of their GUI. Apple had licensed some of the GUI elements to Microsoft and Apple identified over 200 things, some big, like title bars, that made up a copyrightable work. That desktop metaphor that Susan Kare and others on the original Mac team had painstakingly developed. Well, turns out that they live on in every OS because Judge Vaughn Walker on the Ninth Circuit threw out the lawsuit. And Microsoft would end up releasing Windows 3 in 1990, shipping on practically every PC built since. And so I’ll leave this story here. But we’ll do a dedicated episode for Windows 3 because it was that important. Thank you to all of the innovators who brought these tools to market and ultimately made our lives better. Each left their mark with increasingly small and useful enhancements to the original. We owe them so much no matter the platform we prefer. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in for this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to review a fantastic little book, called “The Monk and The Riddle” by Virtual CEO Randy Kommisar Like a lot of authors, I’m a reader. There have always been a lot of technical books in my house. In fact I had to downsize at some point because they were getting out of control. So I made a dedicated Instagram account called deadtechbooks to post photos of books. Separation anxiety is for reals. But I’ve also read a lot of books about startups and venture capital. And it never ceases to amaze me just how big a jerk most of the authors are. There are the super jerks who just come right out with it and let the reader know they invested in Google or Amazon and have billions to throw away. And that they’re so god-like that should you pitch to them, you’ll be struck down by some kind of Jesus fire. You’re left wondering why they bothered to write a book. But then you realize it’s an elitist business card. Then there are the overly eloquent nerdy jerks who let the reader know how rich they are by hiring a ghostwriter with such great prose that the biography pretending to be an autobiography would likely be taught in literature courses along with their fellow literary greats had they not chased a big old vapid paycheck. you can feel the disdain they have for the giant douchenozzle paying their check oozing between the book bindings. You can empathize with the ghostwriter, given the landmass of ego they distilled into perfectly digestible 7th grade prose. Nerdy founders who go down this route likely need to partake in the spirits just as badly given many will never have a good enough idea to found another company that actually bothers to launch a product. Then there’s the opposite; the autobiography masquerading as a biography. You can feel the subject become the author. Sometimes they commission the book. Other times the author becomes enamored with the subject of the book and all objectivity is lost. There may be thinly veiled attempts but founders, investors - they can be seductive to a storyteller. Whether through accomplishments or wealth. Don’t get me wrong, love stories are great; they just belong in the romance section of the bookstore. Then there are the startup guides. Be very careful because one size doesn’t fit all. Saying you have to do things using a formula is as dangerous as it is delusional. There are no best practices when starting a company, only worst practices. Some use such arcane tactics that many a buyer for a new startup might consider them offensive. To be clear though writing potential customers hand-written thank you cards is quaint and totally legit. Then there’s the books that focus on the facts. But without opinion or feelings they read more like code. The worst of the bunch are the humble-brags. These self-defacing tomes make sure you know just how smart the author is. Their wealth or brilliant ideas tell you exactly what you need to know. Or they would if the author didn’t tell you it was just a matter of timing, right before taking you through all of their business master strokes in a wild stimulation of... themselves. I’ve learned to read between the archetypes. Sometimes I get lost and later realize what happened but I frequently start a book just a bit leary. Randy Komisar is none of these. He began his professional life as a lawyer and then worked on the deal that put Pixar in the hands of Steve Jobs. From there, he landed at Apple and worked to license the Mac operating system. When that fell through he ended up co-founding Claris with Bill Campbell. He tells the reader some of his failures along the way, but never with an air of the humble-brag. He speaks of Campbell and others with reverence. Not as heroes but as mentors; not with adoration but with warmth. He then goes through how he landed in what we now call venture capital. He addresses his good fortunes and privilege and mixes pronouns in a way that doesn’t feel the least bit contrived. He mentions his time and involvement in the early days of webtv and TiVo in the book and explains the differences between a few types of startups in a way that’s easy to understand. Komisar warns against being bigger, faster and cheaper while telling the reader that sometimes that’s actually the right way to launch a company. He doesn’t bother to tell the reader too much of his own story until pretty late in the book. Instead he focuses on a startup who is pitching him. He explores motivations and the type that align to his world view. He does so with a genuine desire to help a person he doesn’t initially like. Why? Because he sees something in the big idea the guy has. But through the book the young founder pivots into a content portal over time with no clear route to make money but instead a focus helping people. Throughout the journey he drops insights that can help a reader navigate that world but not overtly. By the end you’re left wondering where the journey has taken you, and you almost forgot about where it began. The book opens with a story of meeting the Dalai Lama. It’s not a bragadochio opening. Instead It’s a “this isn’t going to be your typical startup book” opening. By the end you’ve almost forgotten about where the book began. The monk had asked the author about why people aren’t more compassionate to one another. By the time the book is done the author has become the monk and helped the startup reorient around compassion. And the author has shown compassion to the young founders by looking past their initial presentations full of charts and graphs and helping them recapture the why behind their idea, moving away from big, fast and cheap. So next time you’re out trying to sell your ideas, dig below the surface. Revisit your passion. Let your motivation show and you just might find a champion who can help you find a path to something that you maybe didn’t see in your own journey. This book won’t be for everyone. But I’m lucky it landed in my lap at a time when I was able to accept the message. Just as I’m lucky you chose to listen to this episode of the history of computing podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Have a great day!

Picture this. It’s 1983. The International Design Conference in Aspen has a special speaker: Steve Jobs from Apple. He’s giving a talk called “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be.” He has a scraggly beard and really, really wants to recruit some industrial designers. In this talk, he talked about software. He talked about dealers. After watching the rise of small computer stores across the country and seeing them selling, and frequently helping people pirate, apps for their iconic Apple II, Steve Jobs predicts that the dealers were adept at selling computers, but not software. There weren’t categories of software yet. But there were radio stations and television programs. And there were record stores. And he predicted we would transmit software electronically over the phone line. And that we’d pay for it with a credit card if we liked using it. If you haven’t listened to the talk, it’s fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWwLJ_6BuJA In that talk, he parlayed Alan Kay’s research into the DynaBook while he was at Xerox PARC to talk about what would later be called tablet computers and ebooks. Jobs thought Apple would do so in the 80s. And they did dabble with the Newton MessagePad in 1993, so he wasn’t too far off. I guess the writers from Inspector Gadget were tuned into the same frequency as they gave Penny a book computer in 1983. Watching her use it with her watch changed my life. Or maybe they’d used GameLine, a service that let Atari 2600 owners rent video games using a cartridge with a phone connection. Either way, it took awhile, but Jobs would eventually ship the both the App Store and the iPad to the masses. He alluded to the rise of the local area network, email, the importance of design in computers, voice recognition, maps on devices (which came true with Google and then Apple Maps), maps with photos, DVDs (which he called video disks), the rise of object-oriented programming, and the ability to communicate with a portable device with a radio link. So flash forward to 1993. 10 years after that brilliant speech. Jobs is shown the Electronic AppWrapper at NextWORLD, built by Paget Press. Similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, EAW had begun life as a paper catalog of all software available for the NeXT computers but evolved into a CD-based tool and could later transmit software over the Internet. Social, legal, and logistical issues needed to be worked out. They built digital rights management. They would win the Content and Information Best of Breed award and there are even developers from that era still designing software in the modern era. That same year, we got Debian package managers and rpm. Most of this software was free and open source, but suddenly you could build a binary package and call it. By 1995 we had pan, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. An important repository for anyone that’s worked with Linux. 1998 saw the rise of apt-get. But it was 10 years after Jobs saw the Electronic AppWrapper and 20 years after he had publicly discussed what we now call an App Store that Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, so people could buy songs to transfer from their Mac to their iPod, which had been released in 2001. Suddenly you could buy music like you used to in a record store, but on the Internet. Now, the first online repository of songs you could download had come about back in 93 and the first store to sell songs had come along in 98 - selling MP3 files. But the iTunes Store was primarily to facilitate those objects going to a mobile device. And so 2007 comes along and Jobs announces the first iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference . A year later, Apple would release the App Store, the day before the iPhone 3G dropped, bringing apps to phones wirelessly in 2008, 25 years after Jobs had predicted it in 1983. It began with 500 apps. A few months later the Google Play store would ship as well, although it was originally called the Android Market. It’s been a meteoric rise. 10 years later, in 2018, app revenue on the iOS App Store would hit 46.6 billion dollars. And revenue on the Google Play store would hit 24.8 billion with a combined haul between $71 billion and 101 billion according to where you look. And in 2019 we saw a continued 2 digit rise in revenues, likely topping $120 billion dollars. And a 3 digit rise in China. The global spend is expected to double by 2023, with Africa and South America expected to see a 400% rise in sales in that same time frame. There used to be shelves of software in boxes at places like Circuit City and Best Buy. The first piece of software I ever bought was Civilization. Those boxes at big box stores are mostly gone now. Kinda’ like how I bought Civilization on the App Store and have never looked back. App developers used to sell a copy of a game, just like that purchase. But game makers don’t just make money off of purchases any more. Now they make money off of in-app advertising and in-app purchases, many of which are for subscriptions. You can even buy a subscription for streaming media to your devices, obviating the need for buying music and sometimes video content. Everyone seems to be chasing that sweet, sweet monthly recurring revenue now. As with selling devices, Apple sells less but makes much, much more. Software development started democratically, with anyone that could learn a little BASIC, being able to write a tool or game that could make them millions. That dropped for awhile as software distribution channels matured but was again democratized with the release of the App Store. Those developers have received Operating systems, once distributed on floppies, have even moved over to the App Store - and with Apple and Google, the net result is that they’re now free. And you can even buy physical things using in-app purchases, Apple Pay through an Apple credit card, and digital currency, closing the loop and fully obfuscating the virtual and the physical. And today any company looking to become a standard, or what we like to call in software, a platform, will have an App Store. Most follow the same type of release strategy. They begin with a catalog, move to facilitating the transactions, add a fee to do so, and ultimately facilitate subscription services. If a strategy aint broke, don’t fix it. The innovations are countless. Amazon builds services for app developers and sells them a tie to wear at their pitches to angels and VCs. Since 1983, the economy has moved on from paying cash for a box of software. And we’re able to conceptualize disrupting just about anything thanks to the innovations that sprang forth in that time where those early PCs were transitioning into the PC revolution. Maybe it was inevitable without Steve Jobs right in the thick of it. Technological determinism is impossible to quantify. Either way, app stores and the resultant business models have made our lives better. And for that we owe Apple and all of the other organizations and individuals that helped make them happen, our gratitude. Just as I owe you mine for tuning in, to yet another episode, of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today we’re going to look at what it really means to be a standard on the Internet and the IETF, the governing body that sets those standards. 

When you open a web browser and visit a page on the Internet, there are rules that govern how that page is interpreted. When traffic sent from your computer over the Internet gets broken into packets and encapsulated, other brands of devices can interpret the traffic and react, provided that the device is compliant in how it handles the protocol being used. Those rules are set in what are known as RFCs. It’s a wild concept. You write rules down and then everyone follows them. Well, in theory. It doesn’t always work out that way but by and large the industry that sprang up around the Internet has been pretty good at following the guidelines defined in RFCs. 

The Requests for Comments gives the Internet industry an opportunity to collaborate in a non-competitive environment. Us engineers often compete on engineering topics like what’s more efficient or stable and so we’re just as likely to disagree with people at your own organization as we are to disagree with people at another company. But if we can all meet and hash out our differences, we’re able to get emerging or maturing technology standards defined in great detail, leaving as small a room for error in implementing the tech as possible. This standardization process can be lengthy and slows down innovation, but it ends up creating more innovation and adoption once processes and technologies become standardized. 

The concept of standardizing advancements in technologies is nothing new. Alexander Graham Bell saw this when he started The American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1884 to help standardize the new electrical inventions coming out of Bell labs and others. That would merge with the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1963 and now boasts half a million members spread throughout nearly every company in the world. And the International Organization for Standardization was founded in 1947. It was as a merger of sorts between the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations, which had been founded in 1928 and the newly formed United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee. Based in Geneva, they’ve now set over 20,000 standards across a number of industries.

I’ll over-simplify this next piece and revisit it in a dedicated episode. The Internet began life as a number of US government funded research projects inspired by JCR Licklider around 1962, out of ARPAs Information Processing Techniques Office, or IPTO. The packet switching network would evolve into ARPANET based on a number of projects he and his successor Bob Taylor at IPTO would fund straight out of the pentagon. It took a few years, but eventually they brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 they’d awarded an RFQ to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) to build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs, to connect a number of sites and route traffic. The first one went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. 

Given that UCLA was the first site to come online, Steve Crocker started organizing notes about protocols in what they called RFCs, or Request for Comments. That series of notes would then be managed by Jon Postel until his death 28 years later. 

They were also funding a number of projects to build tools to enable the sharing of data, like file sharing and by 1971 we also had email. Bob Kahn was brought in, in 1972, and he would team up with Vinton Cerf from Stanford who came up with encapsulation and so they would define TCP/IP. By 1976, ARPA became DARPA and by 1982, TCP/IP became the standard for the US DOD and in 1983, ARPANET moved over to TCP/IP.  NSFNet would be launched by the National Science Foundation in 1986.

And so it was in 1986 when The Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, was formed to do something similar to what the IEEE and ISO had done before them. By now, the inventors, coders, engineers, computer scientists, and thinkers had seen other standards organizations - they were able to take much of what worked and what didn’t, and they were able to start defining standards. 

They wanted an open architecture. The first meeting was attended by 21 researchers who were all funded by the US government. By the fourth meeting later that year they were inviting people from outside the hollowed halls of the research community. And it grew, with 4 meetings a year that continue on to today, open to anyone.

Because of the rigor practiced by Postel and early Internet pioneers, you can still read those notes from the working groups and RFCs from the 60s, 70s, and on. The RFCs were funded by DARPA grants until 1998 and then moved to the Internet Society, who runs the IETF and the RFCs are discussed and sometimes ratified at those IETF meetings. You can dig into those RFCs and find the origins and specs for NTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, CardDAV and pretty much anything you can think of that’s become an Internet Standard. A lot of companies claim to the “the” standard in something. And if they wrote the RFC, I might agree with them. 

At those first dozen IETF meetings, we got up to about 120 people showing up. It grew with the advancements in routing, application protocols, other networks, file standards, peaking in Y2K with  2,810 attendees. Now, it averages around 1,200. It’s also now split into a number of working groups with steering committees, While the IETF was initially funded by the US government, it’s now funded by the Public Interest Registry, or PIR, which was sold to Ethos Capital in November of 2019. 

Here’s the thing about the Internet Society and the IETF. They’re mostly researchers. They have stayed true to the mission since they took over from Pentagon, a de-centralized Internet. The IETF is full of super-smart people who are always trying to be independent and non-partisan. That independence and non-partisanship is the true Internet, the reason that we can type www.google.com and have a page load, and work, no matter the browser. The reason mail can flow if you know an email address. The reason the Internet continues to grow and prosper and for better or worse, take over our lives. The RFCs they maintain, the standards they set, and everything else they do is not easy work. They iterate and often don’t get credit individually for their work other than a first initial and a last name as the authors of papers. 

And so thank you to the IETF and the men and women who put themselves out there through the lens of the standards they write. Without you, none of this would work nearly as well as it all does. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in for this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you.