List of frames generated by Internet Systematics

Expecting to get a picture of Net evolution from Internet Systematics, I jump right away to the happy-end and present the list of frames that constitute the picture. For each one of the frames I will post an essay, later on, explaining its importance in my analysis. The sequence of frames explains technological evolution at macro scale. One of my initial presentation in 1999 was titled 'Internet under the macroscope', it is in Greek text at the moment but the included diagrams show the main features of Internet Systematics.

There is also intra-frame evolution as in the case of the global telecom network with major changes appearing between decades. Strowger Switch (1950s), MPLS/Fiber Optics (2000) both these major advances concern the automation of the telecom network by replacing the corresponding manual procedures associated with operation and maintainance.



The Strowger Switch
a more humble task compared to the Coloseus of Bletchley Park but both were driven by the same logic, to automate a manual procedure which triggered tremendous innovation forces

Arpanet Packet Switching
Packet switching is the single technological development which accounts

Flag Day 1-1-1983: First and Last manual step (NCP to TCP transition)
Discovering the statement by John Postel as this being the first and last manual act hunted my imagination about his sense of the way Internet was heading to. There the meaning of the phrase 'internet scale' broke clear for me for the first time.



DNS: the automation of the naming process = manual distribution and update of the HOSTS.TXT file
Question : What is the Domain Name System ?
Answer: Automation of a manul (distributed) procedure

Question : What is Automation ?
Answer: The Turing Machine

Question : Can I map onto this concept some aspect of the Computer Network ?
Answer: Difficult ....

Question : To what did The Turing Machine evolve to ?
Answer: The Von Newman architecture (machine)

Question : Can I map onto this concept some aspect of the Computer Network ?
Answer: The total collection of the BIND processors is the virtual CPU. The Zone files is the virtual MEMORY. The virtual BUS is the Net without automatic naming. The I/O to this virtual computer is the RESOLVE DNS client programs.

Autonomous System routing (a series of advances from manual routing )
I read "There is manual routing table maintainance", somewhere (COMER ?) trying to learn how Internet works. Note that at the time did not have the expererience of EBONE and RIPE where I learned about the need to advance the routing technology to care for treating the EBONE core nodes as being on the same LAN.

The MIME multimedia transformation of the Messaging component
MIME is so important that the same mechanism was incorporated by WWW technology.
Its innovator N.S. Borenstein had a bunch of great ideas like 'computational email' which influence my thinking set off by the trade mark 'the Net is the computer'.

The Archie system, the first search engine
while running two student projects titled 'info-hunt' and 'pythia' respectively
to locate, collect and then publish thematic resources on the Internet in 1990 we were overtaken by the Archie system which indexed anonymous ftp sites. It did automatically what we were doing manually and our on-line service 'pythia' never reached the size of Arc hie's indices. But none the less here lies our eureka moments where understanding of net-automation was established.


The WWW series of advances leading to the Semantic Web
It was 1989 that as a member of the WG I was exposed to T.B.Lee's web vision
after some time and whike NSFNET stats were pointing at Gopher traffic with exponential growth I risked my first prediction ' WWW is more scalable system because it has the URL automation (HTML) which is based on DNS automation, hence an overall more powerful system than the manually operated Gopher-root server in Sweden'.



The CIDR change routing engine on flight
Following IETF's discussions on the big-internet List got familiar with the issues such as scaling facing the Net at the time. There I learned about a plan which incorporated the greatest transitional power.

The Automation of the telecom network
Larry Roberts' writings and ideas about the Timeline of Innovations:

Gutenburg's Press > Photography > Radio > TV > Computer > ARPANET

helped my confidence that 'evolution' is a major issue on the road to understanding Internet, I just had to 'decode'its mechanism.

In a white paper about the status of Internet routing technology he refers to 'automating the telecom network' as being the current issue.