A picture about the evolution of the Net

Once the course was set to understand the Net, I made the working hypothesis that this is going to come about through examing the advances that have taken place and constructing their interpretation. At some point I came upon a broschure by Larry Roberts the Arpanet director. He had a timeline of advances starting from Guterburg's press, the photography, the radio and the TV and finally marking the computer and the computer network. From there my idea of "evolution" as reference model got a firm base.

Researching the topic of the Domain Name System, trying to understand what kind of computer artifact it is because first of all it was definately a point of major innovation of the Net. Marshal T. Rose made a reference to the "time honoured tradition of the host.txt file" thus registering it as a notable change.

So I raised the question "what is the DNS step ?" at the time where the so called DNS wars were on full swing and the name of Jon Postel, as the initial point of control of Internet names. Before I present this sub-system, I will remain for a while on some points of generality concerning the issue of forming a Net picture.

My investigation brought me to Postel's proposal to R.Khare to collect all technical data concerning the construction of Internet and see what it comes out of it. So the idea to form a picture of the Net is a legitimate one. So I moved ahead.

Next thing that I considered as a major problem was my position on this research course. Places such as the IETF and the WGs (later other means such W3C followed) are places where the resources of information are created. How was I to do something useful while not participating inside them ? The answer came from an email by F.Baker on the issue of "pseudo-area".