Category: history

Jan 03

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

IMG_3981This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web - and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!

Jan 29

Capturing My Own Memories Of The Internet’s History (and Pre-History)

449160366_memories_of_Internet_history

Last month I boosted a post on Mastodon where an early pioneer of networking relayed an amusing story about shutting down part of the ARPANET during a storm. After I did that, I was asked “@danyork Do you have a similar story from your archive?"

As I said in a reply,I have stories, but none quite so dramatic. Born in the late 1960s, I got involved with the Internet in the mid- to late 1980s at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).  I was not part of the late 1960s / early 1970s group that was involved with the ARPANET.

But I was at UNH before it became part of the Internet. We used BITNET and there was UUCP and USENET around. It was during my years there (1985-1989) that UNH became part of the Internet. I remember it being a Very Big Deal for those of us in the Computer Science program. Suddenly we would be getting “@unh.edu” email addresses and could connect to everyone else on this growing Internet.

And I was involved with BBSs and early “information services” that pre-dated all of that.

Ari’s point struck me, though. There are many of us who were around in those early days of networking who are walking around with many stories in our heads. Stories of the early days. Stories of how things were before we have the ubiquitous connectivity we have today in many parts of the world (but not all!).

There is value in capturing those stories. In part so that others can perhaps understand how things came to be the way they are. Or to learn how things once were. Or to perhaps spark memories in others. Or for the history fans to just read about what people remember.

There is value in writing or recording these stories NOW… before we forget more of them. Before people get too old to communicate - or before people die. Or, as someone I knew once wrote in the prologue of a memoire of his… “before our memories get so good that we start remembering things that never happened!”  😀

So I think I’ll start this for myself. Here. On this site in a new “History” category. I don’t know that any of my memories are particularly dramatic, and may only be of interest to myself and a few others. But I’ll start capturing them, probably in no particular order.

What about you? If you have stories of the early days of networking, can you share them somewhere?

Image: generated by DALL-E 2 with the prompt "memories of Internet history"

Oct 16

Introducing The DNSSEC History Project – Can You Help Complete The Story?

dnssec-history-projectCan you please help us fill in the blanks and complete the story of how DNSSEC came about?  Back in 2010 after the root of DNS was signed with DNSSEC, Steve Crocker sent out an email suggesting that the community should document the history of how DNSSEC came to be. As documented on the “About The DNSSEC History Project” page, Steve said in part:

It’s taken twenty years to reach this point, starting with Steve Bellovin’s demonstration of cache poisoning and the early proposals for adding cryptographic signatures to DNS.  A very large number of people, working in a large number of places, have contributed.  There were false starts, technical challenges, controversies and long hard marches.  The large bulk of this work is not very well documented, and there is no place to go to find anything approximating the full story.

To help, the Internet Society offered a wiki site to collect information and in 2010 a good amount of text was added. You can see the current version at:

https://wiki.tools.isoc.org/DNSSEC_History_Project

In the years since 2010 a bit more text was added and some editing occurred, but quite honestly a great amount of the story is still left untold. A couple of us would now like to go in and capture some of this history before it gets lost. But to do so…

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Some of us, such as myself, weren’t involved in the early days of DNSSEC and so we’re left to try to document the story based on what information we can find out there.  If you were involved, we’d love to have to you add in some text.  You can see the main page of the project where the information is being gathered.  We also split out the timeline into its own separate page:

https://wiki.tools.isoc.org/DNSSEC_History_Project/Timeline

Both of those pages need updates – and the main page needs, in my opinion, to be broken out into some more pages.

If you weren’t involved, but are interested in helping with the project, even just with the editing, we’d also love the assistance. The existing text could use some good editing, and this will continue to be a challenge as we add in more text from multiple people.  There are also any number of documents and events referenced in the main text for which links need to be found and inserted.  I’d also like to see the text cleaned up a bit to be more consistent across sections.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP, please send an email message to dnssechistory@isoc.org and we can get you set up with an account for editing the wiki pages. (We’d also ask you to please read the “About” page, too, to understand the project goals.)

The end goal is to chronicle the story of how DNSSEC came to be, in part so that the larger community can remember how it all came together, but also so that developers of future protocols can perhaps gain some insight into how best to develop their protocol from the story of DNSSEC.

Please do join with us and help complete the story!  (Thank you!)