Subject: An important day for the IETF

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:14:48 +0100

Greetings,

The first IETF meeting took place 20 years ago today,
on January 16th, 1986, in San Diego, California. There were
21 attendees and Mike Corrigan was in the chair.

The IETF has come a long way since then. We'll celebrate
this in fine style during the 65th IETF meeting in
Dallas, Texas from March 19 to 24, 2006.

    Brian Carpenter
    IETF Chair No. 6

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:30:13 +0100

Happy birthday, IETF!

And remember to raise an extra toast to Mike St. Johns, who should be 
coming to his 63rd or so IETF meeting in Dallas..... for some of us, this 
has gotten to be a habit!

Wonder how many of the original 21 are still around????

             Harald, attendee since #22 (but missed #29)

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From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 16:30:13 +0100

>Happy birthday, IETF!

Dear Harald,
you are right, happy birthday! An impressive continuity we should 
strive to protect. In avoiding the status quo that some stakeholders 
may favor, and areas outside of network engineering (such as 
linguistic and country political definition :-)).

>Harald, attendee since #22 (but missed #29)

Impressive. My own agenda that sad fortnight might help better 
understand the past, present and future of the network.

- on 12-15 January 1986 I attended the eight Telecommunications 
Council Eighth Annual Conference at he Hawaiian Regent Hotel in 
Honolulu. The theme was  "Evolution of the Digital Pacific". Audience 
was probably 200 to 300 people. I had a lunch there with two lady 
training consultant for the US Army TV network, to discuss how to 
support their program on packet switch network, with Compression Lab tools.
- on the 16 I had a diner at the Bonaventure (LA) with Father Bourret 
(http://www.kuangchi.com/english/history.htm). On the agenda: packet 
switching in TW and a Vatican State International Packet Switch Gateway
- then I brought international data services experience in meetings 
with an LA based Bank and for a complete turn-key online banking 
service to a group NY banks. Multi-currency accounts, ATM 
connections. I explained our experience with air-line reservation 
services for most of the major airlines, hotels chains and 
rent-a-cars, and how it worked at regular Travel Agents using a 
service you would call a smart OPES today.
- met with Mobil Oil international communications manager (NY) and 
routine meetings with the International Carriers. I was in Washington 
on the 28th.

We used to refer to ARPANET as the "grand father" :-). Minitel users 
were probably already 3 millions in France, plus Prestel in UK, plus 
Germany, etc.. Over these 20 years since these Tymnet times, OSI, 
then the Internet made us to step from 7+ to 70+ to 700+ millions of 
active users worldwide.

But you may understand why I feel the architectural evolution is 
sometimes dismaying and why constraints and rigidity cannot bring 
innovation and expansion. We need now another technology leap frog 
towards the 7+ billions users.

Only a multilingual, multinational, multilateral, multitechnology, 
multiservice continuity architecture can deliver now.
Good luck to everyone for the next decade which will be decisive.

I do hope you will permit it to be in cooperation with the IGF,. That 
we can proceed fast on a stable, reasonable and acceptable equal 
opportunity but competitive fair basis. As we all agreed in Tunis.
jfc