Hi Susan,

But the two groups, the Engineers and the Telcos, have common ground: the protocols are expected to change. They can change and we'll still have "the internet".

So there were no engineers at the Telcos? As others may have pointed out, the conceptualizations here don't comport with reality. As someone who was very involved in the multiple factions at the time, the history doesn't lend itself to a bipolar view of the world of internetworking. Unix was actually developed at AT&T Bell Labs. In the mid-70s, several groups were working on the host-to-host protocol problem - which TCP-IP solved, but so did others. It was IFIP, then CCITT, that created and pursued domain and object name systems. In the early 80s, the ITU-ISO universe was competing with DARPA and private network systems vendors for interconnecting the machines of the world. Actually, the challenge wasn't so much the machines as the applications running on those machines. I always liked John Quarterman's concept of "the Matrix" the best, but that term got hijacked by the movie folks.