Re: the ancient location question, was IETF-91 Question

On 8/13/14, 12:02 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
> Legend has it that there was once a meeting in Hawaii, and nothing got
> done.  The beach and all that.
Truth time:  I *did* get to the beach. 

For an hour out of a week.  And I didn't go to the luau.  I had an image
of spam, pig and poy and, well, no.  My mistake.

I  remember that there were both productive and unproductive
discussions, many of them heated like today.  One key discussion was
around what the recommended IGP should be.  The claim was made that DV
was fundamentally more CPU-efficient than Dijkstra, and well that
argument lost both on practical merits and the fact that a vendor with a
patent (its first) was pushing DV.  The word "open" was already subject
to abuse in that meeting.  The IETF shut down ODV as a result of the
patent concerns.  We weren't ready as an organization to deal with
licensing issues, declarations, etc.  Good thing, too.

Then there was also discussion around OSI transition, but I think there
was some disagreement about which way the transition was to go ;-)  I
distinctly remember Chuck Hedrick breaking up the room, asking in an OSI
world, what email address he should put on his business card.  Marshall
reported out on Quippu, which was this massive code base of X.500 that
he and Steve Kille had worked on.  Say what you will about the code, the
experience assuredly led to modern day ldap.  That was a big deal.

And then there was DHCP.  After an unbounded but fun discussion at the
previous meeting, this group made the critical decision to focus on
initializing the network layer as its primary task.  That was a huge
step forward and non-obvious at the time.  Good on Ralph for ordering
the chaos!

Bringing this back to what I wrote earlier, at the time there was very
much more of a feeling of the committee of the whole.  I think that's a
useful feature that we should strive for, because it allows for healthy
and broad architectural discussions.  I doubt we can do so on such a
small scale ever again, but this list can help.  Sorry if that sounds
meta, Mike.

I also remember that the cost of getting to HI from CA was considerably
cheaper than other locations at the time, but we did have a perception
problem.

Eliot

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