[iDC] history of protocols

[Simon Biggs]

I'd be looking at people working at places like the National Physical Laboratories in the UK and the ARPA programme in the States. This is where packet switching was developed. TCP/IP, which was the original protocol for computer networking and which has the term protocol in it, was developed by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford in the early 70's. I don't think there's a precise date for when it was launched.

best

Simon

 
On 29 Jun 2013, at 11:12, Claus Pias <claus.pias at univie.ac.at> wrote:

> 
> Dear all, 
> 
> I am curious if anyone did some historical research on WHY protocols were called "protocols". From the existing literature and old RFC's I vaguely know WHEN transmission protocols emerged and how the structure of packages was defined in the times of early online-systems. There are also a few texts on the history of protocol engineering (i.e. Computer Networks 54(2010) 3197-3209). But as far as I see, no one yet asked the questions why the term "protocol" was chosen. 
> 
> The background is that I am working on medieval and early modern documents (deeds) whose structure is called "protocol" in diplomatics (in the sense of Mabillon). In fact, the structure of digital data packages very much resembles the structure of deeds, that follow a highly formalized framework of invocatio, intitulatio, inscriptio, narratio, sanctio, corroboratio, eschatocoll  (to use the latin rhetorical terms) that are equivalent to time stamp, sender, receiver, message, 'checksum' or authentifier etc. etc. Questions of security of transmission were crucial for that kind of structure.  
> 
> Was anyone aware of this historical notion of "protocol" when the term was introduced to computer networks in the 1960's?
> 
> My apologies for such an esoteric question -- it's my first post here.
> 
> Best wishes, 
> Claus
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
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> 
> --
> Claus Pias
> Leuphana University Lüneburg, Wallstr. 1, 21335 Lüneburg / Germany
> Professor for History and Epistemology of Media (ICAM)
> Director, Institute for Advanced Study in Media-Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS)
> 
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Simon Biggs
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