ROBINSON@BITNIC.BITNET (Andrew T. Robinson) (02/06/90)
Michael, There is a distinction between standards and specifications: Specifications that are well designed can live through one or more standards. Standards are required to get real work done, but if you truly work from the top down your specification will be transportable between protocols. The reason it's so hard to come up with good specs is because most of us know too much. We base our ideas of how things should be done on the way we know they are done, which is limiting in and of itself. That is where the discipline part of this process comes in: People doing the specification have to divorce themselves from any preconceptions about how the work will be done, and concentrate on what work should be done in the first place. One of the best ways I've seen to accomplish this is to poll people who ARE ignorant of the innards of the various protocols and established tools and ask what they expect from the network. The days of a highly technical group of people dictating how software development should proceed are coming to an end. If BITNET is going to suceed we have to manage this network to the benefit of the end user who doesn't know or care about NJE, TCP/IP, RFC822, or x.400. Those same users will take their business elsewhere if we can't extract ourselves from the same mire. Yes, I'm taking an extreme viewpoint here. I am fully aware that tradeoffs are inevitable. However, as I said before it is important to approach future development efforts with the idea of making the perfect networking world, even if we know we can't acheive that goal (yet :-). Andy
SCHAFER@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU (Richard A. Schafer) (02/09/90)
On Mon, 5 Feb 90 18:28:01 EST Andrew T. Robinson said: >One of the best ways I've seen to accomplish this is to poll people who ARE >ignorant of the innards of the various protocols and established tools and >ask what they expect from the network. The days of a highly technical group >of people dictating how software development should proceed are coming to >an end. If BITNET is going to suceed we have to manage this network to the >benefit of the end user who doesn't know or care about NJE, TCP/IP, RFC822, >or x.400. Those same users will take their business elsewhere if we can't >extract ourselves from the same mire. Yes, but. I agree that software development needs to have the user who doesn't care about the technical underpinnings ("I'm a doctor, not a computer scientist"), but I remain unconvinced that BITNET doesn't need some sort of technical group to help guide the development of the network services. I have long felt that there was a distinct need for some sort of technical advisory/steering committee (for lack of a better name) to give some guidance to the board. BITNIC has claimed (rightly) for years that they were both incapable of doing this and that it wasn't their job as defined by the board to do this. Note carefully: I'm *not* making comments about the present staff's abilities. Even if the BITNIC staff *is* capable of doing technical direction for the network, I remain unconvinced that such a dependence on the central staff *without* guidance from the technical resources that exist around the network would be a mistake. As someone (David Lippke?) recently said, part of what makes BITNET what it is is support from volunteers (both as individuals and as an institution) for the good of the network of the whole, without always worrying about whether their particular environment was going to benefit the most from their participation. The success of the network so far in fact validates Andy's statement about the end user "who doesn't know or care about NJE, TCP/IP, RFC822, or x.400." In fact, there are an awful lot of users of BITNET today that fit that description, and those users have been guided by the technical volunteers who have written software (which they use themselves, always a good clue to how good something is) which provides an environment which, while not perfect, has helped an awful lot of unknowledgeable users do an awful lot of good networking. Our problem now is how to keep the development of this BITNET environment going, now that the network has gotten so big that I doubt anyone has a real conception of the topology any longer. One of the things that we're going to have to provide is better direction from the center without quenching the development of interesting things from the fringes, and I think that calls for more technical direction than a board member technical committee can hope to accomplish. Richard
CONKLIN@BITNIC.BITNET (Jim Conklin) (02/13/90)
Richard Schafer (and others) have commented on the need for technical
guidance for CREN and BITNET. You'll be pleased (I believe) to know that
the Board's Technical Committee is investigating the idea of forming
technical working groups, with Board and non-Board participants, the
latter coming from the wealth of network volunteers, to address technical
issues and advise the Board. I anticipate that you'll be hearing more about
this from the Board in the coming months.
Jim