Exploring the Internet

I was writing a book and needed a plot, so found myself communing with the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, the top bureaucrat of the venerable multi-lateral treaty organization that published the Blue Book, the bible of telecommunications standards containing such hits as the V-series modems, ISDN, and (of course) SS7, X.400, and the emerging next-generation protocol suite they were espousing with rest of the standards bureaucracy. Every day of the year, 9 different standards committees were meeting they proudly informed me.

Exploring the Internet—a sequential series of blog entries complete with geolocation and a handy temporal navigation mechanism—tells the story of how the Blue Book was appropriated by a bunch of open source zealots and become a technology cause celebre. The book was originally published by Prentice Hall and distributed as the “INTEROP Book.” When the long tail diminished to levels too small to measure, the copyright reverted back to the author, who posted the book back on the net.

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