New Postel Visiting Scholar Will Network the Past

September 01, 2004 —

Postel Center Visiting Scholar Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan holds a volume of original Internet RFCs

Internet historian Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, has been appointed Visiting Scholar at the Postel Center, Center Director Joseph D. Touch has announced.
 
The Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC-ISI) established the center to memorialize the life-long accomplishments of Internet pioneer Jonathan B. Postel and to encourage visionary research in networking and communications for the Internet community.

Edmondson-Yurkanan will investigate the ARPAnet and Internet design histories by exploring the Postel Center Archives as well as by conducting interviews with Internet pioneers, and will augment the Postel Center website to provide the network community with access to early ARPAnet and Internet design documents.

The advisory board for the Postel Center elected Edmondson-Yurkanan based on her extensive development of Internet History resources, including coordinating 19 presenters and an accompanying 650-page notebook for a landmark tutorial on Internet History at ACM Sigcomm 1999, as well as creating the digital network history archive at The University of Texas at Austin.

The archive contains key network design documents written as early as the mid -1960s.

She has also created the Technical History of NetworK Protocols project (i.e. “THINK” Protocols), a 4-year effort to investigate and archive numerous related stories of Internet design, including the UK NPL Network Architecture (by Davies et al), ARPAnet (Telnet, FTP, Network Mail, RJE, routing, Host-Host, IMP-IMP), and the French Cyclades network.