
The internet’s fifth man (2013) - davidwtbuxton
https://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590765-louis-pouzin-helped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its
======
battery_cowboy
This was one of the best articles I've read lately, it's not filled with empty
prose as is the style today, it's just filled with the history of a man who
was one of several who founded the internet and no more.

I agree with him that we need to keep iterating the foundations of the
internet and keep it open and protect against the corporate takeover. I'm not
sure how best to do that so I guess all I can do is work on my small areas of
influence at work and in my personal projects.

~~~
rmellow
> This was one of the best articles I've read lately, it's not filled with
> empty prose as is the style today.

Agreed! Why is that the style today?

I've heard it has something to do with SEO but I'm unsure how, or if there are
other reasons.

This trend makes my skimming habit so much worse, because it actually
justifies skipping ahead to meaningful words.

~~~
mannykannot
Writing concise prose is harder than the stream-of-consciousness style; while
the former may start off as the latter, it takes a lot of editing to hone it
into a sharp implement.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
> Writing concise prose is harder than the stream-of-consciousness style...

Totally true, but I think that's not what's happening. Yesterday an HN post
was made about this [https://lithub.com/the-wolves-of-stanislav-an-improbably-
tru...](https://lithub.com/the-wolves-of-stanislav-an-improbably-true-parable-
for-the-pandemic-age/) It's carefully written to be like that, it's verbose by
design, and I started skimming then closed it. I don't know why these
timewaster articles are produced either, but it's not accident or laziness.
Plenty irritating though.

~~~
mannykannot
Perhaps there's a generation that has seen little else, and takes this to be
the best or only way to write? Are we teaching people to write this way, with
examinations having a time limit and where, in practice, the score correlates
strongly with length? (Though that has been the case for a long time.) Is
concise writing taken to be difficult-textbook style, and undesirable anywhere
else?

Print media editors necessarily have to constrain length, and authors learned
to write accordingly. Nowadays, a lot of writing is unconstrained either by
physical limits or editors.

The specific example you give appears to be intentionally literary in intent,
and so conciseness is not necessarily a prime virtue. When authors were paid
by the word, prolixity was effectively encouraged, and this is obvious in some
of Poe's work.

~~~
rmellow
It's more than expressing a thought with more words than necessary: so many
articles start with something along the likes of

"it was a sunny May afternoon in the office of Dr. Whoever, where the
cobblestones in the entrance glinted the fading sunlight. When Dr. Whoever was
a boy, his father would take him out fishing..." ... and rambles on with
meaningless details, containing perhaps a handful of passages in the article
that are actually relevant to what the title promised me.

Perhaps a clearer example is when you find a recipe online. You will find
pages of how the recipe has been in the family for ages, and how the author's
family is delighted with it, and the innumerous and unproven health benefits
it has, and how it's so easy to make, etc. The actual recipe is half a page.

~~~
antasvara
While that style personally annoys me, I feel as though a decent chunk of the
American populace find the topic of an article more interesting if they
understand the human context behind it. The recipe example is a perfect
distillation of that point; while some (or most) people come for just the
recipe, there is a subset that are interested in how the recipe came to be.
Meanwhile, adding that context doesn't dissuade most people from scrolling to
the bottom to get the actual recipe. At the end of the day, most (not all) of
the population is either interested in the descriptive language and human
aspect of a topic, or is interested enough in the topic to ignore the
descriptive language and human interest parts.

------
mettamage
This guy invented the datagram?!

How in the world is this not recognized earlier? He got awarded in 2003, but
that is still way too late.

I think we should have a list in which all stories of underdeserved computer
scientists should be displayed. Alan Turing's example is a well-known one. I
still can't believe how he was treated. But apparently he isn't the only
example of being underdeserved.

------
ggm
A significantly underrated progenitor. Not always recognised, and certainly
not reflected adequately in the official historia recited often by Americans.

~~~
ghaff
While I don't disagree, there is always a tendency to elevate a few people
even when inventions are the collective works of many. Pouzin's contributions
were important and he did coin the datagram term. At the same time, he built
on earlier packet switching work by Paul Baran at RAND and Donald Davies at
the UK National Physical Laboratory.

~~~
notacoward
I've always wondered: who _actually wrote the software_ for IMPs and such? Who
debugged the lower-level (but still essential) operational issues? Was it the
people we've heard of, or others whose contributions we've forgotten? I'm
guessing the latter, but it's hard to be sure this much later.

~~~
ghaff
RFC 1 lists a few of the people who were involved:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1)

------
mannykannot
The term 'fifth man', especially in a British publication, tends to suggest
cold-war spying (Anthony Blunt was number 4. As it happens, he also received
royal honors, in a time when his unmasking was a closely held secret within
British intelligence.)

~~~
gandalfian
I thought the Beatles lots of people were said to be the "fifth" Beatle.

------
davidwtbuxton
I found this article via Wikipedia as a result of wondering why unix shells
are named so.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_\(computing\))

~~~
quickthrower2
Was your question answered?

~~~
davidwtbuxton
From the article:

> That program, which he described as a “shell” around the computer’s whirring
> innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools,
> called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern
> operating systems.

------
reverendbyte
There is the website
[http://www.pouzinsociety.org](http://www.pouzinsociety.org) that covers new
network architectures, also John Day quoted in the article has written a good
book about networking history and future paths in “patterns in network
architecture”

------
convolvatron
unsurprisingly, he suffered politcal headwinds from the connection-oriented
telco people. i wonder how visible that religious war is through the mists of
time.

how much duplication of effort and fighting at cross purposes .. I guess up
until the failure of ATM and eventual submission to voice over ip.

pretty sad how much effort was expended on things like gossip, and how many
standards were warped in an attempt at reconciliation.

------
prescojan
>Louis Pouzin helped create the internet

Bing part of creating such a main element in the world it's just crazy

------
pteraspidomorph
> Based in California and very loosely accountable to America’s Department of
> Commerce

Is this still true?

