Literature in Focus - A History of International Research Networking : The People who Made it Happen / ed. by Howard Davies and Beatrice Bressan

Tuesday 28 Sept 2010, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

Library, 52 1-052 (CERN)

How do you get representatives of over 30 countries to manage the specification and implementation of a service which is then made available to all of them?  How do you get several hundred highly qualified and independent-minded engineers to work together to find solutions to the numerous technical problems?  How do you persuade funding bodies that your proposals are more deserving of support than other demands on their resources?  How do you - over a period of 25 to 30 years - increase the capacity of your service by six orders of magnitude, i.e. by a factor of a million while keeping the cost constant or even reducing it?

A History of International Research Networking (Wiley publications, Howard Davies and Beatrice Bressan editors), is a “History Book” about how Europe got its act together and managed to create the most advanced facilities for research networking in the world which gives the right responses to all the above questions. The idea of writing such a history came during the summer of 2006, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Trans European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA). 

This book records the main elements of the history of European research networking, including some of the mistakes and dead ends as well as the successes that were encountered along the way. It describes the principal steps which those involved in European research networking have taken, in collaboration with (and sometimes in competition with) their counterparts in North America and other world regions, in the development of the underlying telecommunications infrastructure which today supports the operation of the global Internet.

It is a story about people as well as technology; it is not the story of a single individual who made an astonishing step forward but it is the story of individuals making a collaborative effort that really has meant a big leap forward and who have been deeply involved in some aspect of European research networking during the last thirty years. It is also a story about how complicated it can be to reach agreement on technical and organisational issues between so many different countries – how much work goes into establishing and maintaining the consensus between many different nations, each with their own experts and opinions, that is essential to the success of a shared system.