on a sunny, warm day in geneva i met, talked and walked around with louis pouzin. it was truly human and a great chance to get some things clarified, ie tiny pieces as the following: dijkstra once wrote a report about the eci conference [european cooperation in informatics]:

... The afternoon was devoted to Computer Networks. Louis Pouizn (Iria) was the invited speaker on "Names and Objects in Heterogeneous Computer Networks". He had originally prepared a more technical presentation than in the meantime he dared to give and in a hurry he redesigned his presentation; as a result it was a bit rambling, but it was still quite clear that he knew what he was talking about. I had heard him many times before, but unaware of his past as a telephone engineer: that past was mentioned in the introduction and was quite discernable | dijkstra, eci conference, 9-12 august 1976, amsterdam

well, first reaction of louis pouzin: "i don't think dijkstra was at some of these meetings". showing him the paper he recalled and laughed. no, he never worked for the french ptt. i would have believed it, if I wouldn't have had the chance to ask. i mean, it was dijkstra who wrote the report; who am i to question dijkstra. however, that much to write about history by solely relying upon archives.

btw iria was closed down, i think end of 1970s and reopened under the name inria 1980, pouzin tells. there was a problem with moving around research money, so the people who closed it renamed and reopened it ... political game under the aegis of giscard d'estaing.

gossip carrier there is one part to the cyclades story that gives you kind of an idea about the personality of louis pouzin. back in the 1970s various universities got a contract to work on cyclades, an early french experimental packet switching network, to write software and to test it, ie. to keep this loose corporation together, avoiding hierarchy, pouzin created a new job description: the gossip carrier. the duty of this chap was to travel around and to inform people in a colloquial way about what was going on in other places ...

GossipCarrier (audio/mpeg, 548 KB)

not to be mixed up with gosip, the us way of considering osi.

say catenet or say internet daniel karrenberg once told me the story about catenet, another early name for internetworking. one of the reason may have been karrenberg assumes, that nobody outside of france knew how to pronounce catenet correctly ... well, vint cerf answered by email and louis pouzin laughs ...

catenet (audio/mpeg, 670 KB) daniel karrenberg and louis pouzin about catenet.

Monsieur, it was a true pleasure!

Her damit! ;)

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