to understand more i guess i need this book on open systems and a course with james ten eyck/ or the books of his reading list. in his seminar one of the objctives is

Students will be able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the current Internet, and explain the problems of scaling to higher bandwidth, higher density of users, and a greater variety of traffic.

sigcomm 1999 echoes '19 voices, speaking for a much larger community'.

dave mills paper: a maze of twisty, turney passages - routing in the internet swamp (and other adventures). had already forgotten that the intelpost fax network was sending a picture of a panda as a test page back and forth. he also tells the story of early time telling, starting around 1979 in the fuzzball.