02/01/2024
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS:
The Interop ShowNet from 1988 to The Present Day
The first exhibtion network at Interop was deployed in September 1988 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. At the time, the technology of choice was 10BASE-5, thick yellow coax with "vampire taps" for connecting the transceivers. You may have seen this particular photo at one time or another.
Much has happened in the network technology arena since those days, and most of these developments have been showcased at Interop. Nowhere is this more true than at Interop Tokyo where the design, testing, deployment and measurement effort takes several months involving a large crew of volunteers and networking experts culminating in 3 days at the show itself every June. In 2023, the Interop Tokyo ShowNet was deployed for the 30th time, and in 2024 Interop Tokyo will celebrate 30 years since the introduction of the conference and exhibition to Japan in 1994.
To mark this milestone, we would like to publish an article that provides the background, history, and lessons learned from Interop ShowNets in Tokyo---and around the world. The article will be published in The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ) later this year, probably in September or December. I have recruited David Strom to serve as the overall coordinator of this project and he will be reaching out to anyone who wishes to share their memories, stories, and overall information about how such a major networking project is undertaken. My guess is that lessons from a few other temporary networks such as those deployed at IETF meetings would also be relevant for this article.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
* Planning, venue survey, timeline
* Logistical surprises ("gee, we didn't know...")
* Staff recruitment (volunteers etc)
* Equipment solicitation and selection
* Design, selection of specific technologies to showcase
* Hot Stage
* Deployment, operation, and monitoring
* Teardown and move-out
We are looking for personal stories about your role in testing and using these technologies and what things you learned over this long span of time. Did hot staging for example improve over time, given prior experiences? Was something easier or harder for you to do when the Interops of the 1990s are compared to the present era? Did your experience with the shownet change your professional direction or open up new employment opportunities?
If you are willing to contribute to this article, please contact me by e-mail: [email protected] and I we can discuss details further. The article will certainly list all contributors.
Please spread the word!
