what happened to the ietf bakeoffs that I remember being a highlight of my younger network programming years?

I kind of see the internet as pre and post Sandy & Leonard's Cisco [0]/ the John Chambers age, when the proposal for a draft virtually signalled the inventors acquisition, only to be bolted to IOS like second hand cheap aluminum siding. I lumped Cisco and Microsoft together, so far as client comfort concern was concerned: break down each history into two twenty years stages, skipping the first decade of amazing history I figured both had deliberately forgotten, and if you mark about half way to be a fulcrum upon which is weighed one side money & talent and the other money* 1/(a slow hockey stick to exponentiation*legal liability) [1], you approximate recent corporate gentrification. Maturity doesn't match, and I hope actual human middle age never is closely mimicked by any important tech firm. Charles Handy, famous in my time but under appreciated even at his height, proposed retirement at forty and returning to work at sixty, to avert many ills. Handy didn't fully appreciate what afflicts SV high tech firms, or i think he'd have become Messianic preacher.[2] I've been thinking about taking a DBA / PhD in business, on the effect of Handy's plan if applied to or impacting high tech; I have hypothesized countless advantages. Just consider ageism. In the developing world, consider fertility and supporting the elderly.

I equally posit that trch firms of real consequence ought to be at least by minimum mandate, accept outside directors from the standards bodies and major user constituencies. I know this could be unfair especially during the initial learning process. But I am convinced that already we're past the juncture at which the entirety of civilisation depends on the best outcomes for broad society being regularly, consistently achieved.

Corporations usually, almost invariably, do discover the hard truths before academia.

in this case, I believe the significant networking players all abandoned organised bakeoffs for fairly easily understood reasons. I am not certain i could begin to specify your kind of process required today, or even the actual purposes served. Protocol testing has been moved to product LOB.

But how very much better than this present blind and non optional faith in the purported (by impotent ebd users, the most famous claim of innocence recently forsaken with barely a wake) benevolence, can we very quickly indeed imagine serving enormous network effect level positives, if only we could have the influence?

I beg forgiveness for my footnote length, rather than seek permission, because they convey for me, hopefully to you as well, the aspirational, idealistic and even romantic context of much that has been, for me most sorely, deprecated. I don't believe such "romantic" ideology is without value. I think it holds immense value. Difficult to unlock value. But because so much is evidentiary being enormously positive and innovative upon such dizzy dreaming of past warm SoCal winter evenings (and vicariously I imagined when young,from my easterly longitude, I wasn't​alone dreaming first of warm sunny winters, within which dreams i dreamed of such fancies as a parallel Symbolics made ADA machine, on a card removable for degaussing.....]

[0] that Cisco was a internetworking love story, Leonard Bosack building and installing Stanford's first router to email the subject of his sudden ardent inventiveness, Sandy Lerner, is the most deserving of rarely repeated stories of the Valley. That both exited, graciously well after IPO, seeing through everyone's vesting for the immense pre roadshow efforts, with what still today looks like a full and fair but not ridiculous degree of equity return - not least because it was a clean exeunt, no backseat driving to spoil memories or belittle later work - is not hesrd repeated often enough for my satisfaction, either, I think it ought to be B School staple fayre. "How To Win In Tech With Grace." I worry about SoCal's gender imbalance only when I think how much I nearly drove my company into the landfill, fifteen years later only belatedly realising (or accepting?) how much this was due to my fraught and hopeless long distance relationship we both, flying do high, considered rock solid. Normal marriage and family or just homes and the in-laws, temper the restless spirit in countless positive ways.

[1] I didn't pick my pseudo math to pun on the new Cisco Tetratrion product, but I have speculated at length of all networking players, Cisco must truly understand it's own legacy, else I believe they would have failed time past some. I recall so clearly Fortune magazine trumpeting Chamber's "T+0 Close" of the company accounts. I also suspected at the time, this was long range planning to dissipate anyone's developing worries about channel stuffing. That was a short impossible to trade, as a result of Chamber's accounting forced march. Naturally, the supply chain not in-house wasn't up to scratch...

[2] I think the idea of mandatory retirement at forty, or during typical family centered years, was published in The Future Of Work,1984. Sadly I no longer have my copy. I was considering college then, and my father brought me first a biography of Bill Gates, then The Future Of Work. I devoured both in the same week and had ordered Gods Of Management by the store closing Saturday midday. Anything of philosophy or especially theology ws my ticket to what the library system couldn't supply. My father was convinced that the European religious refugees from persecution whose last waves settled in nineteenth century America, at least outwardly translated faith into a derivative Protestant work ethic. That Robert Noyce attended college in Grinnel Iowa, where the portrait of pitchfork guarding couple eas immortalized in oil as "American Gothic" by Grant Wood (and I believe despite the incongruity with the score, necessarily should have completed Ferris Bueller's museum visit, portending his own possible fate.) isn't remarkable on its own, but remarkable for how little attention is granted to early exposure to religious ethics, by so many Silicon Valley pioneers. In Japan, the most revealing comment by a retired board member of a leading integrated circuit maker, I think is the remark that"Americans didn't believe what they couldn't see [below one micron] whereas our technicians had faith they were being well guided, if they were receptive". I have the quote very very close to verbatim of the translation i remember, the meaning I relate accurately I'm positive: the Japanese did first operate reliabily in sub micron wafer cutting, as a result. Apocryphal or not, I am reminded of this today but a documentary about the Saturn rocket. Surfers were the first recruits to master a critical complex composite honeycomb baking technique, not the technical staff. Simplified to Concentration And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's not as inspirational - I know which impression I want my kids to imagine.