Oops, must have hit a nerve

 The posts about "2nd largest corporate electronic network" in the Surface Mount Tech post yesterday, prompted a quick response from Walt Underwood, the original designer of that network.   Here's his pithy commentary:

I was the designer of the HP Internet. Chuck gave me some very simple parameters, like 12 months and $100k and told me to come back when I had a plan. 

Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning were tremendously useful because they'd come over from SRI.

Second largest private network (not just "corporate"), but the largest private IP network. I think the bigger network was the "DEC Easynet" at Digital, and that ran on DECnet protocols, not Internet protocols. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet#DEC_Easynet

Quite the story, from the designer who should have gotten the award.   But Walt's note prompted thinking along these lines, again this is a story from 40 years ago, so I had to 'research' some of this.

First, Bill Johnson (BJ), a senior VP at DEC, was a colleague I met at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, in their pioneering Graduate College program, based on computer conferencing.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Behavioral_Sciences_Institute

BJ pioneered the DEC Easynet, based on the EIES system and I stimulated the Confer System at HP with the lightly structured 'instruction' for Walt Underwood described above.     BJ and I decided to run a joint experiment with our companies, can you imagine?   I cannot find BJ on the Internet today.  He left DEC in their 'crash and burn' phase circa 1990, and went to IBM where Lou Gerstner honored him as one of the 'new wild ducks' circa 1992.  That story should be findable, but I cannot find it right now.  BJ left IBM circa 2002 or so, and became Chancellor or President of an Eastern University.  I thought it was Rensselaer, but again, no luck finding him today.  Humnn, Roland Schmitt went from GE to President of Rensselaer -- ah, yes, I do recall that now.     BJ might have gone to Worchester Polytechnic, but I cannot find him listed there either.  Time plays hob with all of these wonderful deeds from yesteryear.

Some of the antecedent for all of this is reported in Ray Price's and my HP book, The HP Phenomenon, for example with this opening pair of paragraphs on p. 280 that goes on for five or six pages:

The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) created the first distance learning computer-conferencing system to support an alternative MBA in strategic studies in 1982. Attendees included Bill Johnson (B. J.) from Digital Equipment and Chuck House from HP, along with Dennis Hayes, founder of Hayes Modem, and Stewart Brand, who had profiled XeroxPARC for Rolling Stone magazine. House and Johnson agreed to install computer-conferencing software as an experiment and to share the sociological lessons that resulted.   An Industrial Research Institute membership starting in 1984 allowed House to form a virtual team with R&D leaders Roland Schmitt and Fred Geary of General Electric, Lew Lehr and Les Krogh of 3M, Ian Ross at Bell Labs, and Dan Stanzione at Bellcore. This became a loosely federated core experimental group wrestling with the import of and lessons from innovation in this “digital world.”33

It was experimental, not conceptual. As such, it was exploratory, adventuresome, and pioneering. Amid conflicting advice, the Corporate Engineering team—Bert Raphael, Tony Fanning, and Mark Laubach—brought five different e-mail systems together with an overlay interface, allowing all of the company’s people to communicate. They evaluated two leading university computer-conferencing systems, Confer and EIES, installing Confer to give discussion forum capability to HP employees. 

The Confer story is told nicely, in considerable philosophical perspective in an ACM article by Tony Fanning and Bert Raphael, presented at CSCW '86.   https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/637069.637109

And guess what?  The leading example they use for Confer is Surface Mount Technology.  Which was my attempt to get Femcor (and me) out of the cross-hairs described in the earlier post.