Table of contents

Management writing

Technical writing

Involvement with the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society

Writings, biographical information, etc., on Internet history and computing

Interviews

Other activities of mine
    Movie "reviews"

For family, friends, xBBNers, ...

Contacting me

My other websites

Brief bio of me, BBN, and Internet

Over the next four years, after my retirement from BBN, I spent a little time with the Center for Quality of Management (CQM) and a little time with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT. The CQM web site included a photo of what I looked like as of a few years ago and other information relating to my participation in the CQM.

These days I mostly look out the window at the salt marsh near my home.

Looking out the window from our kitchen
Click for view from outside dining room window
Click for view of front of house (away from marsh)

In 1998 I was pleased to be named to the hall of fame of my undergraduate college, San Francisco State, for having been involved in the early days of the Internet. My friend and classmate Stan Mazor — who was co-inventor of the micro-computer — went into my college hall of fame at the same time. (I love being on the same list as Annette Benning and Danny Glover, among others — see full SFSU Hall of Fame list; I'm also listed with other notable alumni (under category 2 -- Science and Technology); and I was mentioned in SFSU Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2001.) Then, in May 2014, Stan and I received honorary Doctor of Science degrees at SFSU's undergraduate graduation ceremony.

More information about the early era of the Internet when I was involved can be found in the following books:

• Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Haffner and Matthew Lyon
• Nerds 2.0.1 by Stephen Segaller which was the companion volume to the PBS TV show of the same name
• Casting the Net by Peter Salus
• Rescuing Prometheus by Thomas Hughes.
• A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet by John Naughton
• Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 by Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O'Neill with contributions by Kerry J. Freedman, particularly chapter 4
• The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, chapter 7.

In 2001, the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative honored BBN (and our ARPANET team) and did it again in 2007: click here for more info

2019 was the fiftieth anniversary of the installation of the first four ARPANET nodes. I participated in several anniversary events in 2019: Live stream of panel discussion at AAAS annual meeting (YouTube alternative), Net@50 event at the MIT Media Lab at which 3 dozen ARPANET/Internet pioneers were present, ... (more to come).

My book Four Practical Revolutions in Management has been included on the Nippon Foundations's list of 100 Books for Understanding Contemporary Japan.

[It appears that I have an Erdös number of 4, if one ignores the fact that some of the connecting papers had more than two authors and the fact that two of the papers are more about computer communications than math. The sequence is Erdos-Mullin-Cerf-Kahn-Walden.]

[Note: Much of the information in the conventional and business press about my career since my time as a programmer on the BBN ARPANET team is inaccurate; anyone including something on me in a piece you are writing might query me directly rather than trusting what has been written in the past.]

Management writing

– The book A New American TQM

– The book Four Practical Revolutions in Management

– The book Breakthrough Management

– The book Visionary Leaders in Manufacturing

– The Journal of the Center for Quality of Management

• PDF versions of CQM Journal papers of which I have been sole, primary or real co-author
  What Is the Center for Quality Management?
  Breakthrough and Continuous Improvement in Research and Development
  Thoughts on Goals and Metrics
  The Systematic Development of Skill as a Basis for Competitive Product Development
  Language for Action: New Concepts to Address Soft Side Management Issues
  Understanding Unclear Situations and Each Other Using the Language Processing Method
  Task Deployment Management
  Designing Integrated Management Systems
  Observations from the 1997-98 CQM Study Group on Cycle Time Reduction
  A Written Example of A-Delta-T
  Creation and Evolution of the CQM
  Getting the Most Out of Technologists
  
• PDF versions of CQM Journal papers that I compiled or on which I collaborated, or did a lot of actual writing but chose only to be listed as "editor"
  A special issue on Kano’s Methods for Understanding Customer-defined Quality
  Mutual Learning: Industry/Academia Collaboration for Improving Product Development
  Roundtable Report on a Presentation by Professor Hajime Karatsu
  Using the Methods of Fernando Flores
  Planning Projects and Tasks Using the 9-Steps
  Case Study of Trantex
  Reflecting on Obstacles to Innovation---An Example of Using Causal Loops
  A special issue in memory of Thomas H. Lee
  Biography of Thomas H. Lee
  A special issue on Mastering Business Complexity
  
• Complete list of papers published in the CQM Journal during the eleven volumes for which I was editor-in-chief; when I last looked, the archive of issues of the journal could be found on the wayback machine.

–Unpublished, to-be-published, and miscellaneously published papers

• Designing Effective and Efficient Action
  
• Quality Process Improvements Tools and Techniques (with Shoji Shiba) -- now published as a chapter of Quality Tools and Methods for the 21st Century, edited by Conti, Watson, and Kondo, Salem, NH: GOAL/QPC, 2006.
• The Center for Quality of Management (CQM): A US Experiment in Mutual Learning
• Breakthrough in Quality Organizations; published in the e-Newsletter of the Middle East Quality Association, January 2010 (Issue N. 3).

Technical writing

• The original paper on the ARPANET IMP.
• The ARPANET Design Decisions, by John McQuillan and me, Computer Networks, Vol. 1, No. 5, August 1977.
• RFC 62: A system for interprocess communication in a resource sharing computer network
• A System for Interprocess Communication in a Resource Sharing Computer Network, Communications of the ACM, vol. 15 no. 4, April 1972, pp. 221-230.
• paper on host-to-host protocols published in 1975; the content was first presented at a conference which might have been a year earlier (I can't remember)
• Preprint of article by Alex McKenzie and me, eventually published as "The ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and the Internet," Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, Marcel Dekker, Inc., Volume 1, pp. 341-376. This draft is from 1989 at a time when TCP/IP was not yet so dominate a communications protocol.
• A Note on Cheney's Nonrecursive List-Compacting Algorithm, Communications of the ACM, vol. 15 no. 4, April 1972, p. 275.
• RFC 65: Comments on Host/Host Protocol Document #1
• User's Guide to the Terminal IMP, July 1977 revision (original written in 1971); for a few years I updated and maintained this document.
• "RFC 333: Proposed Experiment with a Message Switching Protocol" (with R.D. Bressler and D. Murphy)

• Some notes relating to the Telnet protocol

  Bernie Cosell conceived the symmetric will/won't/do/don't approach to protocol design (see items 1, 2, and 5 below) in the context of the broad effort by many people to come up with an official Telnet protocol. Read the papers cited in the first and third items below and read the first group of RFCs under item 4 below to for lists of these people and the issues they were thinking about.
  1. RFC 435: Telnet Issues (Bernie Cosell and Dave Walden), January 1973
  2. During a 2012 discussion on the Internet History discussion list, Bernie Cosell stated the following (July 1, 2012):
     From my work on the TIP I was already thinking a bit about making Telnet symmetric. What I was mostly grappling with was if the protocol were symmetric it could "loop" -- if commands passed each other over the net, then the responses passed each other, and those kicked off other responses, etc. One [loop] that came to mind (that I recall thinking about back then) was with one end saying "I'll send echoes" and the other saying "I'll echo locally". They cross, and each then responds "OK you echo". Each now has gotten a change of state [since each said they weren't going to echo and now has been told to] and so each sends another "OK I'll send echoes" and "I'll echo locally" and around they go...
     My actual goal in the sketching on the napkin on the plane flight [and I remember mentioning it to Dave, sitting next to me, and waving my hands a lot] was "Look: if the commands are will/wont/do/dont and the rules follow state diagram, then it can't loop and will always end up in a reasonable state [just not-looping wasn't enough, of course, lest the connection end up with BOTH ends thinking that the other is echoing, or vice versa].
     Another important idea that it handled was that it was extensible: it provided for the notion that one side could ask about something unknown and that'd be OK [and the negotiation would do the right thing], so there could be fancy-hosts and not-so-fancy ones and they could negotiate to make as clever a connection as they could while still gracefully handling hosts that could only deal with not-so-clever ones.
  3. The ARPANET Telnet Protocol: Its Purpose, Principles, Implementation, and Impact on Host Operating System Design (Davidson, Hathaway, Postel, Mimno, Thomas, and Walden), 1977, a historical look back at the evolution of Telnet
  4. Section 2 of the prior paper (item 3) contains a history of the evolution of Telnet. At the end of the paper is the following list of RFCs relating to the evolution of Telnet:
     • RFCs on New TELNET Design and Specification: 357, 426, 435, 461, 495, 513, 529, 559-560, 562- 563, 581, 587, 595-596, 651-659, 671, 698, 718-719.
     • RFCs on New TELNET Implementation: 559, 593, 669, 678, 688, 701-703, 718.
     • RFCs on Old TELNET Design and Specification: 1 5 , 97, 109-110, 1 3 7 , 139, 1 5 8 , 295, 318, 328, 340, 391.
     • RFCs on Old TELNET Implementation: 206, 216, 452, 466.
     • RFCs on Satellite Considerations: 346, 355.
  5. Developing Telnet’s negotiated options (Bernard Cosell and David Walden), 2003, a historical look back at Bernie's conceiving of Telnet's negotiated options.

• My presentation on the ARPANET to the 1972 AFCET conference in Paris
• Gateway design for computer network interconnection, by Randy Rettberg and me, Proceedings of Eurocomp 1975, The European Computing Conference on Communications Networks, London, England, September 23-25, 1975, pp. 113-128
• RFC 636: TIP/TENEX Reliability Improvements (J.D. Burchfiel, B. Cosell, R.S. Tomlinson, and D.C. Walden), June 1974
• Techniques for Detecting and Preventing Multiprogramming Bugs, by Bernie Cosell, John McQuillan, and me; Minicomputer Software, J.R. Bell and C.G. Bell (eds.), North-Holland Publishing Company, 1976.
• A bibliography of BBN's Internetworking papers that I helped produce in 1994

Technical writing on my "travels in TeX land"

• Travels in TeX Land

CV

• A fairly complete list of my published technical (and management) writings is included in my CV
• Published books

Involvement with and writing and editing for the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society

Musings on the history of the Internet and my computing experiences more generally (and related biographical data)

• Interview relating to the beginning of the ARPANET, on file at the Charles Babbage Institute (Center for the History of Information Processing), recorded 6 February 1990: after clicking on this link, scroll down the page and click on "Walden, David C.", and then scroll down the page and click on "link to transcript"
• Interview of me by Karl Berry for the TeX User Group's interview series (2006)
• My MAPS interview by Frans Goddijn (2006); this interview is sort of a successor interview to the prior (TeX User Group) interview
• Another ARPANET related interview done by the Computer History Museum in 2009
• 2014 interview by Brad Fidler and Len Kleinrock of UCLA
• Computing memoir for the IEEE Global History Network First-Person website (this memoir covers in one place information already in several of the following notes)
• From San Francisco State University College of Science and Engineering Alumni Newsletter (Fall 1998)
• How I stumbled into being involved with the beginnings of the Internet
• On my first years of work, at Lincoln Lab and BBN with Frank and Will
• On my first two years of "work" at BBN, before I got involved in the ARPANET
• Observations on the beginnings of the Internet
• Preface for publication of the early BBN Quarterly Technical Reports on the ARPANET project
• Reflections on the 25th anniversary of the Internet
• On the rest of my years of "work" at BBN
• On losing computer files
• Some history of the original ARPANET routing algorithm and what it is called today
• Looking back at the ARPANET effort, 34 years later
• Some Observations and Interpretations of Internet History from 1968 to 1980 -- part of A Technical History of the Internet (an ACM SIGCOMM Tutorial given by 19 voices, speaking for a much larger community) at SIGCOMM 1999, 31 August 1999, Cambridge MA, USA
• In June 2004 I visited briefly with Internet pioneer Louzin Pouzin in Paris.
  
• I gave a presentation on the history of the Internet at the Polyteknisk Foreninghttp in Oslo on September 18, 2007. Also presenting were Robert Cailliau (co-inventory of the World Wide Web) and Håkon Wium Lie (CTO of Opera Software and inventory of Cascading Style Sheets for HTML).

Some other activities of mine

Following are links relating to (a) about my only current heavy-duty recreation, movie going, and (b) what seems to be my current avocation, writing and self-publishing (there is also a sacred activity—watching Red Sox baseball):

• Movie going (brief notes on the last 1,000+ movies I've seen)
  
• A 2011 update of the following 2009 paper on self-publishing insights (includes a tiny bit about ebooks)
• A 2009 project to publish a book of interviews: the project is described in a video presentation and in a paper
• And, based on the 2009 publishing project, new summary of my self-publishing insight: described in a video presentation and in a paper
• Notes on self-publishing: based on my 2006 experience of publishing Breakthrough Management
• The writing is mostly about BBN computing history, computing history more generally, and the typesetting system TeX and derivatives.

For my family, friends, xBBNers

• About the Schoolhouse (our condominium building in Boston)
• Our trip to East Africa in 1994
  
• Sailing race to Bermuda in June 2001
  
• Our month in Mexico in October 2001
  
• Our two weeks in Italy in March 2002
  
• Our son and daughter-in-law's September 2002 wedding
  
• Sail to Antigua in October 2002
  
• Our two weeks in Brazil in October 2003
  
• Our nearly three weeks in Paris and Norway in June 2004
  
• Two weeks along the east coast of Florida in January 2007
  
• Ten days in the vicinity of Nice, France, in April 2007
  
• Dave's quick trip to Oslo in September 2007
  
• Our ten day visit to Norway in May-June 2008
  
• A week long business trip to Mumbai, India, in September 2008
  
• A week trip from Portland, OR, to Vancouver and Victoria, BC, in April 2011
  
• Driving across the country from Portland, OR, to Cape Cod, MA, in May 2011
  
• Three week trip to New Zealand in March 2013
  
• Obsolete: Collected thoughts on health insurance when not part of a large group plan, exchanged by xBBNers
  
• Obsolete: Collected thoughts on Long Term Care insurance, exchanged by xBBNers
  

To communicate with me, send an email to: