[ppml] SWIP & A trip down memory lane.

Have you seen this?
http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/historical/9505/msg00087.html

I believe that is the document that was stored at:
ftp://rs.internic.net/policy/internic-ip-1.txt 

However, this is earlier and provides the names of people
who were involved at the time. If you recognize any of
the names, you could direct your question to someone who
was there ;-)
http://ftp.univie.ac.at/netinfo/ietf/92jul/swip-minutes-92jul.txt

If you are looking for the origins of whois, it goes back even
further and probably predates SRI-NIC. However, I'm not sure if
documents of those early days are available on the net.

--Michael Dillon