[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[Michael Thomas]

[sorry if this is a little weirdly formatted... my normal email address 
is seemingly getting send to /dev/null on this list for some reason]


On 2/10/23 6:48 AM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:

> I'll start with a shout out to Brian's point that the transition was
> already well underway by 1990. Absolutely
> fits my experience.


My experience as somebody completely on the outside looking in in the 
mid to late 80's is that we had no clue -- or care, honestly -- who was 
going to "win". We had all heard that OSI was the path forward, but it 
never materialized from what we could tell. Since we were a VMS house, 
we had pretty much expected it to take over but it never did. IP on the 
other hand had people actually asking for it (we were building networked 
widgets at the time). So we spent cycles on it as somebody was willing 
to pay for it. Since we were very host focused, we didn't have a dog in 
the routing fight, so Netware, SMB, Appletalk, DEC LAT and LPR and 
Telnet were pretty much if somebody wanted it, we'd design it. It wasn't 
until probably around 1991 or so when I went to my first Interop that it 
became clear that IP had won and the path to OSI was really the path to 
/dev/null.

Mike