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

[Charles H. Sauer (he/him)]

Staying on topic of installed base momentum...

In hindsight, the writing of TCP winning may seem to have been on the 
wall by the early 90s, but from a PC perspective that seems a decade 
early. The decision makers in Cupertino, Redmond, and Provo, saw need 
for, and perhaps even preferred, AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, and SMB, until this 
century.

A few specifics:
o Appletalk support stayed in macOS until 10.6 release in 2009
o Novell did not give preference to and natively support TCP/IP until 
NetWare 5 in October 1998.
o Windows 95 was the first legacy Windows version to have acceptable TCP/IP
o Windows NT 3.5 in September 1994 was the first NT based version to 
support TCP/IP
o Microsoft did not drop IPX/SPX until Windows Vista in 2007
o Windows 11 still seems to have some allowances for SMB

Charlie

On 2/13/2023 7:25 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 2/13/2023 4:46 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> IMHO by the early 90s, TCP had already won the competition, and 
>> organizations everywhere were working on transitioning to the Internet
> 
> this was really by 1988.  We'd started on an OSI stack and were planning 
> on TCP-to-OSI transition products and started talking with customers 
> about their needs.
> 
> There was no interest from any of them in this, but they were quite 
> eager for OSI-to-TCP transition products.
> 
> d/
> 

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer at technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer