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<p>In the 90s I was at Oracle, and our products were users of TCP,
SPX, OSI, and anything else you had at the time. Getting
something to work in all of those environments was a real hassle.</p>
<p>Even just within TCP, it wasn't simple...<br>
</p>
<p>At one point, I recall that there were over 30 distinct
implementations of TCP for the PC. After the MS release, it
wasn't long before there was just a single implementation. I
think a similar pattern happened in other OSes; multiple
implementations eventually melded into a single implementation
which came with the OS.</p>
<p>TCP was designed to provide great flexibility to the TCP
implementer, who could (and had to) choose a packetization
strategy, buffer schemes, retransmission timing, and other such
parts of a particular implementation.</p>
<p>That led to a range of implementations, with differences beyond
just cost and usability. One might be highly memory-efficient.
Another might be computationally "light". For the same transfer
of a particular dataset across a network, there could be vast
differences in the number and sizes of packets produced by
different implementations. We could see this as we tested with
all the different TCP implementations, even on the same computer.<br>
</p>
<p>When "the" TCP became part of the OS, all of those choices
disappeared. That simplification was obviously an asset. But
IMHO it was also a liability.</p>
<p>/Jack<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/18/19 11:37 AM, Vint Cerf wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAHxHggfoAP68Un-G7uxsYvzW+Oqt2xJH-maz-Zkzqe4Gqo0gmQ@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="auto">I was on the FTP board when MS released TCP/IP for
DOS. It killed the market for FTP.
<div dir="auto">V</div>
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<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Feb 18, 2019, 14:16 Clem Cole <<a
href="mailto:clemc@ccc.com" moz-do-not-send="true">clemc@ccc.com</a>
wrote:<br>
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style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at
12:27 PM Dave Crocker <<a
href="mailto:dhc@dcrocker.net" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">dhc@dcrocker.net</a>>
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On 2/18/2019 7:35 AM,
Tony Finch wrote:<br>
> I was wondering what effect KA9Q had on low-end
adoption. I turned up<br>
> later, but I remember stories from early (1992 ish)
dial-up commercial<br>
> Internet users who relied on KA9Q.<br>
<br>
<br>
I believe KA9Q created a lingua franca for PC use of the
Internet, <br>
within the technical community. That counted as a major
improvement, IMO.</blockquote>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">IMO:
Phil (who was a friend and former lab partner at CMU)
did an outstanding great job; although I would say FTP
SW folks in Andover may have been more important from
a commercial standpoint. Best I can tell, Phil's
implementation was popular in the ham community where
he originally released it to use over radio TTY HW.</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">The
MIT's guys (I believe for Project Athena) and then
created FTP actually made a product that was tuned to
PC Ethernet HW (and DOS). I had access to both
implementations at the time. For instance, we used the
FTP stuff for a project at Mass General Hospital, even
though it cost a few hundred dollars and Phil's was
'open source'. But FTP SW's solution was more
polished and integrated better into their
environment. Phil's stuff was a 'hackers tool kit'
and although I personally had it running at home, I
can say I was reluctant to use it someplace where I
was not there to 'maintain it.'</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">One of
the differences is that FTP guys did the important
thing of creating a socket implementation for windows
and thus were able to port a lot of the UNIX code
using the 386 'DOS extender' from Pharlap and early
386/C compiler. For a short time, they seemed to be
winning the IP for PC battle until MSFT got the IP
religion and included an IP/TCP implementation in
Win95.</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Clem</span></div>
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</span></div>
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</span></div>
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style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span> </div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
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class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><br>
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