[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Vint Cerf]

Ken's initiative in creating affordable, departmental scale computers
was without question a major element of ARPANET and Internet growth
(so was the SUN Workstation). However, Dave Crocker is correct that
DEC actively resisted TCP/IP at the Board level. Ken railed against
TCP/IP. But at the DEC labs, the story was different. Similar
resistance would be encountered at IBM and at HP but in those cases,
too, it was their laboratories that proceeded to develop TCP/IP for
their most popular operating systems. When it finally became clear
that TCP/IP would be demanded by customers, the official resistance
ended. UNIX and its derivatives had a great deal to do with this. ARPA
funded the development of the Berkeley release of TCP/IP for UNIX and
this was an important element of the adoption of TCP/IP in the
academic community as well.

Digital also played a big role in the development of MCI Mail and the
linkage between MCI Mail and the Internet (taking place around
1988-89) broke a policy barrier that prohibited the carriage of
commercial network traffic on the US Government sponsored backbones
(especially NSFNET and ARPANET, ESNET and NSINET).

Digital and its laboratories played a prominent role in the evolution
networked computing, but experienced its own white water problems
adapting to the changing universe produced by the Internet and open
source software.

vint


On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 12:42 AM, Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 2/7/2011 8:01 PM, Guy Almes wrote:
>>
>> Another, more mixed, is DEC's lukewarm support for the IP-based Internet,
>> preferring the proprietary DECnet product line. While, technically, the
>> DECnet
>> work deserves much praise, the business dynamics of pushing DECnet in
>> preference
>> to the Internet are illustrative of blindspots that led to Digital's
>> demise.
>
>
> DEC was not lukewarm.  It was actively hostile.  It pressed for OSI because
> it thought it could control the outcome.
>
> By the time DEC finally realized that TCP/IP was going to win, DEC was very
> far behind the curve and never really caught up.  (The Field Service guys
> were closest to the customer and saw the writing on the wall the earliest,
> so they provided funding for an Internet tech transfer lab that I started,
> but there was an entire corporate culture devoted to stovepipe solutions for
> customer capture with private solutions.)  Upper management wanted the
> change to IP, but there were about 110,000 other employees and
> middle-managers that had trouble buying in.
>
> But yeah, PDP-10/Tenex for the Arpanet and later the PDP-11/Vax/Unix were
> hugely popular for hosts.
>
> For Unix, you had to get the hardware from DEC and the software license from
> Bell Labs.  In order the help the hardware sales, DEC had a special group up
> in New Hampshire doing Unix device drivers.  At every Usenix meeting
> (attendance in those early days number of around 40-100) the team leader,
> Armando Stettner, would give a status report on the device driver work.
>
> At the first larger meeting (300 people in Santa Monica) he got up as usual,
> but started by saying that he was tired of having people say they wanted to
> get both the hardware and the Unix software from one place, and when was DEC
> going to offer a Unix license?
>
> So, he said, he could finally announce that DEC was indeed going to offer a
> Unix license.
>
> He then bent down and held up a New Hampshire-style green automobile license
> plate that said UNIX, with Live Free or Die at the bottom.  He had one for
> every attendee.
>
> I treasure mine...
>
> d/
>
>
> --
>
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net
>