[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Guy Almes <galmes at tamu.edu>

    > his (and Digital's) particular style of computer building had
    > several impacts on the Internet.
    > One is the prevalence of PDP-10s as hosts on the ARPAnet.

_All_ the early TCP/IP routers (gateways, back then) were PDP-11 based
(for a variety of reasons we can explore if anyone cares). Off the top
of my head, from memory:

- The earliest IP routers, the BBN ELF-based boxes
- The later BBN MOS-based boxes
- The Fuzzballs
- The SRI MOS boxes (Port Expanders, etc)
- The machines at UCL
- The Lincoln Labs voice thingys (although those may have been just hosts)
- The first two MIT routers (the ARPANet GW; the internal inter-LAN router)
- The MIT C-GW machines
- The Stanford multi-protocol router (basis of the Cisco router)

My sincere apologies to anyone whom I have left out!

Some other early internetworking projects also used PDP-11s a lot:

- The MIT CHAOSnet used PDP-11 routers very extensively

Not sure about PUP - they had, IIRC, a few PDP-11 baaed boxes, but I think
most of their routers were Alto-based.

    > Another, more mixed, is DEC's lukewarm support for the IP-based
    > Internet, preferring the proprietary DECnet product line.

Like everyone - they almost all preferred their proprietary thing.

So it was a mixed bag: their hardware was _really_ important, but the
company itself, meh.


    > From: Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com>

    > I'm think I remember a trend where user demand forced them to add
    > TCP/IP in parallel with their proprietary network standard and then
    > eventually, the bulk of the traffic went to the Internet via TCP/IP
    > since users (e.g., big corporations) in fact didn't want to be
    > locked into a single vendor.

Not so much a single vendor, as network effect, IIRC: via the Internet you
could communicate with _anyone_, whereas the proprietary network let you
into a much less universal set.

	Noel