[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Richard Bennett]

Yup, first mover advantage in networks gets you a huge lead, and when 
there's no second mover, it becomes absolute.

There really was no second mover, since the proprietary systems were 
never in the game by definition, and OSI never graduated from 
kindergarten. One major supporter's OSI implementation for the 
interoperability workshop was cobbled together out of pieces of code 
written in seven programming languages, a couple of them interpreted. 
The specs were impossible to decode and you couldn't begin to even think 
about interoperability without an agreement on subsets that was as deep 
as the process for writing the over-optioned specs themselves. And the 
difference between a network that works and no network at all is about a 
gazillion times bigger than the difference between a network that works 
comfortably today and one that barely works today but might work better 
ten years from now.

The Internet won by default.

RB

On 2/9/2011 4:25 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      >  From: Richard Bennett<richard at bennett.com>
>
>      >  The OSI development process was ultimately unsuccessful for a number of
>      >  reasons (too many cooks, counter-lobbying by IBM, the clambering of the
>      >  European PTTs for connection-oriented systems, the lack of any real
>      >  champions, etc.)
>
> Actually, IMO the biggest reason why TCP/IP wound up on top was simple:
> installed base, installed base, installed base.
>
> Other factors, such as the ones you mention, along with more mature
> implementations, people coming out of university familiar with it, etc, etc
> helped, but installed base was - and remains - the "location, location,
> location" of networking.
>
> 	Noel

-- 
Richard Bennett