[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Tony Li]

On Feb 9, 2011, at 4:35 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:

> 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.

If I squint, I'd claim that UUCP/Usenet and BITnet might count as second movers.  I think it's obvious that it wasn't even a race.

Tony