[ih] The Internet Plan; was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Jack Haverty]

This discussion reminded me of a personal experience that I had about 20
years ago.  I think of it as my "Both Sides Now" experience (Google Joni
Mitchell - my apologies to the Folk Song crowd).

In 1990, I left the "Networking World", and moved "higher in the stack",
lured to Oracle as "Internet Architect".  At the time, TCP/IP had a
sizable installed base, and was an official DoD standard, but was still
usually characterized, outside of the academic/research community, as an
interim experiment pending the deployment of the OSI global standards.
Big and small technology vendors also had their own networking
technologies and products - SNA, DECNET, NetWare, Vines, Appletalk, etc.
All of these technologies had sizable installed bases, which were to be
replaced by OSI (at least that's what they said...).

Oracle's business was (and is) databases, which live at the core of most
sizable corporation's business mechanisms.  Those corporations all had
some kind of data center(s) and network(s) and their entire business
mechanisms depended on it.  Some were "IBM shops", some were "DecNet
shops", etc.  But they also typically had one or more other technologies
in place.  Perhaps DecNet was in Engineering, NetWare in Administration,
Appletalk in Marketing, etc.

Although TCP/IP provided transport, email, and such services, other
technologies provided more than TCP.  E.G., where TCP still only had the
1970s FTP for dealing with files, others had the ability to share files
in ways that made them as easy to use as local files.  Where TCP had
Telnet, others had the ability to use remote CRT screens.  Etc.

Working "higher in the stack", I encountered mostly people who were in
corporations' IT departments, involved with the business' data - as
opposed to people in Communications departments, involved with phone
lines, and such.  The corporations were also mostly not technology
companies.  Think finance, manufacturing, retail, commodities, shipping,
government, etc.

Going up the stack, I discovered I had passed through the clouds
(remember we always used to draw networks as clouds?).  I was now seeing
the network technology from the other side - hence the "Both Sides Now"
view.

The multiplicity of technologies was driving IT guys everywhere crazy.
With a data-centric viewpoint, it was hard to get the business data
accessible to everyone in the corporation who needed it, since they were
often on different technologies.  So we borrowed some ideas from the
Internet world, and created a product technology which was essentially
transport-level routers.  This enabled, for example, someone on an
Appletalk machine in Marketing to access data on a database running in
an SNA world, to look at data that had been just input from an engineer
on a machine in DecNet.  

We called the transport gateways "Interchanges" - but mostly I could use
the same slides I had used to talk about routers between networks to
talk about Interchanges between different protocol worlds.  Our products
only worked for database traffic - that made it a simple enough problem
to actually implement.  Just imagine the problems of testing -- I
remember that there were over 30 different implementations of TCP just
for PCs, and we had to test all of them (this was before TCP was
built-in to Windows).  Until OSI appeared, this made things workable,
although I'm sure you can imagine how complex it was to set up and
operate such environments.  We ran our own multiprotocol internal
worldwide network, so we felt the pain too.

Sometime in 1991, IIRC, we held a "Network Forum", which was basically a
week-long very small conference where the attendees were several dozen
of the CIOs or equivalent from a broad range of customers.  Many
different industries from multiple continents.  As part of the agenda,
each attendee described their current network environment - e.g., the
SNA shop with a splash of NetWare, etc.  It was a broad mix as you'd
expect.  But there were no "TCP shops", although almost everyone had TCP
somewhere in their organization.

Later on that week, we went around the room again and asked everyone to
tell us what they could about their future plans - where were they
heading, which technical path(s), timing, etc.

The responses absolutely astounded me.

Everyone was planning to go fully to TCP, as fast as possible.
Everyone.  

Let me say that again - everyone.  No one was a TCP shop then.  Everyone
intended to become a "TCP Shop".  As fast as they could.  Everyone.

Many hours of discussion later, I could see the pattern:

- TCP had a large installed base, and could be observed to be working
- the US government had committed to TCP as a standard, and was
enforcing it by procurement policy
- TCP was delivering what OSI was promising
- TCP was delivering functional systems, while OSI was delivering lots
of paper
- TCP was enough like OSI that, when/if OSI appeared it should be
relatively straightforward to migrate
- the new hires in IT, coming out of universities all over the world,
knew all about TCP when they started work; they rarely knew anything
about SNA, DecNet, OSI, etc., and they weren't very interested in
learning
- their own internal efforts with TCP had so far been refreshingly
successful (no doubt because of those new hires...)
- their competitors' similar efforts seemed to be successful (scary!)
- they were tired of waiting, and couldn't stand, or afford, the
multi-technology morass and perennial promises any longer
- TCP was very likely to be a lot less expensive to procure and operate
than the current systems
- TCP breaks the "lock-in" of a vendor-specific technology, and puts the
customer (IT) back in control

There wasn't any mention of anything like "technical superiority", or
comparisons of protocol features, or anything like that.

In short - TCP does the job, is proven, costs less, and works now.

Our "Interchange" technology turned out to be quite useful, but more as
a migration tool, allowing the various IT components to be moved into
the TCP world in a well-orchestrated fashion.  The business functions
could continue to function even as the components got moved from one
technology to another.  In some small way, this probably helped the TCP
conversion also.

So, I think that the main driving force behind TCP's explosion into the
mainstream was the Users (CIOs and staffs) in all those corporations in
all those industries around the world who saw it as the solution to
their problems.

When the Web appeared a few years later, it cast all those migration
plans in concrete, by providing "the" way for all those companies to
interact with their customers, suppliers, regulators, investors, etc.
The Web made a wonderful GUI for database applications.  But only over
TCP.

Hope you found this interesting,
/Jack

AIRI - As I Remember It