[ih] XEROX/PUP and Commercialization (was Re: FYI - Gordon Crovitz/WSJ on "Who Really Invented the Internet?")

[Craig Partridge]

> To be clear, I was not referring to the political aspects of the =
> article,=20
> but  the references along the lines of:
> 
>  "So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest =
> company in the world? "

So, on the XEROX issue.  (Ignoring the WSJ essay until the last sentence).

I was not there for most of this and have heard things piecemeal so parts
may be wrong.  But the broad sketch is:

    * XEROX did some amazing stuff with networked Ethernets, including
      the first voice over data networks experiments, simple bridging,
      networked workstations, and distributed nameservers, in the 1970s
      and early 1980s that still resonate today.

    * They also developed an internetworking protocol stack called PUP
      (PARC Universal Packet).  PUP was similar to TCP/IP and some
      (lots?) of ideas got swapped.

    * When Bob Metcalfe cofounded 3COM, he used PUP and Ethernet as the
      starting point for their networking products and for a time they
      did pretty well selling an local enterprise network solution.

Neither PUP nor 3COM ever offered a system that could deal with a world
with multiple independent operators (aka the EGP/BGP problem).

So, XEROX's technology was commercialized.  It had its day and then faded.

Thanks!

Craig