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

[John Day]

I have to agree with Jack.  The idea of an internet was very much in 
the air and was undoubtedly invented independently by many and about 
the same time.  It was (like packet switching) obvious. Someone was 
going to do it.

And to a large degree, which one ended up becoming dominant in the 
market is also not that important except in terms of what kind of 
legacy we get saddled with.  Gee, wasn't DOS or System/360 just the 
greatest thing every!?  (not)  We all know the technically superior 
solution seldom wins. That is not a mark of greatness in my book.

What I look for are those insights that turn things in a different 
direction, that come out of the blue, that one didn't expect, that 
make one re-think what you thought you knew.  To me those are the 
truly great discoveries.  The ones we should be heralding.

In networking, I have only seen two:  Pouzin's shift to 
non-determinism with datagrams, building a reliable network from 
unreliable elements. And Watson's proof that bounding 3 timers are 
the necessary and sufficient condition for synchronization.  All the 
rest is pretty straightforward stuff that pretty much any of us could 
have done.

At 18:07 -0700 2012/07/23, Jack Haverty wrote:
>It's articles like this, especially in publications well respected for
>journalistic quality, that might finally trigger me to write down my
>own perspective on internet history...people keep telling me I should
>write a book.    My opinion of the WSJ has dropped several notches.
>
>No one can really define "The Internet".  Or maybe just everyone has
>their own idea.  Whatever it it, I don't claim to have invented it.
>I'm not sure when it was invented.  But there's a good chance I was
>there at the time, along with quite a few others in the heyday period
>of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
>
>IMHO, all of these learned publications and arguments miss the point
>of "the Internet", and especially what was actually "invented".
>
>At the time, there were many companies and organizations working on
>networking computers.  IBM had interconnected computers well before
>the 70s.  Xerox did XNS, and I remember John Schoch and/or Larry
>Stewart being at several of the Internet meetings, one of which was
>even held at PARC.  There was lots of technical exchange, in both
>directions, with lots of research groups, in government, industry, and
>academia.
>
>DEC had DECNet.  Novell had Netware.  PTTs had X.25/X.75.  Banyan did
>Vines. Apple did Appletalk.  Microsoft joined the fray.   ARPANet had
>its own technology.  Networking was the new cool thing.  Everybody was
>doing it, and inventing their own technology to interconnect computers
>and networks.
>
>All of those "internets" shared a common characteristic.  Computers,
>and applications, could interact in powerful ways - as long as they
>all adopted the same candidate technology.  You had to pick one, and
>hope it would be the right choice.  Many companies were "IBM shops".
>Others were "DEC shops".  Smaller companies chose Netware, or
>Microsoft, or Apple, or some other technology oriented toward LANs and
>office computing.  All of these technologies and products battled for
>customer attention and "market share".
>
>These various internet technologies shared another common
>characteristic - it was painful, expensive, difficult, and/or
>impossible to interconnect computers that had adopted different
>technologies.  In every one of these "internet" approaches, it was
>expected that the customers would eventually see the light and adopt
>their obviously superior particular internet approach as the corporate
>standard.  The other companies and inferior technologies would
>eventually wither away.
>
>Meanwhile, companies wanted to interconnect with their customers and
>suppliers.  They wanted their Apple-based marketing department to be
>able to interact with their DEC-based engineering and IBM-based
>accounting operations.  They wanted to interconnect *all* of their
>relevant computers, even those in other companies.  They wanted to
>avoid being locked-in to a single technology and manufacturer.  They
>wanted it to be cost-effective and reliable.  They wanted to survive
>and thrive as a business, using networked computers as a powerful
>tool.
>
>TCP/IP - the basis for "The Internet" - was yet another internet
>technology of the 70s/80s.  One can argue forever about the merits of
>the technical differences of all the internets and who invented what.
>But the TCP/IP world - *all* of the technology embodied in all those
>RFCs, IENs, etc. - had some unique non-technical characteristics.   No
>company owned it.  There were few if any legal entanglements of
>patents, licenses, royalties, and such.  It was backed by a major
>government as an official Standard, and the required choice for use in
>government systems.  Most importantly, it worked.  It had been
>deployed and was in use in non-research environments by military and
>other governmental departments.  It had been implemented for computers
>of many types.  Schools were producing new employees who knew how to
>do things with TCP/IP, and weren't familiar with the others.
>Companies were offering products and services to deploy and operate
>TCP/IP-based systems, and interconnect them with others as desired.
>Early adopter pioneers in commercial activities such as manufacturing
>and finance had successfully deployed TCP/IP-based systems, and were
>either reporting good results or quietly outperforming their surprised
>competitors.   There was (and is still) a large, vibrant, open
>community actively improving and extending the technology, not subject
>to the business decisions of any one corporate management or political
>entity.
>
>Somewhere along that path, over the 30+ years or so of the journey so
>far, The Internet was invented.  It's hard to define...the technology,
>experience, processes, mechanisms, legal structure, public relations
>and marketing, the pool of expertise, and other fuzzy "culture" things
>that made it possible to interconnect most of the people, computers,
>companies, and human activities on the planet.
>
>This could have happened with any of those early internet
>technologies.  Xerox XNS wasn't all that different technically from
>TCP/IP and friends.  You could (maybe) build The Internet on
>X.25/X.75.  or on Netware with SPX/IPX.  Or Apple..  Or whatever.
>
>But it didn't happen on those.  It happened on TCP/IP.  DARPA started
>it.  NSF, DCA, and others helped move it along in the early years.
>Many others joined as The Internet became The Juggernaut that wiped
>out all those other technologies.  Tim Berners-Lee delivered the
>coup-de-grace with the Web.
>
>Who invented The Internet?   No clue.  I think it was DARPA - the
>organization with the technical knowledge, political skills, and
>vision to nurture the project and lead it forward until it became
>self-supporting and unstoppable.   The "invention" was that
>combination of technologies and business processes that DARPA used,
>and which made it possible to INTERconnect the plaNET.
>
>Whew, thanks for listening.  Now I feel better...
>
>/Jack Haverty
>Point Arena, CA
>July 23, 2012