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

[Jack Haverty]

I didn't mean that, in some alternate universe, the "internet today"
based on not-TCP would necessarily be anything like The TCP-based
Internet that we are actually experiencing in our universe.  It might
be much smaller, more expensive, slower, provide less functionality,
etc.  But if one of those competitors had been more proactive and
successful at nurturing their technology, and the government had not
nurtured TCP as I outlined, some alternate Internet might have come
into existence, rather than the TCP-based one.  That other "Internet"
would exist, but I suspect we wouldn't like it.  Actually there *was*
an alternate "Internet" using X.75, and as I recall it was virtually
unusable - slow, unreliable, and expensive.

I forgot to mention other competitors, e.g., Appletalk, DECNet, SNA
(which had "gateways"), and probably more that I've forgotten.

/Jack


On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 7/29/2012 2:00 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>>
>> If Xerox, or IBM, or Novell, CCITT/ISO, or any of the other
>> contemporary competitors building internet technology had done the
>> same things, The Internet today might be running on X.25/X.75, or
>> carrying PUPs, or using SPX/IPX, instead of TCP/IP.
>
>
>
> As a diffusion of innovation theoretical exercise, this might hypothesis
> might we worth considering.
>
> I could easily believe that XNS was capability of enjoying the same fate as
> what developed for TCP/IP.  I don't know what changes Novell made to their
> XNS, nee SPX/IPX, but if it wasn't too bad, I'll class that as fate-sharing
> with XNS.
>
> I don't believe for one minute that X.25/X.75 were capable of the kind of
> usage TCP/IP has experienced.  The complexity and limitations they imposed
> seem to me to require massively more expensive and massively less flexible,
> robust, etc., etc., operation.
>
>
> d/
>
> --
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net