[ih] Why TCP?

[Vint Cerf]

I think Noel is largely correct although it was the NSF decision to use
TCP/IP for both CSNET and then NSFNET that drew significant academic
uptake. The ARPA-sponsored academic sites were mostly CS research into AI
and related areas - numbering around a dozen in the early days, but growing
to about 40-50 as the TCP research continued.

v


On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Jack Haverty
>
>     > TCP/IP technology is fine, but there were numerous other ways to
> define
>     > the technical mechanisms that could have evolved into The Internet.
> The
>     > people driving all those technologies had to make a similar decision.
>     > They all made the wrong choice, and their technologies have all but
>     > disappeared.
>
> My perception is that the single biggest reason that TCP/IP became the
> protocols used on 'the Internet' (and I hate that some people don't get why
> there's a capital on it - I look forward to the new US President being
> installed in the white house) is not so much its internal technical
> goodness,
> or even the openness, but other factors - the biggest of which, I think,
> was
> the size of the inter-connected user base.
>
> The point of a communication network is to communicate with people, and so
> naturally people, when deciding which network to hook up to, will tend to
> pick the one with the most, since it gives them the most benefit. (I think
> Metcalfe has a Law about that?) And that tends to drive the smaller
> networks
> out of existence, and the whole ecosystem toward one single Network To Rule
> Them All. (The same force acted on the telephone network back when, I
> expect.)
>
> The TCP/IP Internet, starting as it did with large chunks of the US
> academia,
> and tech businesses (plus government and military, although they were
> secondary), just had a lead nothing else could ever catch. And as time went
> on, it got worse (feedback)...
>
> (I expect the X.25 networks probably started with a large user base, but
> that
> may be one place where technical capability _did_ play a role: TCP/IP
> worked
> well over LANs, which were going crazy at that point.)
>
> An ancillary factor was the wide variety of systems for which TCP/IP
> implementations were available - and the two fed back between each other.
>
>         Noel
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