[ih] Internet addressing history section

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 4:24 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:

>
>
> I’ve been wondering about the this topic for a while, why did tcp/ip win
> out over ipx/spx. There is probably a multitude of reasons, economic,
> social and technical. When just looking at the latter my hypothesis is that
> tcp/ip was the only networking stack in the late 80’s/early 90’s that did
> well in both WAN and LAN contexts.
>

Cole's law:   *Simple economics always beats sophisticated engineering.*

IP/TCP won because it was the *most economical *solution at the time.  The
USG has spent a lot of money with example code for a number of did
operating systems and that code was available.  Today we call this 'Free
and Open Source.'   In those days, it was just how it was done ;-)

We had examples to work with and we used them.   I will tell you straight
out, when Stan and I wrote the VMS implementation in Bliss and CDC-Cyber
Implementations in 1979 we had the RFCs and IEN, but we also had an early
BBN examples (as well as the MIT/Multics version).   The problem with the
Xerox stack was, it was Xerox's - nothing to look at but some papers from
PARC.   Just like DECnet was DEC's and SNA was IBM.  It was originally seen
as a walled garden and in fact the original Novell implementation was just
that.

It was not a technical discussion; WAN or LAN.   IP/TCP was what was
there.  So we used it. We were making an internal network at Tektronix.
 We did not think we would be able to get it connected to ARPA's Research
Network.  In fact until CS-NET was created it was being offered to us to do
that.  But we needed 'WAN' (site to site connectivity), we also need to
talk to our high systems as well as eventually LANs (remember I was 3Com
first customer, beause we could not >>buy<< the 3M Xerox stuff - we
eventually built our own LAN called the 'NIBB - Network Interface Black
Box' that used 75 ohm coax).   We switched to Ethernet only when we could
buy it.

I think the same thing went in other places and by the time of BSD and the
Unix Wars the die was cast.

Clem
ᐧ
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