[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2019-02-16 08:23, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 2:58 PM Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Dennis' decision to adopt TCP/IP for NSFNET was critical.
>>
> Hmmm.  It certainly did not hurt and I agree was cleafrly an amplifier and
> important.   But I'm not sure that was as important as the basic economics
> of the time -> Moore's Law and cheap cycles (i.e. I don't think the NFSNET
> choice, while helped the effect, was not the high order bit on the success
> function).

I took the original question to be about when the success of TCP/IP became
formally recognized. You are undoubtedly right that its market success was
a result of availability in BSD, with a usable API, just when Unix was taking
off.

   Brian

> 
> This was the time of the beginning of the workstation wars and the dominate
> OS was UNIX and in particular BSD which came with a known working IP stack
> (as I said, the USG paid to have that written by BBN).   Other stacks were
> for BSD were available on the market and there were even OSI stack
> implementations to be found.
> 
> But the code that was being written at the time assumed BSD sockets, which
> most naturally mapped to (assumed) IP/TCP.  I think the >>user<< code does
> not get enough of the credit here.  Because it was that code that provied
> the services that we think of as the 'value.'   I think the NSFNET choice
> was driven by the cheap Unix implementations not the other way around.  But
> the HW and SW just used sockets (and TCP under the covers) to do real
> work.   Once those services were there, and they were interconnected, the
> protocol that provided it all took off.
> 
> If a different system had been as cheap to use and used OSI (or whatever),
> I think that would have been the winner.  IP road the success wave of the
> cheap cycles that the UNIX workstations created and provided by Moore's law.
> 
> I really believe that it Metcalfe's Law made those system more and more
> valuable because they could be interconnected and the services agregated,
> but the systems had to start to be in place to get the effect started.
> That said, the two processes played on each other.   The Internet boom
> absolutely needed cheap HW and SW to be there so that the Noel's
> observation about the phone to be true.
> 
> Looking at it from a different and related technology.   AT&T made the
> cheap phone in the 50s and 60s and Metcalfe's law made it useful (remember
> AT&T spent $200 per American household in 1959 dollars to install that
> black hand set.  But once it was there, then magic happenned).   The
> Internet and IP/TCP needed the moral equiv of cheap cycles to be
> ubiquitious before it would dominate.
> 
> 
>   ... TCP/IP-based networking engineering expertise and products.  By
>> 1988/1989, the market for TCP/IP products was much bigger (and visibly so)
>> than OSI and we had (a small number of) thousands of network engineers who
>> understood how to put together and operate TCP/IP networks.
>>
> That's because of Moore's law, UNIX the cheap workstation etc....
> 
> Clem
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