[ih] Internet History - Commercialization (was Re: When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?)

[Vint Cerf]

Good points, Jack - and certainly add color to the tenor of the times.

v


On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 3:51 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> [Thread renamed to better reflect topic...]
>
> I agree with all of Vint's thread, but I'd like to add to it.  I think
> there were several other situations and activities that I think also
> drove commercialization of "The Internet"
>
> 1) The Proliferation of Private internets (aka Intranets)
>
> 2) Parallel Creation of Other internets (aka Othernets)
>
> 3) Deployment of Multi-Protocol internets (aka Multinets)
>
> 4) Establishment of a Internet Technician pipeline
>
> 5) Adoption of Web technology as a Client/Server standard
>
> Intranets
>
> While "The Internet" was growing, and steered by decisions by
> organizations such as NSF, NIST, etc., the same hardware and software
> was used to build private internets, totally disjoint from "The
> Internet".  This probably occurred first in governmental arenas, where
> it was straightforward for a non-research group to simply buy some
> routers and hook them together as a private intranet.  The same was soon
> true in commercial environments.  I personally encountered this in
> 1989-90 while consulting for a large Wall Street investment house, who
> were struggling to deploy their own TCP-based intranet connecting LANs
> and Sun workstations in New York, London, and Tokyo.  But there were
> many types of Intranets, not based on TCP, because of Othernets.
>
> Othernets
>
> While "The Internet" was evolving, other organizations were building and
> promoting their own technology.  Some of these were driven by "standards
> bodies" like ISO or CCITT.  Others were driven by corporations who each
> had their own version of a "global network".  IBM, DEC, Xerox, Wang,
> Novell, Banyan, Apple, and probably others I've forgotten all had their
> own technology for creating a global network.  All of these would work
> great in a global installation, at least according to Marketing,
> especially if you only used their hardware and software.
>
> Multinets
>
> With so many choices, people made different decisions.   Engineering
> seemed to like DECNET.  Finance was true-blue with IBM SNA.  Marketing
> often had Appletalk.  Departments with lots of PCs had multiple choices,
> e.g., Novell, Banyan, etc.  The weird guys in the Lab had something
> called TCP (which, if you were in the UK, was a mouthwash).  There were
> X.25 networks in use, and perhaps someone was talking about ISO for the
> long-term solution, but they were still waiting for something they could
> install.
>
> Multi-protocol routers, bridges, and other such pieces of the Tinker Toy
> networking kit allowed you to run as many different Othernets as you
> liked, all over the same physical wires and circuits.  Instead of
> picking one of the choices as your corporate standard, you could just
> have them all.  You could have your own private Multinet.
>
> The Technician Pipeline
>
> With all of these different network technologies and products, staffing
> an IT department was a formidable challenge.   You could hire people,
> and them send them to the various vendors' training to learn how to use
> each particular technology and products.  Of course everyone would need
> retraining frequently as all the technologies were evolved.   And then
> the best people might disappear, lured off to some other IT department.
>
> The exception was the TCP world.  Somehow it seemed that new graduates
> were continually emerging from Academia already trained and experienced
> in using TCP-based systems.  There seemed to be a pipeline through the
> schools around the world that was pumping TCP-qualified potential IT
> staff out into the world, who could get a TCP-based system up and
> running while other technologies advocates were still in networking school.
>
> Web Technology as Client-server Standard
>
> By the early 90s, the networking started by the ARPANET had evolved for
> 20 years.  But over those decades, the search for the next "killer app"
> hadn't produced much.  File transfer, remote terminal access, and
> electronic mail were still the primary "apps" used broadly, and had been
> for 20 years.
>
> With the advent of The Web, that changed in the early/mid 90s.  Suddenly
> there was a new "protocol on the wire" technology that enabled people to
> create and consume content, without the requirement to have the
> identical word-processing, graphics, or other "user interface" software
> on every machine.  The first new "killer app" in 20 years had appeared.
>
> In the general business world, people wrote and read documents, but they
> also did a lot of other tasks with their IT systems.  They did inventory
> control.  They ran analyses, in financial, sales, marketing,
> engineering, and every other business discipline.  They modelled
> physical systems such as weather or economics.   They did everything
> associated with their business operations, using computers.
>
> Although the Web technology began as a way to collaborate on documents,
> it had the requisite "hooks" to enable "documents" to be generated on
> the fly, tailored by instructions gathered from the human user who would
> be viewing the result.   This enabled many of the broader business tasks
> to be done using Web technology.   Instead of viewing a Quarterly
> Analysis using an application on your workstation, you could view that
> same analysis as a "web page" that had just been created by a program as
> you just specified.
>
> In effect, the Web technology brought a wire-protocol standard for
> "Client-Server" interactions to the TCP technology arsenal.   That was a
> capability none of the "Othernet" players had.
>
> ======================================================
>
> All of the above reflects only what I personally experienced.  So
> there's probably a lot more that was going as well that should be
> included when looking at the Commercialization aspect of Internet History.
>
> Note that everything I just mentioned happened outside of the topics
> that are most often discussed here as "Internet History" - RFCs, IENs,
> IETF, IAB, ISO, NIST.   Those were all important, but I think there was
> lots of other things going on, like the ones I listed, that also
> strongly influenced the growth of the Internet.
>
> It seems to me that there's quite a lot of material recorded in things
> like the RFCs and even academic papers, but very, very little about the
> myriad "Othernet" technologies, or about what was going on in the "User"
> (i.e., Commercial) business world as it struggled to actually use all of
> this stuff.
>
> Back in the early 90s, Oracle had recruited me as "Internet Architect"
> with the rather vague direction to "get us into the Internet
> business".   I recall one meeting, circa 1991-2 (pre-Web), where I
> finally realized that TCP had won.
>
> We had a "Customer Council" which was composed of senior staff (CIO,
> CTO, etc.) of a diverse group of customers.  They were all from
> non-techology companies, e.g., Finance, Manufacturing, Transportation,
> etc., and from different countries and continents.  Their common mission
> was to figure out how to use IT technology in their business operations.
>
> One of our meetings focussed on networking.  We went around the room,
> and everyone briefly described their existing networking.  There were
> "IBM shops", "DEC shops", and the like, but they all had smatterings of
> other stuff, e.g., PC-based LANs of some ilk, etc.  They were all
> becoming de facto Multinet IT departments.   More accurately, they were
> struggling to get it all to work.
>
> We went around the room again, and got everyone to describe their
> corporate strategy - their vision of where they wanted to get to.
>
> I was absolutely blown away by the response.  Several dozen large
> corporations, in many industries, across many geographies ... every one
> of them said their future target was TCP.  It might take them years, but
> that was the destination.
>
> I had to ask "Why TCP?"....
>
> There were a few common themes in the answers:
>
> - This multi-technology stuff is driving us nuts.
>
> - TCP works.  We can see it running in the Internet (e.g., at Interop).
> We have it running in our lab.  We can see other people using it
> successfully.  It's here.  We can use it.
>
> - TCP is under our control.  [Bet you thought IETF was in charge...] TCP
> is an open de facto "standard", unencumbered by secrecy, patents, or
> vendors' business strategies and changing plans.  We can buy products
> from many vendors, and we could, if we really had to, even build missing
> pieces ourselves.
>
> - TCP is well-supported.  In particular, we can hire people, even just
> out of college, who already know about TCP and often already have
> several years operational experience with it.  They "hit the ground
> running" in our IT department, saving us lots of time, and money.
>
> No one brought up anything resembling a technical issue.  No "the XYZ
> routing protocol is better than the "JKL" one, or anything like that.
>
> These themes tie back to events in the technology world.  For example,
> DARPA's choice to make TCP technology "open", and to create free
> implementations, coupled with NSF, CSNET, and other decisions to inject
> TCP into the academic machinery were likely crucial in creating that
> "pipeline" of qualified IT staff.
>
> Similarly, the technology industry's decision to proliferate competing
> technologies, and never coalesce into a standard, put the user
> communities in the position of having to deal with Multinets, which were
> a world-class arena for vendor finger-pointing.   If you think building
> an operating a TCP Intranet is challenging, think about a Multinet (been
> there, done that...)
>
> This led to the User community taking the lead, if inadvertently and
> reluctantly. E.g., the Web came from a User environment, driven by the
> need to share documents and data.
>
> ===================
>
> There was really a lot that happened outside of the more visible
> activities of the technical and standards worlds of IETF et al, much of
> which had significant effects on the growth and evolution of the
> Internet.  I only saw a small part of course, and haven't run across
> much else written about the networking experience in the "real world"
> back in the 80s/90s and even today.  Maybe I really should write down
> some more of at least what I remember.....
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
> On 2/15/19 1:29 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> > Commercialization of the equipment and software arose from a different
> > thread:
> >
> > 1. IBM, Digital and HP all implemented TCP/IP on their commercial
> > operating systems - but it was their Research Groups
> > who did that (I encouraged this).
> > 2. I also encouraged the UNIX TCP/IP development at 3COM for which
> > Metcalfe never forgave me because after
> > he implemented that offering, the Berkeley release came out for free
> > 3. INTEROP made Internet visible to a much larger, non-academic
> > audience, had training sessions and allowed
> > a lot of product vendors to demonstration the interoperability of
> > their software/hardware - a major sales point
> > when you are trying to decide what to buy.
> > 4. there were very few implementations of OSI and none that I know of
> > were commercially successful
> > 5. In 1992, NIST was persuaded to do an analysis of TCP/IP and OSI and
> > concluded that it was OK
> > for government users to procure TCP/IP despite previous guidance to
> > use OSI according to the
> > Government OSI Profile (GOSIP).
> > 6. MOSAIC hits about 1993 followed by Netscape Communications and its
> IPO.
> > 7. Cisco, Proteon and later, Juniper, produce commercial routers. Sun
> > Microsystems produces Work stations and they
> > all use TCP/IP.
> > 8. Novell tries to use IPX and XNS but just doesn't have the traction.
> >
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