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

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 12:27 PM Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> wrote:

> On 2/18/2019 7:35 AM, Tony Finch wrote:
> > I was wondering what effect KA9Q had on low-end adoption. I turned up
> > later, but I remember stories from early (1992 ish) dial-up commercial
> > Internet users who relied on KA9Q.
>
>
> I believe KA9Q created a lingua franca for PC use of the Internet,
> within the technical community.  That counted as a major improvement, IMO.

IMO: Phil (who was a friend and former lab partner at CMU) did an
outstanding great job; although I would say FTP SW folks in Andover may
have been more important from a commercial standpoint.   Best I can tell,
Phil's implementation was popular in the ham community where he originally
released it to use over radio TTY HW.

The MIT's guys (I believe for Project Athena) and then created FTP actually
made a product that was tuned to PC Ethernet HW (and DOS).  I had access to
both implementations at the time. For instance, we used the FTP stuff for a
project at Mass General Hospital, even though it cost a few hundred dollars
and Phil's was 'open source'.   But FTP SW's solution was more polished and
integrated better into their environment.   Phil's stuff was a 'hackers
tool kit' and although I personally had it running at home, I can say I was
reluctant to use it someplace where I was not there to 'maintain it.'

One of the differences is that FTP guys did the important thing of creating
a socket implementation for windows and thus were able to port a lot of the
UNIX code using the 386 'DOS extender' from Pharlap and early 386/C
compiler.   For a short time, they seemed to be winning the IP for PC
battle until MSFT got the IP religion and included an IP/TCP implementation
in Win95.

Clem






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