[ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?

[Jack Haverty]

On 3/27/19 2:15 PM, Karl Auerbach wrote:

> The result 
> was that all of the TCP stack venders for PC's - FTP Software, Beame and 
> Whiteside, WRQ, NRC, Netmanage, etc were freed from the burden of 
> writing device driver code.

Interesting...  In that era (circa 1990-2) I was at Oracle, and I recall
the pain of having to get our "application" software (i.e., databases)
to run over at least 30 separate implementations of TCP just for PCs.

The "packet driver" standardization may have made it easier for all
those people to write their TCP stacks -- but there was no such
standardization at the next level - the APIs that allowed an app to use
those stacks.  So we needed different code for each TCP stack.

TCP of course offered standardization -- but within its own walled
garden, competing with OSI, DecNet, SNA, Vines, XNS, Netware, etc. 
TCP's walled garden won the battle and all the others died out.

I wonder if that is where the boundary starts between interoperability
and walled gardens - i.e., where people take advantage of the "lower"
uniformity brought by some standard (whether in spec or in code), but
fail to coordinate standardization at the level "above" them, where they
present their services to the next guy up.  By maintaining uniqueness,
they hope their walled garden will be the one to thrive.

The history of all those walled gardens and boundaries seems like an
important part of Internet History.

/Jack Haverty