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

[Miles Fidelman]

On 3/27/19 10:16 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:

> 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.


Interesting point.  I've always thought of walled gardens from the top 
down; with email being the clearest example.  First we had lots of email 
systems that didn't talk to each other - predating the ARPANET (e.g., 
mail on an individual time sharing system).  In the early days, we had 
vendor specific email, running within enterprises.  ARPANET bridged 
those - but only for a limited community.  Meanwhile, folks like AOL & 
Compuserve competed on how many people could be reached on their 
platform (not unlike the early telephone days - when a business had to 
have a dozen phones on their desk, from a dozen telcos, to allow all 
their customers to reach them).  And then, a little bit before the 
Internet fully opened to the public, we started to see email connections 
(e.g., Compuserve exchanged email with the Internet).

Now, email is starting to go the other way; what with various "secure" 
email systems promulgated by health care organizations, banks, and what not.

Calendars are the one that really bug me, though.  We have interoperable 
specs, they actually kind of worked - until Google stopped supporting 
them (funny how Microsoft Outlook DOES support them).  It makes 
scheduling a meeting a royal pain.

Looking at things from the bottom up provides an interesting alternative 
view.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown