[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[Jack Haverty]

My observation about the early 90s was based on conversations I had at 
the time with end-users - e.g., CTOs, CEOs, et al who were end-users of 
computing technology critical to their businesses, struggling to develop 
their own organization's networking strategy. When I met with such 
people in the early 90s, they had pretty much all committed to TCP as 
their target environment, with a plan to get there from their installed 
base.   It surprised me at the time, but my background to then had been 
as a networking vendor.

Networking and computing vendors were a little slower to realize TCP had 
won.

Jack


On 2/13/23 17:59, Charles H. Sauer (he/him) via Internet-history wrote:
>
> Staying on topic of installed base momentum...
>
> In hindsight, the writing of TCP winning may seem to have been on the 
> wall by the early 90s, but from a PC perspective that seems a decade 
> early. The decision makers in Cupertino, Redmond, and Provo, saw need 
> for, and perhaps even preferred, AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, and SMB, until 
> this century.
>
> A few specifics:
> o Appletalk support stayed in macOS until 10.6 release in 2009
> o Novell did not give preference to and natively support TCP/IP until 
> NetWare 5 in October 1998.
> o Windows 95 was the first legacy Windows version to have acceptable 
> TCP/IP
> o Windows NT 3.5 in September 1994 was the first NT based version to 
> support TCP/IP
> o Microsoft did not drop IPX/SPX until Windows Vista in 2007
> o Windows 11 still seems to have some allowances for SMB
>
> Charlie
>
> On 2/13/2023 7:25 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> On 2/13/2023 4:46 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>> IMHO by the early 90s, TCP had already won the competition, and 
>>> organizations everywhere were working on transitioning to the Internet
>>
>> this was really by 1988.  We'd started on an OSI stack and were 
>> planning on TCP-to-OSI transition products and started talking with 
>> customers about their needs.
>>
>> There was no interest from any of them in this, but they were quite 
>> eager for OSI-to-TCP transition products.
>>
>> d/
>>
>