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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 14-Feb-23 15:26, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

100% correct. And (just as SNA remained a cash cow for IBM for years after
it was overtaken by events), the other proprietary networking suites went
on generating cashflow... until they didn't.

I hear there are parts of the universe where OSI is still generating
cashflow.

    Brian

> 
> 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/
>>>
>>
>