[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 52, Issue 5

[odlyzko at umn.edu]

Well, we may have to continue disagreeing.  My argument
is that while the OSI/CCITT people did indeed try to
come up for complicated protocols for each application,
this would not have worked.  The 1966 Carterfone decision
limited (at least in the US) what the telcos could do,
and in any event, the bulk of data communications, up
until the end of the 1990s, was carried not by the
public Internet, but by corporate private line networks,
X.25, Frame Relay, and the like, where the telco had
no insight into what was being carried.

At the time of the Netscape IPO in 1995, which by many
accounts was the start of the Internet bubble frenzy,
most individuals were online through services like
AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.  Here the telcos only
saw the modem calls from the home to the central office,
where it was handed off to AOL, ...  Now AOL and its
competitors switched to TCP/IP, but had that not been
available, they likely would have adopted something
else, again out of the telco control.  So there would
have been delay there, and of course more delay since
AOL, ..., tried to maintain their walled gardens, so
it would have taken some time to figure out how to
interconnect those services.  But, even though it would
have been clumsy, I expect it would have happened.

Andrew



> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 15:34:52 +0100
> From: Johan Helsingius <julf at Julf.com>
> To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> Subject: Re: [ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 52, Issue 4
> Message-ID: <8cbb4754-06b4-413e-a598-6f20bbe8ddfd at Julf.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 15/03/2024 15:19, Andrew Odlyzko via Internet-history wrote:
>
>> Yes, PTTs were definitely trying to preserve their monopolies.
>> But I am pretty sure that if the Internet had not come out
>> when it did, what the public sees and does would have turned
>> out pretty much the same, but delayed a couple of years.
>
> I think I have to disagree. The Internet was a success because
> it was open-ended, and from the start assumed that people would
> do all sorts of unexpected stuff on top of the protocols, while
> the OSI/CCITT people tried to come up with all the ways to
> use the net, and then define (by committee) complicated
> protocols for each application.
>
> 	Julf
>
>