[ih] History from 1960s to 2025

[Dave Crocker]

On 12/17/2025 2:17 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> - 1980s: US government embraces COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) 
> policy, which encourages the development of commercial products for 
> use in the TCP environment;  corporate representatives from tech 
> companies begin to participate in Internet technology development and 
> standardization efforts (IETF); DoD limits funding of custom systems 
> and research in favor of using commercial products

Not sure how much influence the COTS policy had on broader adoption.  My 
impression was that the forces towards commercial adoption of Internet 
technology were really just organization operations benefits.

Best example I had at the time was with one of Wollongong's major 
European customers of TCP/IP software. In spite of Europe's being the 
hotbed of OSI, it was a major fraction of our TCP/IP revenue. Also, of 
course, it was arguably completely independent of US Gov't policy.

The exemplar customer was... ISO.  I chatted with their IT manager who 
was the customer and asked whether he got much push-back for this 
choice.  He snapped that they got to tell him what services they needed, 
not how to provide them.



> - 1990s: Commercial users, and the public, get tired of waiting for 
> the internet wars to end, notice that TCP technology is available, can 
> be observed to work, and can solve their immediate IT problems; the 
> TCP Internet grows rapidly in the general public worldwide; 
> corporations deploy private "intranets" using TCP products; all 
> competing internet architectures fade into oblivion

The wars were over by the latter 1980s.  As I like to report, by around 
1988, I was contacting customers to find out what sorts of transition 
tools they wanted, to move from TCP/IP to OSI and in every case they 
said they had no interest in that capability, but uirgently needed OSI 
to TCP/IP transition tools.

The simple fact was that by that time, Internet tech offered a complete 
set of capabilities for connectivity and basic application services.  
Even better was that it had well-demonstrated an ability both to scale 
and to adapt.  And continued doing /that/ into the 1990s.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
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