[ih] Why it happened the way it did? [was Re: OpenPGP and email lists]

[Dave Crocker]

>> During the 1990s and 2000s, I watched as all of those competitors
>> disappeared.  It seemed like it happened almost overnight. 
>
> It had actually happened before 1990, and all the multiprotocol stuff
> was a legacy that took 15 years or so to go away. It's conventional
> to say that it was the Web that killed all the competition, but IMHO
> the game was already over well before the Web came on the scene. 


I think the Internet's momentum was solidly in place, in the latter 
1980s, with NSFNet's development, including its organizational and 
economic model moving to federated and self-funded operations.

Besides that, I suspect some credit should accrue to a rather obscure, 
contemporaneous accomplishment that Craig Partridge consistently cites:  
Getting multiple, heterogeneous email networks to agree to use the DNS 
MX record for publicl routing.

  d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social