[ih] Why did TCP win? [Re: Internet-history Digest, Vol 63, Issue 3

[Bob Purvy]

I've heard Dave say this before. I think the political/management lesson of
all this is: without someone to say No and make it stick, design efforts
always devolve to the lowest common denominator. All the dumb ideas get
folded in.
OSI was a committee without a BDFL. That's why they tried to satisfy
everyone by having different "profiles."

TCP didn't have a single BDFL but it had a group of wise people, most of
whom are still with us, who could say No. In my own WG (RFC 1697) we had
Marshall Rose, whom I remember saying, "What part of 'no' don't you
understand? The 'n' or the 'ol'? "

On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 10:20 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 2/2/2025 3:16 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> > I've always answered that with: Because it worked, had a full suite
> > of applications, and it was free on Unix, and modestly priced on
> > most other operating systems.
>
> /Specs/ and reference software were both free.  Big advantage over OSI.
> (I think the Unix version was nice, but Unix had such a tiny market
> share at that point, I suspect it didn't sway the market choice as we
> might think.)
>
> 20 years of operational history.  Big advantage over OSI.
>
> Telnet, FTP, email. In use over that entire time.
>
> Quick updates and quick development of specs.  OSI, well, umm...
>
>
> >
> > After 1995 you could add "because of the Web".
>
> TCP had clearly and definitively won by the latter 1980s, before the Web
> was created.
>
> The Web added sex appeal, just in time for the mass-market knee of the
> growth curve to need it.
>
>
> > (IBM watchers might add: it also worked over Token Ring,
> > despite Ellen Hancock's best efforts.)
>
> It ran over everything.  Someone should make a t-shirt about that.
>
> And just as significantly, it ran /the same/ over everything. OSI didn't.
>
>
> > That's over-simplified, but I think it's ~ true. A more subtle
> > point is that all the OSI hype prepared the market for a single
> > non-proprietary protocol suite, but TCP/IP was ready first.
>
> Indeed, OSI was wonderful strategic marketing, creating the pull for
> TCP. I forget the exact wording, but the comment was "OSI created the
> demand and TCP filled it".  Was that Marshall Rose or someone else?
>
> I forget the exact percentage, but Europe was maybe 40% of our sales for
> TCP.
>
> Latter 80s, we started looking to our customers for what they wanted, to
> do TCP-to-OSI transition, and they all came back saying their transition
> requirement was OSI-to-TCP...
>
>
> d/
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>
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