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

[Bob Purvy]

> An essential difference that surfaced back when I was writing about this
was that one community required unanimity, and thus tended towards
solutions that were the union of everybody's wishlists.  The other
wanted something working yesterday and therefore tended to 'settle' for
the intersection of the many lists.

well said. I didn't claim that YOU said the BDFL stuff; that was me.

I think your comment about "unanimity" is a bit misleading. As I recall,
there were always some people who wanted more, but the leadership assumed
its burden and said No, and everyone respected them enough to leave it at
that.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 9:09 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
> > 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'? "
>
>
> hmmm.  I'm pretty sure my comments in this space have not cited an
> ultimate authority, for breaking deadlocks, as required. Certainly there
> are examples of its being quite helpful, in the Internet's history, but
> I don't think it was a primary reason for success.  (Early central
> funding, from ARPA and later NSFNet was certainly important, but that's
> different from the technical decision processes.)
>
> And, as I do make a point of citing, both communities had bright,
> well-intentioned folk forming their communities. And both had
> administrative hierarchies.
>
>
> An essential difference that surfaced back when I was writing about this
> was that one community required unanimity, and thus tended towards
> solutions that were the union of everybody's wishlists.  The other
> wanted something working yesterday and therefore tended to 'settle' for
> the intersection of the many lists.
>
> The difference between leaner, quicker specs that got plenty of field
> experience, versus bloated, slow specifications with essentially no
> serious field experience, is what swamped the OSI boat.
>
> d/
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>
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