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

[Dave Crocker]

On 2/3/2025 9:51 AM, touch at strayalpha.com wrote:
> IMO, it’s also very hard to notice when an exponential adoption curve 
> starts - in the beginning, it was just universities, then universities 
> and some workplaces, etc. Much like protocols, many user interfaces 
> were walled gardens that didn’t interoperate (Prodigy, the original 
> AOL, BBS systems) - until they started to, and when they did, they all 
> used TCP.


I think there is objective data, but I don't recall from where. And 1994 
seems to be a good reference for when things exploded. It certainly 
matches my subjective sense of what happened.

Remove of the Acceptable Use Policy made the opening of the floodgates 
official, but really, that was just making what was already happening 
formally.,.. acceptable.

I seem to recall someone doing an analysis of long-term data, and it 
predicted roughly that time-frame for the knee.

Separate from the numbers game, I cite 1990 for when I finally 
understood where the Net would go.

Given a half-day class on Internet tech in Pittsburgh -- ironically, to 
a class of bell-heads -- and demoing Gopher, since the web wasn't around 
yet.

We navigated a geographic hierarchy in gopher and landed on a page for 
Wellington NZ.  And from Pittsburgh, in 1990, we started reading the 
previous week's minutes from the Wellington Town Council.

It was then, finally, obvious to me that everyone was going to be online 
and was going to put absolutely everything online.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

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