[ih] Why did TCP win?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Brian E Carpenter

    >> "Why did TCP win?"

    > I've always answered that with: Because it worked, had a full suite of
    > applications, and it was free on Unix

There was no single reason that it did; there were a long list of factors,
some of which you have mentioned there, and others have been given by other
posters, in later messages.

I don't even want to try and put them in weighted order; that would take a
lot of pondering (in the original meaning of the word).

Let me add a very important one, one that I don't recall having seen yet
(sorry if someone else mentioned it, and I missed it); 'Metcalfe's Law'.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Also referred to as 'installed base'. (Related to 'nobody ever got fired for
recommending IBM'.)

There is of course a complex interaction between the success of TCP/IP and
the success of the Internet. Metcalfe's Law was of course probably _the_
biggest cause of the success of the Internet - and if one wanted to connect
up to it, TCP/IP was an integral part of the package.

The period when TCP/IP was used inside organizations which had no extrnal
connection (and thus could have used _any_ protocol family) is thus probably
instructive. That period was short, but did exist - Novell Netware was a big
hit during it. (At a point in time when PC's and LANs were becoming popular.) 

One thing that would have made TCP/IP popular at that point was that it was
available for so any kinds of machines (for reasons touched on earlier); it
wasn't 'company X's protocol'.

	Noel