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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 04-Feb-25 07:02, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

https://bgp.potaroo.net/ is a pretty good resource.

    Brian

> 
> 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/
>