[ih] Why did TCP win?

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

On 03/02/2025 20:09, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
> 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'.

Bravo. that's the closest to my experience in the UK.
In the mid-nineties in Imperial College we asked ourselves why the 
sudden change of direction from OSI to TCP-IP and the factors were 
numerous, but from personal experience and in no particular order:

- OSI was primarily in a world of mainframes and large servers with dumb 
terminals but in the meantime the IBM PC had won the desktop.
- There was no easy to install OSI software for X.3 / X.25 / X.400 on a 
PC. In order to get anything working from your PC you'd need to run as a 
dumb terminal (VT55 or VT100 emulator) connecting to the serial port of 
your PC that was connected to a modem, over to some mainframe. And it 
all sucked. (sorry there is no other word I can use for it)
- To do file transfer you'd need to run Kermit, or Xmodem/Ymodel/Zmodem 
- and trust me, this was a pain to get working too

By the early 90s came a few things that changed the game for us:

- Phil Karn's KA9Q NOS that made life ever easier to run a TCP-IP stack
- Novell Netware that would manage to just about... work... with 3COM 
ethernet cards... and all the cheap NE1000, NE2000 knock-offs (with 
frequent freezes, and later, when Win3 got used instead of DOS 3.3, blue 
screens of death!)
- Trumpet Winsock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_Winsock
- Cheap/free software like PCRoute that could turn a cheap 286 PC with 
the above cards into a router between the thick Ethernet backbone 
(10base5) and our local thin Ethernet (10base2) and... to our amazement, 
10baseT which was a godsend compared to 10base2. (anyone who'd been 
running 10base2 cabling would know what I mean)

It was cheap and it worked. Telnet and FTP mostly worked out of the box. 
>From home, the above softwares would let you use your PC with a modem 
and run SLIP/PPP and it worked, and then when US Robotics got the modem 
to work at 56Kbit/s there was no way back.

I made many demos to companies in the City in 1993-4 using a variety of 
set-ups as above and the majority were still stuck in Token Ring + 
proprietary protocols because (a) "TCP-IP and Internet was not proven 
technology" and (b) what do you mean, this is not made by DEC or IBM? :-)

O.