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

[Craig Partridge]

I would argue that 1989 was ahead of the curve (and we should give due
credit to Brian and Tim -- they were 6 years ahead of Bill Gates!).
Indeed, if memory serves, Vint used to say the 1989 Interop showfloor in
the San Jose TechMart (first Interop with a serious show floor, after two
proto-Interops in Monterey and before Interop moved to the SJ Convention
Center) was when he had his epiphany that TCP/IP was pulling ahead.

By 1990, Heiden should have known better :-)

Craig

On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 2:29 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 2/3/2025 12:11 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > It is not coincidence that the original proposal for the Web [1] and
> > my paper "Is OSI too late?" [2] were written in offices about 30
> > metres apart in the same year.
>
> 1989 was an excellent time for papers like yours.  The war was, in fact,
> already over.  But the management mindshare for OSI was extremely
> sticky.  They'd had what?  15 years of intense marketing?
>
> I think it was 1990, with a panel about networking at some conference.
> Heidi Heiden gets up and gives a clear-eyed acknowledgement that OSI had
> been constantly promising it would be ready for production
> environment,.. in two years.
>
> But, he insisted, progress really had been made and OSI was finally
> going to be usable in a production context.  He estimated that we should
> plan on deploying it in 1992.
>
> I commented out loud that that was 2 years.
>
> This is my story.  There were many stories like this.  But this one was
> mine.  (Well, I have many similar stories, as do many of you.  But this
> one was mine.)
>
> d/
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
>
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>
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