[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[John Gilmore]

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>    	     	 		  	 I recall for example seeing a
> huge semi-truck filled with Sun workstations delivering to a Wall
> Street investment house.  The computer industry figured out that new
> characteristic of their marketplace, TCP became the effective
> Standard, regardless of what the official bodies said.

I was at Sun for a number of early years.  It was a bit obvious how Sun
standardized on TCP/IP.  First, TCP/IP was built into Berkeley UNIX,
which was the origin of SunOS.  It was there and it worked, and so we used
it in-house too ("eating our own dogfood" to ensure that it kept working
well).

Second, TCP/IP was free of cost.(*) Sun customers could buy third-party
products (some even resold by Sun) that implemented DECnet, SNA, X.25,
OSI, etc.  But they were all extra-cost products, and they typically
cost the customer hundreds or thousands of dollars for EVERY
WORKSTATION.  The percentage of customers who would pay that toll was
very small.

DARPA's contract to pay Berkeley to embed a working TCP/IP into the
freely available(*) Berkeley UNIX 4.3BSD distribution was certainly good
for driving TCP/IP acceptance among their academic research partners.
It had the perhaps unanticipated follow-on effect of driving the
acceptance of TCP/IP in the much broader commercial UNIX world that came
a very few years later.  Indeed, that story is a classic textbook
example of the power of freely available software to move markets in
positive directions for end-user benefit.(**)

	John

(*) BSD was free of per-copy cost if you already had an AT&T UNIX
license.  Academic sites got very cheap source code licenses from AT&T.
Commercial companies paid a "UNIX tax" per copy shipped in binary.  But
since that tax was built into the purchase price of the workstation, and
since in its early years Sun didn't "unbundle" its OS, there was no
further customer cost for the Berkeley-added TCP/IP.  Much later, the
BSD OS had all of its AT&T-licensed parts removed and replaced, becoming
fully both free-of-cost and free-as-in-freedom.

(**) The BSD+TCP example informed my later business model when founding
Cygnus Support.  Cygnus drove the acceptance of the GNU C and C++
compilers in the 1990s, by providing commercial support, customer-funded
improvements, and a train of increasingly reliable and capable
free-as-in-freedom releases.  The result was that for a few decades they
became and remained the default C compilers throughout the non-Microsoft
portions of the whole computer industry.