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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 18-May-26 09:00, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 5/17/2026 1:50 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>> No Wollongong, no Web?
> 
> 
> I wonder.
> 
> HTTP seems pretty transport-agnostic to me.  It's PDU format arguably
> echos Internet mail's header style, but that was hardly unique by then.
> 
> On the other hand -- and this might have been your point -- having it
> running on TCP/IP gave it access to -- and accessible by -- a vastly
> larger and more heterogeneous population of potential participants.

Exactly. But the pragmatic reason at the time (1988, when TimBL did
his RPC project) was much more parochial. Physicists used VAXen and
were just at the crossover point of deserting VMS. And, not to
labour the point, OSI wasn't ready. I'm not saying that Tim didn't
have a wider vision, but he also had users. The large LEP experiments
at CERN started taking data in 1989, so there was a very strong
running code aspect to choosing TCP/IP. (That is also why I backed
off from CERN's OSI strategy in the same year.)

    Brian