7 Feb
2019
7 Feb
'19
12:18 a.m.
From: Kevin Bowling
I think TCP was a success because of BSD/UNIX rather
than its own
merits.
Nope. The principle reason for TCP/IP's success was that it got there first,
and established a user community first. That advantage then fed back, to
increase the lead.
Communication protocols aren't like editors/OS's/yadda-yadda. E.g. I use
Epsilon - but the fact that few others do isn't a problem/issue for me. On the
other hand, if I designed, implemented and personally adopted the world's best
communication protocol... so what? There'd be nobody to talk to.
That's just _one_ of the ways that communication systems are fundamentally
different from other information systems.
Noel
7 Feb
7 Feb
12:40 a.m.
New subject: OSI stack (Was: Posters)
Seems like a case of winners write the history books. There were
corporate and public access networks long before TCP was set in stone
as a dominant protocol. Most F500 were interchanging on SNA into the
1990s. And access networks like Tymnet, etc to talk to others.
TCP, coupled with the rise of UNIX and the free wheel sharing of BSD
code, are what made the people to talk to.
On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 4:19 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
From: Kevin Bowling
I think TCP was a success because of BSD/UNIX
rather than its own
merits.
Nope. The principle reason for TCP/IP's success was that it got there first,
and established a user community first. That advantage then fed back, to
increase the lead.
Communication protocols aren't like editors/OS's/yadda-yadda. E.g. I use
Epsilon - but the fact that few others do isn't a problem/issue for me. On the
other hand, if I designed, implemented and personally adopted the world's best
communication protocol... so what? There'd be nobody to talk to.
That's just _one_ of the ways that communication systems are fundamentally
different from other information systems.
Noel 
12:52 a.m.
New subject: OSI stack (Was: Posters)
On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 04:40:24PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
Seems like a case of winners write the history books.
There were
corporate and public access networks long before TCP was set in stone
as a dominant protocol. Most F500 were interchanging on SNA into the
1990s. And access networks like Tymnet, etc to talk to others.
Yeah, but those were all tied to some vendor. TCP/IP was the first
wide spread networking stack that you could get from a pile of different
vendors, Sun, Dec, SGI, IBM's AIX, every kernel supported it. System V
was late to the party, Lachman bought the rights to Convergent's STREAMs
based TCP/IP stack and had a tidy business for a while selling that stack
to lots of places. It was an awful stack, I know because I ported it to
a super computer and then to SCO's UNIX. When Sun switched to a System
Vr4 kernel, they bought it in some crazy bad deal and tried to use it
in Solaris. That lead to the tcp latency benchmark in lmbench because
Oracle's clustered database ran like shit on Slowaris and I traced it
down to their distributed lock manager and then whittled that code
down to lat_tcp.c. Sun eventually dumped that stack and went with
Mentat's code and tuned that back up. Sun actually dumped the socket
code and went just with STREAMs interfaces but was forced to bring
back sockets. Socket's aren't great but they won and there is no
turning back.
TCP, coupled with the rise of UNIX and the free wheel
sharing of BSD
code, are what made the people to talk to.
BSD wasn't free until much later than TCP/IP. TCP/IP was developed in
the 1970's.
http://www.securenet.net/members/shartley/history/tcp_ip.htm
https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_tcpip.htm
1:04 a.m.
New subject: OSI stack (Was: Posters)
On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 4:52 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 04:40:24PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
This is where I am out of my depth, was it a "success" before the
mid-late '80s as some dominant force? My reading is no outside
universities with UNIX/BSD. The meteoric success came a bit later in
the '80s with NSFNET, the rise of Cisco, and then the internet
exchange culture in the early '90s CIX, PAIX, Metropolitan Fiber
Systems etc got us to today and off Bell System stuff.
Seems like a case of winners write the history
books. There were
corporate and public access networks long before TCP was set in stone
as a dominant protocol. Most F500 were interchanging on SNA into the
1990s. And access networks like Tymnet, etc to talk to others.
Yeah, but those were all tied to some vendor. TCP/IP was the first
wide spread networking stack that you could get from a pile of different
vendors, Sun, Dec, SGI, IBM's AIX, every kernel supported it. System V
was late to the party, Lachman bought the rights to Convergent's STREAMs
based TCP/IP stack and had a tidy business for a while selling that stack
to lots of places. It was an awful stack, I know because I ported it to
a super computer and then to SCO's UNIX. When Sun switched to a System
Vr4 kernel, they bought it in some crazy bad deal and tried to use it
in Solaris. That lead to the tcp latency benchmark in lmbench because
Oracle's clustered database ran like shit on Slowaris and I traced it
down to their distributed lock manager and then whittled that code
down to lat_tcp.c. Sun eventually dumped that stack and went with
Mentat's code and tuned that back up. Sun actually dumped the socket
code and went just with STREAMs interfaces but was forced to bring
back sockets. Socket's aren't great but they won and there is no
turning back.
TCP, coupled with the rise of UNIX and the free
wheel sharing of BSD
code, are what made the people to talk to.
BSD wasn't free until much later than TCP/IP. TCP/IP was developed in
the 1970's.
http://www.securenet.net/members/shartley/history/tcp_ip.htm
https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_tcpip.htm
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participants (3)
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jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu -
Kevin Bowling -
Larry McVoy