Novell had NetWare and IPX. Apple had AppleTalk. There was also Token ring...

Even the Stanford/Cisco people were thinking "multiprotocol gateway" back then. Much of the push for TCP/IP came from the buy side. I did my networking work when I was at a big aerospace company, and we wanted everything to talk to everything else. Not have DECNET<->SNA<->XNS<->X.25<->TP4 gateways trying to interconvert. The vendors all pushed their proprietary systems.

Even Berkeley didn't get it at first. Early Berkeley TCP/IP only talked to other Berkeley TCP/IP systems. They had to be beaten on to get interoperability to work. 4.3BSD shipped with broken sequence number arithmetic that only talked to itself until we fixed that.

This was back when big buyers had more clout than software vendors. It's hard to do that today.

I truly believe suppliers have more influence on market creation direction than buyers, to all of our detriment.

Wouldn't TCP/IP run on token ring? My understanding that token ring is at the same layer as Ethernet, and thus wouldn't exactly be a competitor for TCP/IP.

Though IPX and friends are children of Xerox’s XNS.

People like to forget. It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes.

Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people.

Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi?

The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing everything else.

Also, what about DECT from about the same period? Some companies (mostly in Europe) tried to make an equivalent of Wifi, but using DECT modems. Some devices even made it to the market!

> It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes.

Well, at least on this case government research did produce the best outcome. By far. So far no comparison even makes sense, and people don't even remember there were other attempts.

So you mean, when something fit their narrative (here: government research is better) people forget about other attempts? And counter examples in similar domains (here: wifi) are also dismissed?

Color me impressed!

Wifi is not a counter example. The underlying technology was invented at CSIRO, the Australian government research agency.

I don't know if it's better or worse, but since governments have a much longer time horizon they can fund more basic research.

You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"

The beauty of standards is that there are so many to chose from! So it's not very different from startups.

Eventually, somethings dominate whether it comes from a standard body or is "branded" as a standard ex-post.