Nekochan Net

how come .... Why did tcp/ip become ubiquitous, when other xerox-derived protocols like Novell Netware and Banyan Vines were more reliable and more common early in the network day ?

The internet maybe? I remember growing up in the 90s and relying more on IPX (especially for gaming), but in the late 90s that switched.

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33mhz R3k/48mb/XS24 150mhz R4400/256mb/XL24 600mhz R14kA/2gb/V10 8x1.4ghz Itanium 2/8GB 32x600mhz R14kA/24GB 4x700mhz R16k/8GB/V12/DCD/SAS/FC/DM5 2x700mhz R16k/4GB

My take? They solved too small a problem. You never got much in the way of services beyond filesharing and printing - which they did well. Authentication and directory services, meh. And I don't think they were particularly good over WAN links where you wanted anything more than bridging.

So Netware, Vines, etc were okay as long as you just wanted your PCs to talk to other PCs. Through the early-90s they were all pretty healthy - until Windows NT targeted them all for elimination. Then you've got NetBEUI, SMB, Active Directory, and so on razing their villages and despoiling their herds.

TCP/IP was already ubiquitous for the 'Net, e.g. for WAN services like FTP, Gopher, etc by the start of the 90s. Meanwhile UNIX workstations and servers became ever more popular, and even VMS was usually seen with one TCP/IP product or another on it. Apple gets MacTCP to take advantage of these services, and the PCs, well, sortof - packet drivers, FTP Software, Trumpet/WinSOCK. Then you get the Web, about the same time that Apple and Microsoft have internalized TCP/IP from these add-on products.

Should I keep blathering, or have I already missed your point?

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Then? ... Now? +MLA ... Other: DEC Sun, DG AViiON, NeXT

Licensing issues, perhaps?

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Sitting in a room.....thinkin' shit up.

400MHz R12k - Apple G4 Cube dual 500MHz/GF6200 - Newton Messagepad 2100 - Apple PowerBook 2400c/G3@240 - DECstation5000/133 - Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 - Apple Macintosh IIfx - Apple Macintosh Color Classic (Mystic upgrade) - Sun Cobalt Cube 3 - Tadpole RDI UltraBook IIi

IPX didn't quite scale well. Ever watched a packet dump of a Novell network with a few thousand machines/printers? Broadcast madness.

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while (!asleep()) sheep++;

Very simple: the internet and specially the web happened.




IPX had a smaller overhead than TCP, but it was definitively not "more reliable."

At the large organization/network level, DECNet, SNA et al may have had a larger presence than either VINES, IPX, or ARCNET. And at the mid/small local area level nebeui was probably more widespread given Microsoft's market size when compared to either novell or banyan (although netbeui proper ran on top of the IPX,TCP, etc stacks). TCP and UDP were the stack associated with Unix and the internet services, so there were plenty of nodes running it from way back.

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

Same way UNIX (and later Linux) and x86 PCs took over. Make a product that works OK and then offer a great deal on it. Expose a bunch of university CS students to it so you get the Apple-factor going on (for the software). Then make it simple. (at some level aren't you glad that SNA didn't take over?) Who knows - if DEC had been a little more cooperative we could all be on DECnet phase-6 right now.

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Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

Understand what you mean, but... DECnet Phase V was built on the OSI model. Even if they'd given it away, even if they'd open sourced a stack, I imagine it still would've been dragged down by ISO. I may have quaffed too much IETF Kool-Aid back in the day, but...

HECnet is still using DECnet Phase IV, but then their target is hobbyists and they want to include PDP-11s. I'd be interested to see what HEPnet* was doing with Phase V - or not, can't remember...


* High Energy Physics, not the Hepatitis Information Network thank you very much

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Then? ... Now? +MLA ... Other: DEC Sun, DG AViiON, NeXT

Thanks for the comments ... it was just idle curiosity but the reasons were interesting ...