[IP] more on Setting history straight: So, who really did invent the Internet?
Begin forwarded message:
From: Mitra <mitra_lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 9, 2005 1:00:03 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, Ip <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Setting history straight: So, who really
did invent the Internet?
As the originator of the comment in Ian Peter's history that the
internet would still be the internet if it was based on X.25 or ATM,
I wanted to add my perspective.
Mike O'Dell states
sorry - but that could not be, other than as some grandios
technological
edifice. those "telco" technologies were created specifically to
provide
for central planning and control of innovation (aka "new services").
the power of that control can be seen in how successfully ISDN was
crushed in the US. In that world, "new services" (not necessarily
innovative) are doled out by the network operators, in concert with
their handmaiden equipment providers, on geologic time scales.
This is simply not true. Our network (GreenNet) and its partners
(IGC,EcoNet etc) were service providers on the X.25 networks, for
most intents and purposes the business and technical models were
almost the same as they are now, i.e. :
* we bought an X.25 line from the phone company, and provided email,
forums and databases to our users.
* The phone company was also our major competitor in providing email
services
* Users could get bundled service from us - dial up access, plus
email boxes and hosting, or buy access directly to the network and
access any server they wished.
* Users with a fixed address could put up servers, and interchange
peer-to-peer, but most users had dynamic addresses and did all
communications via servers.
* Our servers interchanged email with each other in much the same way
as SMTP servers do now, and used existing standards (uucp) to
interchange with external servers, hiding this complexity from our
users who addressed email to addresses in either of the common
formats in use at the time - e.g. mitra@gn or gn:mitra
X.25 had many problems, and TCP/IP is of course, a superior
solution, and the phone company pricing couldn't keep up, which is
why we - and everyone else- switched to it, but there were plenty of
hybrids around for many years, and I believe there still are now.
X.25 also had advantages, link-level error correction meant that lost
packets got noticed quickly, rather than having to be repeated end-to-
end on what were at the time high latency connections, often
involving satellites.
At the time of the switch from X.25 to TCP/IP we, and others, were
moving from dumb-terminal (vt100) applications to client-server apps,
but these were two orthogonal changes, and the client-server apps
worked just as well on X.25. It would have been quite feasible to run
gopher, wais or www over X.25, i.e. to have made the transport layer
switch at a much later date, and there is nothing really to stop
applications being run over non TCP/IP services at some point in the
future.
What most of our users saw was a gradual improvement of email
services, and addition of new servers, most of them never even knew
when we switched from X.25 to TCP/IP.
None of this should of course be taken to minimize the contribution
the developers of TCP/IP made to the internet. The internet was a
collaboration of many people working on separate parts over several
decades, and any claims by any one person or entity should be taken
to have "invented the internet" are not merited.
One other point ...Brad also comments ...
The internet cost contract is "I pay for my line to the midpoint,
you pay for yours, and we don't account for the individual
packets." I pay my half, you pay yours. This remarkable billing
arrangement gave the illusion that the internet was free. People
were paying for it but you could treat it like it was largely
free. Other systems, including the X.25 network, and of course
the PSTN, tended to have usage based accounting.
which if taken literally would imply that we don't have the internet
in Australia, where almost all end users are subject to some kind of
usage-based accounting, e.g. I pay about AU$10/Gbyte of committed
volume and $0.24/Mbyte of any volume above that limit. We certainly
don't treat usage as free "down-under", this of course is due to the
Australians having to pay 100% of the cost of the transpacific link,
and that most of the servers are in the US.
- Mitra
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