Vint Cerf on Why TCP/IP Was So Long in Coming

whitehartstag writes "TCP/IP is 25 years old this year. Vint Cerf says there was a long development cycle for both TCP/IP and for X.25, and we'd have been using TCP/IP much sooner if TCP/IP had been more marketable. 'Over the years, we can come up with many examples both of where the best technology did (or did not) win and of how marketing has defined a service. For example, many of the "best" features of frame relay, such as the ability to use Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) in addition to Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC) were never widely marketed because the pricing was too complex. Rather, the PVC was a simple replacement for a leased line at a fraction of the cost with better performance.'"

Comments

Seems normal.

[jd]

Pricing complexities are why multicast is taking so long to reach the home, even though it has been enabled clear across the entire backbone up to the local ISP level for over a decade. The virtual circuits costing issue is presumably part of why MPLS is also somewhat of a rarity. Of course, this does raise some questions, one of which is why - when the early Internet and IPSS were Government-funded, mostly Government-run, intended to be fault-tolerent and suitable for military use - cost was a factor at all. Big business did not enter the X.25 or TCP/IP markets until very late in the game, and most initially used gateways off their own internal network protocol. The Internet's native protocols should have had no impact at that time.

So why is it normal for the immaterial to matter more than the significant? It is normal, but it is also irrational and nonsensical.