email was Mac something something

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Jan 13 16:07:33 2005

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> But again, those "Insta-ISPs" would not have found a viable market before
> the Linux boom. There was simply no mainstream cognizance of this thing
> called the "Internet" until it slowly started seeping into the mainstream
> thanks to the infiltration allowed by an easy to get and use Unix, i.e.
> Linux.

Sorry, but that's simply not true. I was there, in the business.
Most of the early adopters (say 1992 - 1996) were mostly
unix-based. Most of them were technology companies, tiny and
medium (our customers) a few largish (nvidia).

Windows and Apple could and did do TCP/IP (however poorly)
starting in 1995? Dial-on-demand PPP and SLIP. That was the
"killer app" for the "mainstream" not linux.

If I sound like I'm linux-bashing, which I'm not, you sound, to
me, like you are trying to force-fit linux into places it simply
wasn't. Linux wasn't there not due to quality, desire, intent,
etc, simply because it wasn't ready yet. It's not a judgement
call.

Nearly every down-stream-from-us ISP consisted of:

* commercial routing gear, Livingston, Cisco, etc
* a unix host for port services (smtp, http, dns, radius)
* portmasters or equiv. for dialin ports (ppp, slip)
* baskets of modems, later T1 and channel splitters
* end-user sites, windows, macintosh, unix, in that order

That final item is what drove it economically. All of them were
early adopters. By 1996 the up slope was steep, and TCP/IP was
built-in; linux was growing fast by then, but Win/Apple grew far,
far more in numbers.
Received on Thu Jan 13 2005 - 16:07:33 GMT