[Lancaster] [Fwd: Re: Twitter]

[Martyn Welch]

mp wrote:
> The suggestion that without Microsoft's questionable business practices
> there would have been no Internet is pure speculation - but what is
> known is that it wasn't until 1995 that Microsoft came to really embrace
> the Internet as one of the last key IT players. The conventional,
> capitalist reasoning that says that only private interest can generate
> progress obviously means that Debian and Apache are impossible.

Maybe. Though by the 1995/1996 time frame the Internet was already 
beginning become a "widely" used consumer service here in the UK - I 
know this because it was approximately August of 1996 that I first got 
on the internet (or at least AOL's chat rooms, yes I was young and naive).

How was this possible? Because we happened to have an IBM compatible PC 
and yes, given that at that time none of my family (including me) could 
have been called advanced or avid computer users, the fact that internet 
had made it to the family spare room shows that it was at least becoming 
widely marketed to consumers . What OS was this PC using? Windows 3.11 
for workgroups. Now, I don't know what the market share for the various 
computer hardware and software vendors was like back in 1996, what I 
seem to recall is that by then my school had left DOS behind and I had 
quite a few friends with computers running Windows, possibly the odd 
friend with an old Commodore or Atari gathering dust and some with games 
consoles. Doom or one of the later FPSs was very popular amongst my 
peers, whichever it was, it was predominately a PC game. Though 
obviously it is impossible to tell, I would venture the guess that 
without there being a largely dominant installation of compatible 
multi-purpose computers in consumers' homes, the internet would not have 
had such an "easy" time making it's way into millions of them over the 
following years. Had the computer market been much more fragmented it 
would have been more difficult provide the connection software/ drivers 
for what was at the time still an unproven technology in the consumer 
space. I certainly wasn't as rich or as useful as it can be to the 
average person now.

Clearly I'm not saying there wouldn't have been an internet without 
Microsoft - it's invention had little if anything to do with consumers. 
I do however firmly believe that it's uptake might not have been so 
dramatic or have supported such fast pace development or even have got 
to a critical mass in the consumer market had this vaguely homogeneous 
installation base not existed. Regardless of Microsoft's stance towards 
the internet or their business strategies and regardless of the quality 
of the early TCP/IP implementation for their operating system, the very 
existence of a TCP/IP implementation for that OS made it possible for 
the internet to be use on the numerous PCs running it. Supporters of the 
more niche platforms could see greater benefits for developing 
compatible stacks to supply the demand and to stay relevant to the 
segment of their market that wanted to play with this "new" medium. I 
seem to remember that the TCP/IP was essentially given away for free, 
this wouldn't have been as commercially viable for the early pioneers in 
the consumer/business ISP game or even as tasty a punt if a TCP/IP 
implementation had needed to have been developed on countless niche 
consumer operating systems.

Would we have the internet playing such a large role in the world today 
without there having been such a dominant player in the computer market? 
Who knows, who knows if the internet would have even stuck and not 
fizzled out for the masses when some other new shiny idea came along. I 
do however believe it would be unwise to dismiss the role Microsoft 
played, however unwittingly they played it.

Martyn