[Lancaster] [Fwd: Re: Twitter]

[Martyn Welch]

Richard Robinson wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 12:46:25AM +0000, Martyn Welch wrote:
>> 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 
> 
> 
> This is quite precisely back to front. All the interesting 'net applications
> were developed on what you call 'niche' platforms, it was the PC that,
> finally, saw the benefit of a compatable stack, so it could join in with
> what the rest of the world had been doing for ages.
> 

The rest being "not the consumer market" which had already pretty much 
standardised on the Microsoft OS du jour.

> The concepts, and the software, were in place already, they became visible
> to micosoft/intel PCs once those machines became capable of speaking the
> same language that the other OSs were converging/had converged on.
> 

I fully appreciate that.

> As witness, the early visual web browsers - the year (? or so ?) when you
> had to find access to a Unix box to get a look at Mosaic, and this whizzy
> www thing, because none of it would run on a microsoft/intel box.
> 

Yes and these boxes weren't usually in peoples homes, they were 
corporate/academic machines. It wasn't until the internet got into 
peoples homes that it really took off to the point it has today.

My point is that this transition between "academic/military tool" to 
"mass market medium" was greatly aided by Microsoft's massive 
installation base in peoples homes. Had the home OS market been highly 
fragmented (as with the Unices of the time) it would have been a lot 
harder for companies such as Demon to distribute TCP/IP stacks on floppy 
(from a pure capacity standpoint if not from the engineering cost of 
providing TCP/IP stacks for may rather than essentially 1 OS).

Martyn